Monday 24 August 2020
Free to WE to Me [?]
Two idealistic north Toronto teenagers got together in the early 2000s after seeing theabject working conditions of children in far off Asian countries laboring to produce consumer goods for the West. Craig and Marc Keilburger set up a non-government organization inspirationally called “Free the Children” designed to liberate young people from abusive workplaces. It caught the mood of the times and achieved significant support social support as many people and organizations were seeking something other than the race to the bottom set in motion by neo-liberal policies. So successful was the initiative that it led to the creation of a broader initiative – Me to We to engage young people globally in social activities for the good of their communities. Free the Children became Me to We as ambitions and aspirations grew. Eventually the Canadian government signed on, seeing Me To We as a tool for engaging Canadian youth and eventually a major contract was awarded with some money flowing to clearly compromised persons in high places in Canadian public life. In the meantime Me to We generated a charitable foundation (WE) giving the seal of selfless do-gooding to what happened in the Me to We penumbra. What is wrong with this? Beyond the clear ethical problems of insiders rewarding themselves for ostensibly charitable activity, there is a more insidious problem to which social enterprises are vulnerable. How do you draw the line between self-interest and selflessness? The Keilburgers became famous and idealized by many through their idealistic endeavours and much good has no doubt been done. But there took place an escalation of organizational scope and ambition that was not only difficult to maintain without engaging in questionable practices ironically similar to those of the corporations Free the Children originally exposed but seems ultimately to have succumbed to the lure of Growth. In effect, insofar as the Keilburgers became an enterprise then a charity, Free eventually became Me. The challenge for all social enterprises is how to avoid such trajectories.
