It has hosted town hall meetings where residents could raise their voice on issues that are important to them, hosted community field trips for youth to do things like ride horses and experience things they have never done before. It serves as a space where the whole community is welcome, and in a community that has seen as much neglect and difficult times as the 9th Ward in New Orleans, it is evident that a community center like this wold be an invaluable resource.
This community center has a special connection to UC Berkeley, as the Village has provided a place to stay for student volunteers from Berkeley who are part of Magnolia Project, a Cal Corps Public Service Center program that sends student volunteers and interns to New Orleans. I was a Magnolia Project intern during the summer of 2012, and while I didn't stay at the Lower Ninth Ward Village, many of my friends who were part of the service trip earlier that summer did. For a community center to open their doors to outsiders, to strange college students that come from very different cultures and backgrounds than the community members, aiming to get involved in their lives and issues, and to provide them place to stay, shows the center's generosity and openness.
So when I recently heard that there was a fundraiser taking place in order to save the center from closing, I was immediately concerned. I assumed that the reasons that the center might have to close might be the expected reasons, simply a lack of resources and funding in an impoverished neighborhood during hard economic times. However, when I read more, I found a much more troubling reason for the center's closing. According the the Lowe Ninth Ward Village's website:
"In 2012, Mountain Dew agreed to build a skate park to serve as 30% of the community center’s operations. The original plan was to build this skate park for the youth in the Lower Ninth Ward where Glu Agency (Mountain Dew’s public relations agency) contracted to pay off the center’s mortgage and help insure the building.
Unfortunately, after building the skate park, Glu Agency left our community center unfinished: they never finished the electrical wiring. The Village must bring the entire electrical system up to code (45) as mandated by the City, or the Electric Meter will be revoked. As of current, the lights are cut off due to lack of monetary support. What was believed to be the solution for finally providing a safe space for the youth has halted our abilities to combat the issues within our neighborhood.
The community suffers the most from this unfinished business. Since the Village has been closed, the community has lost 3 young people that used to frequent the Village often. Could their lives been saved? No one can be sure, but the Village provided an invaluable space for the youth of this community."
This situation was incredibly reminiscent to me of the ideas Ananya Roy discussed in GPP 115 during the "Disaster Capitalism" section of class. Roy presented the idea of the poor constantly being failed by private corporations or other groups aiming to "help" but never coming all the way through and often making the problem worse. I was reminded of the people we learned about whose homes were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, who spent year after year in formaldehyde filled trailers, which were managed by private businesses, always being told their home would be rebuilt by a certain date, but it never happening. While the situation with the Lower Ninth Ward Village is different from that of the homeowners, it has the same theme of abandonment. The Lower Ninth Ward Village agreed to partner with Mountain Dew in order to provide a safe place for youth and to help support their community center, but now might have to close because of unfinished business on the corporate end. Mountain Dew and its partners got their moment of publicity that made them look good, complete with an appearance by Lil Wayne at the opening of the park, which can be read about here: http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2012/09/lil_wayne_skated_and_celebrate.html. Yet after this, they felt no need to actually complete the work needed to keep the community center alive. It is maddening to hear how these patterns and situations of disaster capitalism continue, even 8 years after a disaster.
I guess my question regarding these situations, is how can we, as community member or general citizens, keep corporations and private groups responsible for promises they make in these kind of situations? When reading about the fundraiser, I only heard of efforts to raise money from the community to fix the problem, and nothing about efforts to hold Mountain Dew responsible, or to get them to help pay for what needs to be done. I wonder why this is. Would legal intervention be necessary? Is there a way to hold Mountain Dew responsible, or would the battle be too expensive and time-consuming to even attempt? I think these questions are essential to consider as these situations continue constantly and big corporations gain more and more power.
If you would like to learn more about the Lower Ninth Ward Village and its fundraiser, you can read about it here:
Unfortunately, there is no cookie-cutter answer to the question you posed about if and how we can keep corporations responsible for the philanthropic promises they make. However, we can try to gain a better grasp of how to deal with these situations, such as the one you have provided about Mountain Dew’s unfulfilled promise to citizens of the Lower 9th Ward, by investigating the topic of corporate philanthropy further. To do this, I read up on a few key sections featured in Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar’s book, “Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy,” which was published by the Oxford University Press.
ReplyDeleteThe first point I found relevant to this issue is the motivations behind corporate philanthropy which, to summarize, Pogge and Wenar lay out as including the following:
1. To improve the general reputation of the company
2. To induce customers to buy their products
3. To smooth earnings
4. To reduce taxes
5. To improve their competitive position in the industry
6. To motivate or attract employees
7. To access important social networks
8. To forestall regulation
9. To insulate against negative public reaction to bad acts
10. To achieve a particular social goal
Of these potential motivations, I feel that number 5 in particular would be among the most prevalent reasons why corporations engage in philanthropy, a view that is supported by iconic academic consultant Michael Porter who advocates for “strategic philanthropy” as a way for companies to develop their competitive edge. Porter says, “If systematically pursued in a way that maximizes the value created, context-focused philanthropy can offer companies a new set of competitive tools that well justifies the investment of resources. At the same time, it can unlock a vastly more powerful way to make the world a better place.” I can think of many instances, however, where I would disagree with the last statement made by Porter about strategic philanthropy making the world a better place. For example, if a company decides to try to increase sales on a product by promising to make a charitable donation for every item purchased, the success of the project will be determined based solely on the sales of the product. In this case, as Pogge and Wenar put it, philanthropy is “purely a business strategy in which any social motivation is purely instrumental.” If the sales are not high enough, the donations will be cut off, even though certain charities may be counting on those promised donations.
(my response is continued into the next comment because I had too many characters to post the entire comment in this single post)
The second point I found relevant to the issue Savannah raised is the question of whether corporate philanthropy should be made mandatory. The arguments I found in favor of making corporate philanthropy mandatory include the reciprocity, legitimacy, citizenship, efficiency, and extrapolation argument. To summarize these arguments made by Pogge and Wenar:
ReplyDelete1. Reciprocity: Society and corporations have a reciprocal relationship in which society provides the environment and background institutions that make it possible for businesses to thrive, and in turn businesses have an obligation to give back to society.
2. Legitimacy: Philanthropy as a means for corporations to be recognized as legitimate members of the societies in which they operate.
3. Citizenship: Corporations are seen as citizens of global society and thus have general duties similar to all citizens as well as special obligations to all humanity.
4. Efficiency: Some businesses have a comparative advantage in contributing to the social good because of unique services or specific competencies they possess, and thus are the most useful and efficient in certain circumstances.
5. Extrapolation: Charity is a general duty of all individuals, and since it can be extrapolated that a corporate entity is a collective of individuals, charity is a general duty of corporations as well.
Based on my investigation into the most potentially powerful motivation of corporate philanthropy as being strategic in nature, and the myriad of valid arguments in favor of making corporate philanthropy mandatory, I conclude that the full potential of corporate philanthropy to make the world a better place is not being realized. Pogge and Wenar conclude that this is due to “mismanagement, lack of focus, and agency issues.”
To relate this back to Savannah’s example, I think that Mountain Dew’s unfulfilled promise came as a result of mismanagement, and was further fueled by underlying motivations that were far from altruistic in nature; namely, to improve the general reputation of the company and to improve their competitive position in the industry.
Coming full circle, I agree with Pogge and Wenar in their suggestion that a way to prevent corporations from making promises they cannot keep would be to have firms treat their social investments in a manner relevantly similar to their business investments. In order to ensure this happens, Pogge and Wenar suggest that firms “apply hard business criteria to the selection, operation, and evaluation of their philanthropic programs.” In addition to this, I think that another way to make sure that corporations realize their unfulfilled promises is to have greater transparency in which businesses that possess unique competencies to aid victims of a major human catastrophe realize that they “have a constrained moral duty to use their resources toward that end” and society identifies these businesses so as to watch their actions as well as enable them to make unique contributions to the overall social good in the first place.
For more information about corporate philanthropy:
Pogge, Thomas, and Leif Wenar. Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.
Savannah- you've talked about a harsh reality and posed a question that is as such extremely difficult to answer.
ReplyDeleteThe power of big corporations and their lack of accountability hits home for me since my PE India Smiles deals with this issue in a different manner in regards to their manipulative marketing strategies and false promises to improve health and nutrition with their processed foods and beverages.
I think that the general public might feel that holding these big corporations accountable is a lost cause, as unfortunate as that sounds. Considering the monopolies they hold in their respective sectors and also how they have connections and hands in other realms (i.e. corporate farming big whigs in the FDA), most people wouldn't know how to mobilize against them no matter how important or valuable the cause they are false-promising is, as in the case of Mountain Dew and the community center. I agree with Kim in that Mountain Dew's promise stemmed from a selfish place to get their name out there and improve their brand power. I agree with Savannah in that this would probably be an extremely time-consuming battle to embark on, but it wouldn't be impossible. Every day I get e-mails from various petitions protesting situations like this- maybe a step such as this is all it would take to mobilize against this extremely relevant issue that spans across sectors beyond aid and development.