modern stories

Fit for a king

April 24, 2023 patushka

How can we help: Why we give, and how we might do it better

Britain is crowning a new(ish) King next month, so we’re all being encouraged to spend a once-in-a-generation bank holiday doing something nice for each other. But the Big Help Out, which promises to “give everyone an opportunity to join in”, has already prompted concerns that it will flop, further undermining efforts to recruit and engage new volunteers.

If that all sounds a bit gloomy, it’s because volunteering in England has dropped to its lowest level of the past decade. The issue isn’t only here: shortages have also been reported in Australia and in the USA, and just last week, Volunteer Canada was campaigning to reverse a “dramatic decline in volunteers”, with 65% of volunteer-supported organisations short of people, even as a third report increased demand for their services.

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Mega(phone) motivation

February 22, 2023February 22, 2023 patushka

Youth media projects matter because they give young people “a voice”. Funders, nonprofits and facilitators emphasise this as their goal; participants celebrate it. And standard-setters expect it: a 2006 guide by the Open Society Institute, a significant early philanthropic backer of youth media in the US, says a key feature is that it “conveys the authentic views and voices of young people”.

But whose view is being conveyed? One academic study looked at a project where young participants could explore any issue of importance to them. A surprisingly large number chose gang culture, even though few were directly affected by this issue. Facilitators, whose role includes helping participants to challenge stereotypical, negative media representations of youth, were in a difficult position. Do they stop them from making films about a certain topic if it appears they’ve chosen it out of a sense of obligation or a need to conform to expectations? Or do they respect this as their authentic voice? Youth voice, it turns out, can be “a double-edged sword”.

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Royal recognition

September 27, 2022 patushka

How can we help: Why we give, and how we might do it better

*Remembering the late monarch with a selfie*

“Well, they do a lot for charity…”

It’s a common response when you ask people what purpose the British royal family still serves. For some, good causes are the monarchy’s primary purpose: according to recent research from Charities Aid Foundation, a third of Brits believe that the royals’ most important role is supporting charities. (It’s not clear what the remaining two thirds feel is most important.) And a quarter think they first heard about a campaign or cause thanks to royal support.

But do they really do a lot for charity?

Analysis in 2020 by Giving Evidence of the apparently rather opaque world of royal patronages found no evidence that these increase a charity’s revenue (in some cases, they may even cost them money), nor that royalty increases generosity more broadly.

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Pasting, parks, and a pioneer of solo travel

July 2, 2022July 6, 2022 patushka

Three things I learned or loved this month

I loved making collages during a short course at CityLit: the simple-yet-not-simple task of putting disparate pieces together to make something else.

When I sit down to write I have an idea of what will happen, or at least what I want to happen. Collage starts with a blank page too, but – because it is new to me and maybe also because it’s without pressure – feels impossibly open-ended.

I liked the surprise of the decollage technique – pasting layers then removing elements to create something entirely new. It is unpredictable: some people in the class said they didn’t enjoy the lack of control.

I liked the tutor’s suggestion to have multiple pieces on the go at once, to shift without thinking from one to the next and back again, to see things afresh, to start noticing themes or connections that tie them together. Above all, he said, it stops you being too precious, it frees you.

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Secular stuff, a census for a century, and simple advice

June 2, 2022June 5, 2022 patushka

Three things I learned or loved this month

*Artful possessions (credit: Luca Laurence)*

Twenty years ago a British artist gathered up 7,227 things he owned and spent two weeks methodically breaking them into pieces. In the heart of consumerist London – in a closed-down C&A store on Oxford Street – his paintings, hi-fi, clothes, love letters, cat food, passport, car and more became bits of metal, glass, ceramic, textiles. The pieces were sent to landfill until his only remaining possession was the boilersuit he was wearing.

The artist, Michael Landy, interviewed last year in the Financial Times, described it as “reversing the idea of production into a disassembly line”. In the act of destruction he was also creating something, of course. His two-week performance attracted some 50,000 visitors to the store, and led to works of photography and exhibitions.

Whatever you think about performance art – or about destroying things for art’s sake, in an age of environmental crisis – the work says something about our complicated attachment to material possessions. As Landy told the FT: “At the time I spoke about how I was witnessing my own death and also moments of elation and it being the happiest two weeks of my life.”

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Cartagena, community, and sixty-minute Sundays

May 1, 2022 patushka

Three things I learned or loved this month

*Saturday stroll among the colours of Cartagena*

Everything feels different or disjointed: the air oppressively warm; my knowledge of Spanish buried too many years ago to find the words I need; and it should be afternoon, but I’m the first to order breakfast. Eggs with tomatoes and onion, fruit, black coffee to shake off a six-hour time difference.

Last week an overnight flight took me to Cartagena de Indias, a city of around 1 million on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, where men push carts piled high with mangoes through busy streets, where horse-drawn carts join traffic jams, where friends pose for selfies amid flags or pink umbrellas or street art. A dark history – a one-time slave trade hub, and one of three seats of the Catholic Inquisition in the Americas — but the city has since become a UNESCO heritage site, and tourists come nowadays for the colour, the nightlife, the nearby islands, the easy stroll along thick fortress walls.

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Despair as a teddy bear

April 20, 2022 patushka

How can we help: Exploring how and why we give, and how we might do it better

Bad things seem to pile up: the slow grind of dishonest politics, the sharp horror of war, the unfathomable end of life on earth barely registering on our front pages. You want to make the world a little bit better, but amid all of this, is there any point?

Much has been written already about the risk of burnout among activists, charity workers and healthcare workers. Many have repeated the advice to put on your own oxygen mask first, to practise ‘self-care’ (a term that I find off-putting for some reason, even if I agree with the concept).

But aside from looking after yourself (time off, getting into nature – whatever works), I wonder if it’s most important to find a kind of acceptance, to see despair as the inevitable other side of the coin.

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Feeling unalone, facing fears, and the questions of 7-year-olds

April 2, 2022 patushka

Three things I learned or loved this month

Lisa Taddeo’s 2019 book Three Women is widely described as a “bestselling phenomenon”. Columnist Caitlin Moran is quoted saying she would “probably re-read it every year of my life”. Now that I’ve read it, her praise doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

As much as I was swept up in the real lives that Taddeo portrays – lives of complicated desire, sadness, sexuality, rejection, power, loyalty – I am fascinated by her process as a writer. She spent eight years on research (during which time she also had a baby). Twice, she moved to the town where the women lived to spend time with them; her husband moved with her. She was present at some of the events described in the book; she would meet one of the women immediately after her encounters with a secret lover to hear her recount the experience. Taddeo describes her role, in an interview on the Happy Place podcast, as a sort of “non-judgmental ghost”, present as lives unfolded. Each of the three women finds her decisions judged harshly by those around them; in giving them the full range to tell their stories, the author aims to challenge the quickfire dismissal most of us unleash on people we barely know. “I wanted people to feel unalone,” Taddeo says.

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Sticking around

March 23, 2022April 3, 2022 patushka

How can we help: Exploring how and why we give, and how we might do it better

A former colleague told me recently that he’s started mentoring a kid. It’s not just the occasional phone call or a few trips to the cinema, though: he has signed up to a programme that commits you to meeting up with the same child on three weekends out of four, for a minimum of two years.

How many of us stick at anything, consistently, for a full two years? It’s so easy to set good intentions, then find that other stuff – work exhaustion, family demands, travel plans, life admin – gets in the way. I’m hugely impressed by the volunteers who sign up for two years, but also by charities that aren’t afraid to require it of their volunteers, because they know that for vulnerable kids, consistency matters.

A day after that conversation with my former colleague, I got a handwritten thank-you letter, out of the blue, from the kids’ charity where I’ve been volunteering on and off for some years. It was completely unexpected, and also unnecessary – like many other volunteers, I do it because I enjoy being there, because I love what the charity does, and because I’ve grown to feel proud to be part of a lovely little community. (Other volunteers include primary school teachers who give up their Saturday mornings to spend more time with excitable children; another, a writer, recently turned up directly off an overnight flight from the USA – she could easily have skipped that session, but said volunteering was the highlight of her week.)

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