The Road to Hell (25 page)

SELLING THE CHILDREN

—Charles MacCormack, Save the Children Confidential memo, 1993

As communities often receive a small portion of the sponsor's contributed dollar, they are obviously going to ask questions about where the money goes. All the explaining in the world would not make this question go away or our own strategy look good in an investigative report.

T
hrough the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to come up with several USAID evaluation reports of the Save the Children project in Qorioley. They didn't say much but generally indicated that an evaluation team dropped in on the project for an afternoon and then returned to Mogadishu the same day. The evaluations were completed, and the projects declared satisfactory, all in a few hours. There was no way the evaluators could have seen much of the project let alone studied its long-term impact on the people who were declared to be “beneficiaries.”

As CARE evaluated its own projects, so too was Save the Children allowed to make its own reports on Qorioley. Across the board, NGOs make claims about how their activities are helping people where they are working,
claims generally disseminated by the fund-raising department. But villages are not laboratories where factors can be isolated to determine how an organization has performed. NGOs tend to take credit for every positive development in a village where they happen to be working. Of course, they don't call anyone's attention to negative trends, or to places where things are deteriorating. And they don't broadcast internal complaints from people like Chris Cassidy.

Nothing that Chris Cassidy ever wrote or said about the project made it into any official report that I reviewed. It was as if he'd never set foot in Qorioley. But I knew Chris had complained loudly and sent letters back to headquarters. Did anyone ever care enough to read them?

When I returned from Somalia to New York 1995,1 couldn't help wondering if there might be some correspondence buried in a file box up in Westport that would shed some more light on Chris's experiences.

I knew that Save the Children was under no obligation to show me anything, and that any organization that took such pains to construct its public image wouldn't let me rummage around in their file room. And I wasn't going to be as lucky as I had been in Geneva. But I started making calls, not through their official channels, but to former colleagues of mine who had worked for Save in the past. Through them I was able to locate several people within the organization who were willing to help.

What I got were files and documents predominantly covering Save's programs in the United States, but containing information about how the organization was run and how much time it spent covering up for its blunders. As I read through the papers, I felt guilty. When Cassidy had been relating his horror stories about working for Save I had reacted somewhat skeptically. Now, here in front of me were documents, evidence of massive internal dissent, that confirmed everything he had told me and more.

M
ost people know Save the Children from its recent print ads, which ask people to “help stop a different kind of child abuse,” and from television advertisements that feature former
All in the Family
star Sally Struthers pleading on behalf of poor children who, she explains, are waiting for you to step forward and become a sponsor. Struthers's plaintive voice drifts over horrific images of fly-covered starving children. Then, with the lens tightly focused on one child, she informs the public that all it takes to redeem this child from a life of poverty is $20 a month, 65# a day. Your decision right now about whether or not to pick up the phone and take out your credit card will determine if this child lives or dies.

The ads seem to have been on the air for years, though Struthers has
only worked for Save the Children since January 1994. Before that, for seventeen years, she delivered a nearly identical plea for Christian Children's Fund, another organization that raises funds through sponsorship. (It appears that much of the public thought Struthers was working for Save the Children all along.) A number of Save the Children staffers, especially those in fund-raising, thought the veteran pitchwoman was past her prime and doubted very much that her residual celebrity would translate to positive numbers on Save's bottom line. “She was delivered to us as a fait accompli,” recalls Sally Franz, who used to work for Save as a fund-raiser.

But the move had the support of the senior staff at the organization, including Save's new president, Dr. Charles MacCormack. MacCormack had taken over a year earlier at a time when the organization desperately needed strong leadership, a new direction, and a calming influence.

During the 1980s, the organization had been shaken by the minor scandals about sponsorship that Cassidy had dealt with during his days in Somalia. David Guyer, who led Save through those storms, was a charismatic leader who ran the organization as a benevolent dictator. When Guyer was forced to resign because of AIDS-related illness—he died in 1988—he handed the reins over to James Bausch. Initially, Bausch was immensely popular, in part because he wasn't Guyer.

But Bausch was eventually hounded from office by a vicious staff rebellion waged with innuendo, personal attacks—including anonymous threatening letters to his wife—and leaks to the press about the ostentatious waste of sponsorship funds. Bausch was said to have been an embarrassment to the organization after it was revealed that his salary and benefits added up to more than $300,000 a year.
*
The leaks became so bad that Bausch came in one day and had all the fax machines disconnected. When Bausch finally left, he took with him a $225,000 severance package that itself became an issue of contention and led to the resignation of at least one board member, writer Michael Dorris, and a lot of bad feelings.
†

MacCormack, who had been on Save's board, was brought in as a
healer. And with their new leadership, higher visibility, and new celebrity spokeswoman, Save believed that the controversies were behind them, and they could move forward with the business of helping children.

W
estport, Connecticut is among the wealthiest towns in America. Its shoreline, by Long Island Sound, is rimmed with multimillion-dollar mansions. Westport's Main Street runs along the Saugatuck River and is lined with upscale boutiques such as Laura Ashley, Brooks Brothers, and Barney's. Over the past fifteen years, it has been transformed from a quiet New England town to a less understated, more New York kind of suburb where, according to the complaints of one Westport native, the wives of big city executives drive the streets in expensive cars speaking on their cellular phones. Save the Children's headquarters sits just across the river from Main Street in a two-story former school building that once housed the Famous Writers' and Famous Artists' Schools. The building is actually three separate structures, awkwardly joined, each built in a different decade from the 1950s through the 1970s. Just beyond the reception area is Save the Children's gift shop, where a variety of Third World crafts are sold.

At first glance, one might think the trinkets are part of an incomegenerating project for villages where Save works. On closer inspection, however, it becomes obvious that the goods are fairly generic, nothing that can't be found in gift shops that line the boulevards in the tourist districts of any city. The charity's more distinctive products are tacked on a bulletin board outside the shop's entrance. Little red-and-white folders resembling greeting cards contain photos and thumbnail descriptions of children. Each bears the Save the Children corporate icon, a Gumby-like cutout of a child with its hands raised; employees refer to the symbol as Red Baby Jesus, or just RBJ. Below the folders a hastily hand-written sign reads: CHOOSE A CHILD. INQUIRE AT DESK.

This combination of generic Third Worldness, corporate imagery, and the sad faces of distant but real human beings sums up the charity's peculiar appeal. Its goals are satisfyingly broad—simply “the children”—yet achingly specific: Each sponsor receives, so to speak, a child. The sponsor can track the child's transformation with cards and letters from the child and through progress reports from Save the Children. The organization pioneered this fund-raising technique with Appalachian children in the 1930s. It has since been adopted by dozens of other charities around the world. (World Vision, Children Incorporated, Childreach, Plan International, and others also use sponsorship.) As a way to raise money, it is unparalleled. Sponsorship links the donor directly to a needy sad-eyed target
of the charity's work, rather than to a faceless fund-raiser at the end of a solicitation letter. The charity's bureaucracy becomes invisible. The sponsor feels connected to an actual person and will believe that his or her money, or most of it, will be going to help that child.

But sponsorship is not always what it appears to be. In this case, the sponsor is seduced into believing the improbable because his or her judgment is clouded by the possibility of getting something valuable on the cheap. What sponsors are really buying is, as stated in Save's brochures, a sense of well-being and “deep satisfaction.” That's a real bargain at $20 a month, but it doesn't leave much for the children. The pitch, so appealing to donors, seems absurd when one is in the field confronting the challenges of economic development. And it puts Save in a bind: If they ignore some of the sponsored children, they can do more effective work for the others. If they try to do something for everyone, they run the risk of accomplishing nothing at all. Its commitment to sponsors clashes with its promise to save the children.

Despite the string of controversies that have dogged it, Save the Children enjoys one of the best reputations in the charity business. As it announces in its own advertising, “Today, Save the Children is one of the most respected relief and development organizations in the world.” That is certainly true.
Money
magazine, in its annual ranking of charities, recently rated it third among relief and development charities and noted that 82.1 percent of its expenditures were used for “program services.” According to Save's tax forms for the 1994 fiscal year, that number is up to 82.9 percent. The newer numbers show nearly $80.5 million going to “programs,” from total revenues of over $97 million collected from more than 100,000 sponsors.

Every year, Save prints a pie chart divided into three slices. The two little slices always represent fund-raising and management, the big slice, always more than 80 percent, is “Program Services.” The pie chart is packed into all of Save's promotional mailings and proudly displayed in all the pamphlets hanging from the bulletin board.

Charlie MacCormack is proud of that pie chart and of the sponsorship program, which he regards as the real strength of Save the Children. Sponsors are not driven, he said, by the “crisis
du jour
” Instead, they become interested in the child. “If they're supporting a child in activity in Bangladesh, they're gonna stay for ten, twelve, fourteen years whether Bangladesh is in the newspapers or not.” This solves one of the biggest problems relief and development organizations face: If they start raising money for a calamity in Rwanda or Somalia, by the time the funds are
gathered and dispersed, the worst of the emergency has usually passed and the organization is sitting with millions of dollars earmarked for one place while a new crisis is forming somewhere else. Sponsorship is a steady and predictable source of operational funds.

M
acCormack's office is located on the second floor beside what Save employees call the fishbowl, a conference room with large windows opening up to the river, and a glass inside wall that allows sunlight reflected from the water to fill the wide corridor lined with Save's executive offices. From his sparsely furnished office, MacCormack can see the back side of shops along Westport's main street and watch the water rise and fall with the tide.

MacCormack is in his mid-fifties with gray hair and mustache, rosy cheeks, and a round face. He speaks clearly and quietly in calm tones. When he talks about the children, a thin smile breaks across his face and his voice radiates warmth. “The goal of Save the Children,” MacCormack began, “is making better lives for children.” What followed was a wellrehearsed recitation of good works and lofty aspirations, but nothing much more specific or quantitative than “making better lives for children.”

When pressed for more concrete details, MacCormack's relaxed confidence wavered somewhat and then became completely shaken when I began to ask questions about Save the Children's financing, questions about the pie chart. It is the deception inherent in the pie chart that provides the key to unraveling the deception that is Save the Children.

The pie chart is misleading in two ways: First, it tracks the proportion of all
expenditures
that go to programs, not the proportion of all
donations
. The distinction is probably lost on potential sponsors, who might naturally assume that the pie chart is a representation of how their donations are being spent. But most of Save's funding comes not from individual sponsors but from U.S. government and United Nations project grants. Expenditures are nearly three times donations, so even if Save spent none of the sponsors' money on programs, they could still find a way to claim that 75 percent of the money they spend is going to program services. The pie chart really says nothing about how sponsors' money is spent.