So recently I came across video series on a
channel called TakePartTV which is a
channel run by the same people who put out
uh... like "Food Inc" which is one of
my favorite documentaries a couple other
like a pretty awesome documentaries about
all kinds of cool social issues. So one
series in particular caught my eye it's by Kobe
Bryant it's called "Mission." I don't know
much about Kobe Bryant except that he's a
basketball player and he's famous so it's kind of
cool that he's helping people on skid row
fight homelessness. If you want to check out that series you can
click on the little
box that has been here
the whole time. I don't know much about Kobi
but
I do know that he's out there trying to
do a good cause and i'm not gonna knock
him for that but I am gonna talk about the
systemic problem with the documentaries
about homelessness and poverty and the
way we kinda go about things.
So there's two ways to go about it, one way is
really terrible and the other is not so terrible
and actually fairly helpful. The first
way is the kind of way that the guy
with the beard who would show the
black and white kids in Africa with the
dissented stomachs and all that stuff.
That's a terrible way to do it because
it dehumanizes the people that are
actually struggling with those things
because
that's not their entire reality. Yes it's
a terrible reality but it's not their
entire lives. They do have interests and
human lives and other things like that,
so to dehumanize them, group them all
together and say "These poor people need
help!" BAD IDEA. I don't like it,
it's not helpful at all and
it doesn't changed the way we think
about poverty it just says
I need to throw money at this! The second
option is to humanizem, to tell personal
stories about the individual people. This
is a good way to go about it because it
does show that
people in poverty are not all the same
people, you know, they have interests they
have reasons they fell into poverty,
have reason they fell into homelessness
any of us could possibly do uh... and so
it provides a human element to that.
That's good. A problem with this is that when
people see those documentaries they only
want to help those individual people
because we've been programs by the other kind
which just says I could throw money at
this,
so they want to help the individual
person that has been featured in the
documentary or the series rather than
the group of individuals that the series
is attempting to help. I know this for a fact
because when I was working Kentucky with
people in poverty in Appalachia
there was a documentary on 20/20
with Diane Sawyer that featured three
individuals on the program in an attempt
to show the wide bredth of the kind of
poverty
and the reasons that people fall into
poverty in Appalachia. So what happened
at the end of documentary they featured four or five different non-profit
organizations that were helping people
Appalachia to rise out of poverty. What
people did is they took their money and sent it to the organizations and they
said "I want to help Jimmie!" If you say "I
want to help Jimmy"
that organization has to help Jimmy, they
can't use that funding to do anything
else except help Jimmy, alone. Not that there's
anything wrong with helping Jimmy but
there's also John, Joe, and Jane
that also need help and the organization is
not allowed to use the money that you told them
to use for Jimmy on John, Jane, or Joe. So
there's nothing wrong with helping Jimmy
bud Jimmy's gonna get it a million dollar
pay check whereas John, Jane, and Joe are
just gonna get to use the same funding that has
always been going on.
So the absolute best way in my opinion to
do these kind of things is the way that
Sawn from the Uncultured Project is doing it. He's featuring individuals but is
also featuring them as part of the larger whole
so when you donate to Shawn
you're donating to help the people
of Bangladesh, not to help
Jane and Joe
of the videos that Shawn is putting out.
You're helping,
you know, build a school or helping
build a well for a village.
THAT I think is the best way to do it. If
you wanna watch Shawn frikken go
ahead I'll link him right here.
He's prolly one of the best
documentary filmmakers about poverty. So
the suggestion is
now that we're about to come up on Project 4
Awesome and all the other great things are
going to come up in the holiday season
if you donate organization don't
earmark the funding for one specific person,
because that's the person is just one of many
Thanks for watching, don't forget to subscribe and share this video!
