Good Intentions Gone Bad

Written by, Gill Tataev founder of Ruthless Giving.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Nowhere is this quote more relevant than in the charity space. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again: someone thinks they’ve had a game-changing idea, they pursue it with the level of passion that you’d want, but it turns out that the realities are far removed from the dream.

Often a passionate individual will continue to push their idea no matter how bad it turns out to be. Confirmation bias sets in — the positives are highlighted, the negatives are ignored, and the ship slowly sinks while the captain stubbornly grips the wheel.

All the while, money that could otherwise have done a lot of good is poured down the drain.

Here are four such ideas. Each showed some initial promise, only to fail in the cold, hard light of day, in some cases doing far more damage than good.

Playpumps

Rising to prominence in 2005, Playpumps was a charity that built playground roundabouts that would pump water while children played on them.

The Playpumps marketing material created itself. Happy African kids having fun on a playground merry-go-round, as they pumped life-giving water up from the earth for the local townsfolk. With smiling kids solving problems, it’s little wonder that the concept instantly raised millions from the likes of Jay-Z, Mark Ronson, The Co-op, and no less than $60 million from the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief.

The problem? This was about as clear-cut a case of ‘too good to be true’ as there ever was. The equipment proved to be far too expensive, complex to maintain, based on flawed water demand calculations, and, worst of all, over-reliant on child labor. The resistance from the water pump meant that the roundabout needed constant effort and If the kids didn’t spend 27 hours a day — yes, you read that right — playing on the merry-go-round, a town’s water needs would not be met.

By 2009 the charity had given away the last of its pumps to another organization, and had begun focusing on the arduous task of maintaining those it had installed.

D.A.R.E.

Founded in 1983, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) was a school education program used as a control-side strategy for America’s War on Drugs.

Drug and Alcohol Resistance Education, or DARE, was introduced into US elementary school classrooms in 1983, on the back of ferocious campaigning by Nancy Reagan. Over the following decades almost every young student in America would have the interesting experience of role-playing with their local police officer, who’d offer them some imaginary drugs, then coach them on ‘just saying no’.

But DARE has since been revealed to be completely ineffective in preventing drug use, and, to the horror of dear old Nancy, looks to have instead encouraged it.

DARE put drugs in the spotlight. As the program’s participants got older, they became curious about these drugs that they’d heard about in elementary school. It turns out that telling a 4th-grader about hallucinogens then role-playing drug deals with them might just whet their whistles. Add in ‘just say no’, which in the mind of a contrarian child translates to ‘just say yes’, and you might as well place the drugs directly into the kids’ hands.

When the American Psychological Association said as much in the late 90s, the program quickly lost federal funding. Nonetheless it continues to be a part of many elementary school curriculums — presumably those who teach abstinence instead of sex education.

Scared Straight

Scared Straight (and other similar programs) see school-age children spending time in prison with prison inmates. The experience is designed to discourage them from getting involved with crime.

A kid hears the clink of sliding metal bars closing behind him. He looks around to see a handful of inmates, each all too ready to share their story with him, of how they made mistakes, and how he doesn’t want to follow the same dark path.

Scared Straight and similar programs are evocative. They feel like they bring the dose of reality that good preventative programs need. But are they actually as real, and subsequently as effective, as they could be?

The short answer: no.

In a series of randomized trials, this study found that such programs not only fail to deter crime, they can actually increase criminality in the ‘Scared Straight’ group versus an untouched control. For most people, especially kids, ‘vicarious deterrence’ — learning from the mistakes of others — just doesn’t work. Kids are impulsive — they need to learn things themselves. What’s more, exposing kids to prison can show them that life in lockup may not be as bad as they thought.

Apologies Prison Mike, but your work here is done.

Eugenics

The Eugenics movement believed that could improve the genetic quality of the human population by identifying those deemed ‘unfit to reproduce’ — usually the disabled, criminals, or members of minority groups.

The early 1900s saw the birth of a movement that would begin with the best of (questionable) intentions, but would end with the rise of the Nazis. As described by Lia Weintraub in this paper, hindsight would once again prove 20/20 when it came to the Eugenics movement.

According to a 1913 piece in The New York Times, Eugenics worked to find “the best methods of restricting the […] defective and delinquent classes of the community.” It was a form of population control that essentially aimed to sterilize the lower classes, thus allowing the ‘pure’ upper classes to flourish.

Harvard University, Brown University, Alexander Graham Bell and the Rockefeller Foundation were amongst those on board. Using his endless wealth, Rockefeller in particular pushed the field forward, to the point where it eventually reached the eyes and ears of a young Adolf Hitler. Based on this new field of academia, Hitler would begin to build the pillars of the Nazi party, tasked with wiping out all of humanity, save for the Aryan race.

How do you know that your good intentions have gone bad? When they start World War II I suppose.

The last was an extreme example, sure, but it still serves to highlight the need for deep thought before making any sort of contribution to a cause. As demonstrated by Playpumps, you can’t let good marketing distract you from bad delivery. DARE and Scared Straight showed that data is better than intuition in judging effectiveness. And Eugenics showed the incredible harm that an ill-advised cause can have on the world.

Non-profit programs that aren’t built on a base of evidence are at best a waste of resources, and at worst actively harmful. It’s critical that you, a charitable giver, do the appropriate research to ensure that your money is making a real and positive impact on the world.

This article is sponsored by People’s Foundation.