The Road to Hell by Michael Maren

Author:Michael Maren [Maren, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2009-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

No one familiar with Save the Children found it surprising that they would still be looking for children while phasing out their programs. Recipients long ago seem to have accepted the fact that there is no connection between program and sponsorship. “What you’ve got is a system built on the backs of low-income communities,” Shelby Miller said. In fact, Save seems to be less of a development agency than a professional fund-raising operation, but with one big difference. No professional fund-raiser could get away with keeping 80 percent of the gross.

Save’s rationale for spending most of the money in Westport, for charging executive salaries against “program,” is that people in Westport do “programming.” But there was little evidence of Save’s hand in any of the development projects I saw in Arizona or anywhere else. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, Save was a relatively minor contributor to the Tabernacle Elementary school. The small private school supplied 325 children to Save’s sponsors, and Save returned $16,000 a year, about 20 percent of the $78,000 it would have collected. The money was a tiny part of Tabernacle’s budget, but it did help to slightly reduce the tuition costs for students’ families. Save never did any programming, but they did hang a Red Baby Jesus outside the school, and would often show the school off as an example of its inner city projects. They were, in essence, trading photographs and biographies of their children for a small annual cash allotment.

In all the years that Save has worked on the Hopi reservation, Dee Tootsie can recall much activity aimed at signing up kids but can name only one or two projects that ever did any good. She doesn’t remember ever getting any guidance or programmatic assistance from Save the Children, only pressure to sign up more children and keep the reports coming. One of the final insults came in 1992 when the organization turned down projects in eight villages, and the committees failed to come up with any proposals acceptable to Save. According to the rules, if a community can’t spend the allocation by the end of the fiscal year, the funds are lost. They can’t, for example, wait two years and do a larger project. As time was running out, Save came up with a solution, and in 1992, several hundred children in villages received gift certificates to Wal-Mart for denominations of between $10 and $25. The store was located in Gallup, New Mexico, some ninety miles away. Dee Tootsie typed up the gift certificates and delivered them herself. Then she resigned.

Based on her sister’s experience, Phyllis Wittsel wasn’t eager to get involved with Save, but thirty-five sponsored children and an ongoing project fell into her lap. In June 1994, they submitted a proposal for a summer program for the kids, designed to keep them away from drugs and other problems that are common on reservations. The community wanted recreation equipment, arts and crafts supplies, and electronic learning games. Because the proposal was

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