Amateurs Without Borders
For most of my adult life, I’ve been connected to non-governmental organizations, or NGOs—an inelegant term for nonprofits doing humanitarian work in developing countries. A post-World War II phenomenon, the NGO world is increasingly professionalized and specialized, getting more sophisticated by the day. If you want a job shaping programs at an NGO like World Vision or Save the Children, you’d better have a master’s degree. Even then, there are likely other candidates, more qualified than yourself, angling for the job. (Not that I’m speaking autobiographically, of course.)
With rare exceptions, these organizations don’t need you to volunteer, donate stuff, or lend your professional expertise. All they ask for is your money. But here’s an important caveat: this is true mainly with the NGOs we have all heard of, the orgs that get multimillion-dollar grants, the folks on cable news wearing bright orange vests after a hurricane. These guys are pros; they’re good at what they do and they know it. They don’t have time for amateurs.
At the smaller, grassroots level, the situation couldn’t be more different. Since 1990, more than 10,000 international NGOs have been registered in the United States. The vast majority of these organizations will never get big; you and I will never hear of them. These DIY groups will never hire anyone with a Master of Science in agronomy or a PhD in executive leadership. They will never receive a grant from USAID. In many cases, their work will depend largely—if not entirely—on volunteer labor and small donations of cash (or stuff) solicited from people at church or parents at soccer practice. The founder will likely need to keep her day job.
It’s this understudied and therefore little understood rise of grassroots NGOs that is the focus of Allison Schnable’s fascinating book Amateurs Without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion (University of California Press).
In Schnable’s analysis, globalization, affordability of travel, and the ubiquity of the internet have all contributed to the blossoming of these bootstrapped organizations. Relying on personal, relational networks of support, grassroots NGOs “do not turn to seasoned development professionals for advice,” Schnable writes. “Instead, they look to the playbook of civic life back home to structure new organizations, and they use stories of American success as blueprints for individual transformation in developing countries.”
Because of their unique ability and proclivity to operate at a human level, many grassroots NGOs are capable of playing a positive, transformative role in the lives of the people they serve—people whose names and stories they know. Others, by failing to learn from best practices in the field, will inevitably make existing problems worse. Helping can actually hurt.
It appears that Schnable gets into that in the book’s conclusion, but in the early chapters she is most concerned with understanding grassroots NGOs on their own terms: how they come into being, what motivates the people involved, and how they differ in substance and tone from their larger, more bureaucratic counterparts.
“Amateur,” as Schnable defines it, designates “those who are outside the epistemic community of development experts.” And while the word carries negative connotations (as in “mere amateur”), she is quick to remind us that “the term’s Latin root—amator, or lover—points to motivation . . . To refer to the people involved in grassroots [NGOs] as amateurs is also to refer to this expressive quality.”
Given my own work with faith-based organizations, I’m especially eager to read Chapter 7, which explores how religious belief and practice shape so many grassroots NGOs. If you’ve ever been part of a missions trip, you may be interested in that chapter as well. In practice, large faith-based NGOs may appear quite similar to their secular counterparts. But at the grassroots level, faith is far from abstract; it’s often the lifeblood of the thing. Nothing makes sense without it.
Writing as someone who works for an organization that finds itself, at the awkward age of 14, somewhere between “grassroots” and “professionalized,” I’m glad organizations that have traits I recognize and appreciate are being studied and analyzed. While books like this run the risk of making us uncomfortable or defensive, I think it’s always worthwhile to learn, being willing to grow. As amators whose lives are oriented toward the vulnerable, don’t we owe at least that much to those we serve?
