Philanthropy is the new reality TV
Howard Lake | 26 October 2006 | Blogs
RDF, the TV company that brought you Wife Swap on Channel 4, is poised to entertain and enlighten us with a new series “Secret Millionaire” in which rich people experience how the other half lives and then distribute their largesse to deserving individuals and families.
According to The Guardian, participating philanthropists include John Elliott who made £60 million from air cooling units; Ben Way, a new media ‘whizzkid’ and Caran Gill, the ‘curry king’ of Glasgow.
They will all live ‘undercover’ to experience how poor and disadvantaged people live and, at the end of their experiment, give up to £50,000 to people they’ve met who they think deserve their cash.
John Elliott is quoted by The Guardian as saying “I don’t think charities are good at [distributing cash]. They don’t tend to pick out the most deserving cases. They tend to pick out the sexy ones and the politically correct ones.”
So, that puts 190,000 registered charities in England and Wales in their place, and suggests that, despite their combined totals of many hundreds of thousands of years’ experience at grantmaking and alleviating poverty and sickness, they still haven’t worked out how to do it properly.
If only they, like him, had had just 50 or so years’ experience in the air cooling unit business, then they’d know how to help the deserving poor.
I’m a fundraiser – get me out of here…
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.