KEY POINTS:
It's unusual for charity schemes to be plot drivers in Hollywood blockbusters. But About Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson as the eponymous Schmidt, made a star out of the sponsor-a-child charity format.
Nicholson's character, the previously cold-hearted Schmidt, becomes warm hearted by sponsoring an African boy, Ndugu, for $22 a month.
In his letters to Ndugu (letters are very much part of the mechanics of child sponsorship), Schmidt is at last able to reveal how he truly feels about life.
The whimsical missives of a rich old man must have made pretty tedious reading for a 6-year-old in an African village, but still.
I should probably just relax because this is just a film (and one that's eight years old), but About Schmidt continues to grate because it typifies the donor-centred mechanics of the format, and reminds me of apocryphal tales I've heard from charity workers of donors writing to poverty-stricken kids about family ski trips and the like.
The film also gave the kiss of life to a flawed charitable format previously on the wane. The limitations of child sponsorship schemes were laid bare back in the '80s with a seminal piece in the New Internationalist provocatively titled, "Please do not Sponsor this Child".
Schemes were shown to cause family rifts by supporting just one child in poverty-stricken communities, to engender cultural confusion and give sponsored kids unrealistic aspirations.
Plus, the mechanics of sponsorship - which include recording a child's progress, translating letters and taking photographs - put a financial and administrative burden on the charity.
Pre-Schmidt, many big charities had jettisoned schemes in favour of more progressive fundraising devices that focused on helping a community rather than an individual.
To be fair, the charities that still focus on child sponsorship have largely switched emphasis.
While a project may be represented by an individual child in a photograph, more often than not these days this is just a device and your money goes to a community project.
In these tough times where the "donor dollar" contracts every day, it feels churlish to question the profundity of the charitable gaze, but you should still ask why you want to sponsor a child when there are so many other, less conservative formats available.
Child-sponsorship schemes perpetuate the myth that a single child's fortunes can be changed by a monthly donation.
This is a flattering idea to the Western donor, but as Oxfam (which does not run child-sponsorship schemes) always points out, children's welfare is dependent on the kind of life their parents are able to lead.
Your money therefore may be better served channelled into a social or practical project for a wider community - a sanitation project perhaps?
Except that a latrine won't send you a monthly update letter to stick on the fridge.
- OBSERVER
