The Modern Appeal: Baby Elephants in the Spotlight
The other night, I saw a TV ad appealing for donations to help save baby elephants who’ve lost their mothers to poachers in the worldwide ivory trade. Interspersed with visuals of “harvested” tusks, the little guys were extremely cute. They trotted along, big ears flopping, small trunks reaching trustingly to their very large and now presumably deceased elders.
Origin Stories: Tracing Back to “Ransoming Pagan Babies”
I recognized a trope/model, a universal staple of charities involved in retail “everyone gives a little” fundraising and marketing. Subscribe and for only $$ a day/$$$ a month/$$$$ a year, you can help save and/or rescue these irresistible creatures. Thinking about origin stories, how tropes and models emerge and become absorbed into the culture, I recall my own first encounter with an earlier, cruder, form.
Nuns and Fundraising: A Fagan-Like Zeal
“Ransoming Pagan Babies,” that’s what they called it. Very “white man’s burden,” but it was not a self-conscious time. I was in second or third grade, seven or eight years old, in a Catholic school in the early 1950s. Our teachers were nuns. Back then, I took their hovering/looming presence for granted, but in retrospect they seem like alien creatures better kept away from little kids. Dressed in contrasting black and white, in between rote teaching, they exercised Fagan-like zeal in throwing us into fundraising schemes—selling cards at Christmas, filling mite boxes during Lent, selling Easter seals. Then they’d pressure us to bring in the proceeds asap. Did not complying somehow get tangled up with sin? We were so very young, vulnerable, malleable. I did the minimum, only moving two boxes of cards a year, one to my mother and one to the lady across the street. Paralyzingly shy, I found even the idea of going to strangers’ doors unimaginable. In contrast, one boy in my class regularly sold at least 20 boxes. To family, I assumed. Even that young, he resembled a cadaver, so I imagined, if he went to unfamiliar houses, the residents might have paid him to go away. Zombie invasion!
The Birth of “Mary Ann”: A Mysterious Mission
I recall one of those cardboard stand setups, with a slotted box for donations. There was probably a picture, but I have no memory. When did we have the chance to slip in our nickels and dimes, since we weren’t allowed out of our seats much? Yet somehow, by the end of the year, we’d reached the magic number of $5. We voted to name the baby “Mary Ann” and the nun announced the money would be sent off to the Confraternity for Christian Doctrine, which handled “the missions.” No one offered us any details. And, young as we were, we didn’t ask. But now, I wonder where our $5 actually went.
Cracks in the System: Seismic Shifts and Changing Traditions
The word “catholic” is supposed to mean universal. I therefore assumed selling and shilling was a regular part of Catholic school experience nationwide, even worldwide. But a friend who’d attended in another city said she’d never had to. And then I remembered another long-ago friend’s description of having to march out at the end of the school day to military music. So, there was room for a range of bizarre behavior and exercises of unlimited power over very small humans by women who had given up control in all other spheres of their lives. And, I later learned, were often not paid, or hardly paid, and so subsidized the Catholic school system with their free labor. That’s emblematic of the Church as it was then, authoritarian, insular, almost medieval. It seemed solid, immovable, eternal. Yet, in a few short years, the Vatican II Council would start a seismic shift, cracks began to show, and everything changed. And the nuns who’d ruled over us would come out of habit. Some would even leave the convent all together.
Modern Parallels: Fundraising Then and Now
Today’s world would be unrecognizable to my younger self. But judging by the baby elephants, fundraising techniques and methods haven’t changed much, though they’ve expanded with the media—TV, online, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Charities have also grown more adept at humanizing, using stories to build and maintain relationships rather than expecting we’ll take them on faith. Our “Mary Ann” would have had to be fabricated, something like a shared imaginary friend. But these days, actual children are identified, and letters and photos regularly dispatched to keep sponsors engaged. Though baby elephants can’t communicate directly, of course, photos specific and generic, can be provided to show happy outcomes like their being adopted back into bands of their own kind.
Maturing Perspectives: Facing Realities and Funding Overhead
Charities operate based on our trust and willingness to believe they will do what they say. And it’s up to us, no longer children, to do our homework, ask bottom-line questions. Like what percent of funds goes to the direct, helping, mission and what percent goes to overhead and expenses, and research where applicable? And, given some recent high-profile abuses, executive staff living large on their charity’s proceeds, it’s important to check out what charity watchdog organizations have to say. (Megan Cooper. Discover What Percentage of Your Donations Go To Charity. Nov. 2, 2023). And that way, we might realistically maximize our chances of having the positive impacts we hope.