LIFE ENRICHMENT -- 8 ::

EMPOWERING THE BENEFICIARIES

BY P S SUNDAR

The accent I laid in my Guest of Honour address at the Rotary International Conference in Mangalore the other day on the need for a paradigm shift in the approach to service by service organisations like Rotary was well received.   It was a pleasure receiving messages from two incoming Presidents of Rotary Clubs in that Rotary district that they have adopted the change suggested.

My thrust was to evaluate the success of service not just by counting the number of people who received blankets or specs but to go a step further to count the number of beneficiaries empowered by the service.   Hence, the accent was on graduating towards ‘empowering the beneficiaries’ over and above gifting basics to them. 

This involves taking service to a higher plane and empower the beneficiaries to stand on their own and fend for themselves – a Biblical concept of teaching a needy to fish rather than gift him with fish every noon and night.  A relevant thought in this month of Christmas.

This also entails raising the beneficiary from ’seeking status’ to ‘self sufficiency’ and further to ‘surplus status’.   It adds elegance to service.

Gifting anything makes one seek more and creates mores seekers in the society.   On the other hand, empowering reduces the number of such seekers.  Henceforth, it does not appear wise to direct service activities to the seekers of alms; instead, there is need to empower the downtrodden to learn and earn. 

There is a selfish motive as well attached to this approach.   Because of the freebies extended by the Government, the dependence of workers on their work for a living has reduced.  The result?  We suffer from shortage of hands at field, factory, shop, office and any work-spot.  Time has come to revert to the olden days of working to earn your living rather than living with freebies.

When we get an appeal for a donation, say the education of a son or the marriage of a daughter or medical treatment of an old, in the past, our approach was to see the correctness of the request and evaluate the merit of the case based on the economic factors governing the seeker.  All these are valid even today but we need to scan a further factor.  Just examine how much the seeker spends on cable/dish TV connection and mobile phone product and bill payment besides on alcohol consumption.   In some cases, we will discover that the seeker is not willing to sacrifice these extras but wants our support for the essentials.   It might look as though our donation is to pay for his cable TV and mobile phone charges rather than to support education, marriage or hospitalisation.   Any donation involves a sacrifice and an opportunity cost.

Besides, these days, Government has enormous package of welfare schemes that addresses all basic needs of the seeker – food, clothing, housing, water, education, medical, marriage, matrimonial functions, delivery, maternal and child care, compulsory job, old age pension, drought and flood relief, entertainment, and even funeral rites.   These are operated among others with our tax and hence, our donation has already gone into that.

So, empowering means assisting the needy to get these benefits from the Government rather than our duplicating them.  Empowering means ensuring that the needy gets the right education including vocational training or course at Industrial Training Institute or Polytechnic so that the beneficiary gets a job and the society has the supply of skilled workforce.   Empowering means helping the needy get the right job or set up the correct business or profession and support with clientele and guidance for fiscal assistance.

Empowering creates self-esteem to the seeker and satisfaction beyond description to the giver. It may not be easy to shift the entire service activity towards this immediately but a beginning has to be done now.

(published in January 2015 issue of THE NILGIRI ROTARIAN, a bulletin of the Rotary Club of Nilgiris).