Donation culture in Korea

By Hwang Hae-won

Last May, a volunteer club at my boarding school screened the movie “Spirits’ Homecoming,” a drama describing the tragic history of Korean comfort women. When the movie ended, the club accepted orders for donation bracelets, whose profits would be contributed to the Heeum Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japan Military and to helping the victims. It was surely a worthy cause.

Within two days, the club had sold 300 bracelets, collecting a total of 600,000 won. About half of my classmates wore the bracelets. However, since the event ended, I have not heard any serious discussions about the topic, and when the second semester started last month, I saw only three classmates wearing those bracelets. The campaign felt like a one-time, quickly forgotten event.

The trend of donation has changed: the era of crude collection boxes has given way to fancy, fun campaigns inviting citizens to join. Now donation campaigns use creative visual aids or other installations to draw potential contributors’ attention or to make them feel worthwhile, such as UNICEF's “Roly-Poly” campaign, where contributor’s coins would make a roly-poly toy with a child’s picture stand upright.

Also, charities are using social network services or symbolic accessories--like the bracelets sold at my school--to promote the campaign in a friendly way. Hae-Jung Choi, the director of marketing for Save the Children, explained this in an interview with the Hankyoreh; “Traditional campaigns haven’t disappeared, but different campaigns are carried out depending on their purpose.”

The merging of donation campaigns with advertising may be positive as it can gather spontaneous interest. But if people join the campaign based on slacktivism — lazy behavior involving plenty of words but lack of actual action — or “dramatic conceptual consumption,” where consumers spend their money to exhibit morality or other admirable qualities, it may result in unstable support for the foundations because these motives are ephemeral. If the donation foundation face difficulty in consistently gathering money, meaningful changes will be hard to achieve as the projects done by such fountains often require consistent research and fundamental aid.

Some may argue that slacktivism and donations motivated by pursuit of pleasure are better than nothing. In the short term, that may be true. Yet long term, donation without sincerity may cause serious side effects. If people think that they have done their share by giving money, and are indifferent to what their money actually does, their donation may result in a quite different ending from what they expected. For example, we should not forget what happened in 2006. Some workers of Community Chest Korea — a famous charity community known for its “Thermometer of love” and “Fruit of love” — used 33 million won at karaoke rooms and bars, and manipulated tax documents. Although the board of directors all resigned to take responsibility for the situation, no one can guarantee that charities will remain free of corruption if there aren’t any watchful eyes.

Even without such deception, donations may have negative effects. For example, Toms Shoes’ “Buy one give one” model in which the company donates a pair of shoes to an impoverished child every time a pair of shoes is sold seems to be a great idea. Yet economists have shown that receiving Toms shoes had a negative impact on future shoe purchases, thereby affecting local businesses. Greg Dees, professor of social entrepreneurship at Duke University stated, “There are local shoemakers that may not have much of a business if [a B1G1 company] comes and gives away shoes for free.”

In this cruel capitalistic world where self-interest has shoved altruism aside, donation is an ideal solution to make a better world. The public’s increased interest in donations is a positive change, but to prevent being distracted from the real meaning of the campaign by splendid adornments, the public should care how their donations are used. Actually, this concern seems to be widely shared among the public: nearly 70% of people replied in an Embrain (an online research agency) survey that mistrust of foundations holding donation campaigns was the reason why they are not happy with the status quo of donations in Korea. To help donating become a strong and healthy culture here, we should not just fall for marketing but instead look over the reliability of the foundation. In addition, we should not consider donation campaigns as one-time events but have long-standing interest to what the campaign ultimately seeks. Lastly, we should not forget the real meaning behind the event as many students in my school did.

The writer is a junior at Hankuk Academy of Foreign Studies. Reach hear at monica06244@gmail.com.