Monthly Archives: June 2019

UN Report on Assembly and Association in the Digital Era

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On 12 June 2019, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Clement Voule issued a report (A/HRC/41/41) on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association in the digital era. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law has created an unofficial summary of the report here. In its introduction, ICNL notes:

As technology plays an increasingly vital role in the freedom of assembly and association, the Special Rapporteur finds that many governments are not fulfilling their obligations under international law. In fact, government measures restricting online space have become all too common. Furthermore, technology companies act as gatekeepers to people’s ability to exercise these rights, creating new issues. The report addresses these challenges, with a focus on developing guidance to preserve and expand the digital civic space.

In its summary of the Special Rapporteur’s report, ICNL notes the following regarding “digital technology companies,” and I think it’s worth highlighting in particular:

Digital technology companies, particularly social media companies, have become gatekeepers, controlling people’s ability to exercise assembly and association rights online. The role these companies play has created new risks or exacerbated challenges. The Special Rapporteur finds that these platforms’ policies and algorithms may undermine the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, despite some attempts at improvements. The Special Rapporteur is particularly concerned that social media’s content policies seem to affect those with a public profile in a disproportionate manner, placing activists and those calling for mass mobilization at risk of facing arbitrary content removal and account suspension or deactivation. Compounding this problem is social media companies’ increasing use of algorithmic systems to flag content for takedown and determine findability. In the words of the Special Rapporteur: “Algorithmic systems have the power to silence stories and movements, prevent civil society actors from reaching a wider audience, and reinforce echo chambers or reproduce bias and discrimination, to the detriment of democratic development. These measures can also have a disproportionate effect on already marginalized or at-risk groups.”

Read the full UN report (A/HRC/41/41) here.

Read the ICNL summary of the report here.

Poverty porn, survivor porn, inspiration porn

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Sophie Otiende is a program consultant for HAART Kenya, a nonprofit that bills itself as the only organization in Kenya that works exclusively on eradicating human trafficking. In this podcast with The Nonprofit Quarterly, Otiende discusses her anti-trafficking work and why awareness campaigns fail to deter vulnerable women who are already suffering from poverty and abuse in their own homes. She also says donors must do a better job of providing emotional support to frontline staff. And she talks about the ethics around what The Nonprofit Quarterly calls “survivor porn,” which happens when survivors of trauma are asked by a nonprofit to provide an account of their causes, in a video, in an interview with the press, etc., to provide an emotional hook to attract donors to the nonprofit. The podcast asks some hard questions about the power dynamics between survivors and the nonprofits that have helped them.

On a related note is this article from March 2019 from the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism: “Inspiration Porn: How the Media and Society Objectify Disabled People.” This article is about, specifically, someone film or taking photos of a person with a disability in public doing just about anything – eating, getting on and off a bus, going down the street – without that person’s permission, and then uploading it to social media with some sort of inspirational message, making the person with a disability’s experience a “feel good” story. Even journalists are guilty of this. Often, the stories are about someone helping the person with a disability – say, to push their wheelchair over a corner curb that doesn’t have a curb cut – which deflects from what should be the real story: why doesn’t the curb have a curb cut? As one person in the story says, “Inspiration porn makes us feel that everything is going to be OK.”

Both of these are, like “poverty porn”, voyeuristic. As Skye Davey says in this article, “It captures human beings in vulnerable, deeply personal moments, and packages that trauma (and humiliation) for consumption.” All three over-simplify poverty, famine, human rights issues, sex trafficking, accessibility and challenges for people with disabilities, and other complex issues. It promotes a fiction that these issues can be fought with charity and message-promotion on social media, without structural change.

In this opinion piece in The Guardian, Jennifer Lentfer notes:

Poverty, disease, injustice, and conflict are all heartbreaking. But sometimes the work needed to tackle them is not new, innovative, or sexy. It might be citizens demanding fundamental services like improved healthcare or better roads; or governments better managing their budgets; or pressing local agencies to be more responsive to public concerns… We must highlight the grey area between our interventions and the reality of how social change occurs. Trust the public with a little more nuance – they can handle it.

The subhead on this Guardian piece says, “Our job is to tell compelling stories without trivialising people’s lives – and to promote a more nuanced narrative about how to achieve lasting change.” Without poverty porn, survivor porn or inspiration porn. It can sometimes be a difficult balance, but it’s a balance worth pursuing.

There are some good resources regarding ethics and photography in humanitarian work that have advice that can be applied for nonprofits working with vulnerable populations (people who are homeless, people experiencing addiction, people who have experienced domestic violence, foster children, people with disabilities, etc.) in their own countries, including:

I would love to hear from others about how they maintain this balance in their representation of vulnerable populations in public relations and marketing materials.

Also see:

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

How to counter the ongoing drop in volunteer firefighter numbers

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In March 2019, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) published its 2017 U.S. Fire Department Profile report. It’s based on data collected via a national survey of fire departments. The report estimates that there were 682,600 volunteer firefighters in the USA in 2017. That is down significantly from the 814,850 and 729,000 volunteer firefighters that the NFPA estimates were active in the U.S. in 2015 and 2016, respectively. The volunteer firefighter numbers for 2016 and 2017 are the lowest recorded levels since the NFPA began the survey in 1983. 

According to the report, 83,550 of the 132,250 reduction in volunteer firefighters between 2015 and 2017 occurred in fire departments protecting communities with populations of 2,500 or fewer residents. The NFPA estimates an overall decline of 83,900 firefighters (career and volunteer combined) in those communities, a reduction of more than 20 percent over a two-year span. 

In addition to the decline in the number of firefighters serving in the smallest communities, the average age of those firefighters continued to increase in 2017. Fifty-three percent of firefighters serving communities with populations of 2,500 or less were over the age of 40, and 32 percent were over the age of 50 in 2017. This continues an aging trend that has been happening for years among the population of firefighters in small communities.

Number of Firefighters in the U.S., 1983, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015-2017

YearTotalCareerVolunteer
1983*1,111,200226,600884,600
19901,025,650253,000 772,650
20001,064,150286,800777,350
20101,103,300335,150768,150
2015 1,149,300345,600814,850
20161,090,100361,100729,000
20171,056,200373,600682,600

*Note, this is the first year for which firefighter numbers are available from the NFPA.
Source: NFPA Survey of Fire Departments for U.S. Fire Experience

As the National Volunteer Fire Council notes, it is important to note that these numbers are estimates based on responses to a survey of a sample of U.S. fire departments that is designed to be representative of the overall U.S. Fire Service. Approximately 8.7 percent of fire departments surveyed responded to the survey. Any annual differences reflect both actual changes in what is being measured as well as year-on-year statistical and sampling variability.

The NVFC says that, this year, the federal government will award more than $40 million to local fire departments to help pay for volunteer recruitment and retention efforts through the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grant program, funded out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And that’s great. But it’s going to take a huge change in the attitude of most local fire departments for this money to make a difference. As I said in my blog why you can’t find/keep volunteer firefighters: There ARE potential volunteer firefighters out there, even in your small town. There are a LOT of people who are hungry to connect, hungry for a deeper, substantial activity that connects them with the community and causes they believe in, one that gives them an immersive, hands-on, intense experience. Volunteer firefighting can have a great deal of appeal to today’s young people. But if you don’t have a welcoming environment, if you aren’t trying to reach them where they are, if you aren’t using social media, and if you are just talking about all the work that has to be done and the obligations to be fulfilled, those young people are going to overlook you and even go elsewhere and numbers will continue to decline.

In short: we will never, ever go back to a time when volunteer firefighters are recruited in the way they were before the 1980s. The recruitment of volunteer firefighters must radically evolve. How volunteer firefighters are engaged must radically evolve. And it’s going to take more than money.

Also see:

All of my blogs regarding volunteer firefighters.

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Teaching youth about poverty – teaching compassion or supremacy?

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I’ve drafted a new resource: Ideas for Teaching Children Compassion & Understanding Instead of Pity With Regard To Poverty. It’s part of the section of my web site to help people that want to volunteer, rather than those that manage volunteers.

It was inspired by so many of the ideas for volunteering for young people that, in my opinion, are dreadful, suggestions that teach supremacy and superiority, that encourage a young person’s introduction to different regions of the world – say, the country’s of Africa – through a lense of poverty instead of first talking about the beautiful culture and rich history and many talents and skills of the people there.

How can adults – parents and teachers – encourage young people to be compassionate for and kind to others while not cultivating pity and feelings of superiority? Here are some ideas. It’s a first draft – suggestions welcomed (post in the comments or contact me directly).

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.