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This article is part of a series titled “Volunteering 101: An Orientation on Grassroots Volunteer Work” exploring the dynamics of volunteering with nonprofit organizations. My insights are based on two years of personal volunteering experience with nonprofits in Latin America, Asia and Africa as well as research and conversations with people involved in the sector. By volunteering I typically mean self-organized participation in grassroots projects as opposed to voluntourism or government postings, even though I will touch on these as well.

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  One loaded phrase people toss around when discussing development aid (and volunteering motives) is the “White Savior Complex.” It suggests that patronizing Westerners engage in low-income countries with whitewashed know-it-all agendas to better people’s lives. Critics claim that the White Savior mindset and the humanitarian activities that ensue take away from the agency and empowerment of local populations, while shaping a dubious narrative of benevolent outsiders saving pity-poor communities unable to help themselves. That the White Savior might act with the best intentions does not matter, because the very arrogance of thinking to know what is best rings deep in the term.  

 

However, critics who employ the White Savior rhetoric might be disregarding the complexity of today's humanitarian sector with its diverse global and historical dynamics, and thereby render a nuanced matter quite literally black and white. In order to appreciate the intricate and diverse realities of humanitarian engagement, I will draw a couple of lines: first, a big marker-pen stroke between imposed and requested help and then some penciled borders within these areas.

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imposed and requested development aid

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I would like to coin two definitions for the purpose of investigating the White Savior Complex within this article:

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imposed aid = help from the outside addressing a need identified by foreigners

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requested aid = help from the outside addressing a need identified by locals

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Many humanitarian organizations, such as the American Peace Corps, engage in development aid only when requested by a given people or government and always in coordination with local authorities or nonprofits. They also employ a local workforce that guides volunteers.

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The same is true for most local grassroots nonprofits that implement their own volunteering programs – their visions and setups evolve around a local core and typically these organizations are founded by natives. My personal volunteering experience is in line with this: out of eight projects I worked with, and two more that I visited, only two were initiated by foreigners.

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When critics of development aid and volunteering talk about the White Savior Complex without making the distinction between imposed and requested help, they might end up employing the very dynamic they are so set against: they patronize local communities by denying them the agency to consciously want and request developmental assistance from the outside and by neglecting the fact that said decision-making is an indispensable dimension of empowerment.

 

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imposed development aid

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The problem with imposed development aid is that it might be invasive to local communities and ignore their actual needs, agendas, perspectives and cultures. If this is the case, the term White Savior seems applicable. One example would be a project that uses donations to give a monetary handout that actually hinders the economical sovereignty of locals, who would benefit more from empowerment (e.g. through micro-businesses). Such a handout could be institutional, when given regularly by nonprofits, or individual, when given by volunteers.

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There is another crucial drawback to handouts, may these be material or immaterial (e.g. a volunteer helping a single mom around the house): they might not only lessen local empowerment but also hamper the necessary change in global policies and mindsets that could improve the status quo at the roots and reduce the need for humanitarian engagement in the first place. A Western volunteer who gets to be a quick-fix do-gooder might feel like a savior and return home with a clear conscience, without ever seeing the necessity of changing the bigger picture. Reforming the current state at the foundation could require, among other things, altering one’s own consumerist behavior at home, which affects living standards and working conditions in other parts of the world; or advocating and pushing large-scale policy change that remedies unfavorable conditions fueled by capitalist greed and crooked trade deals.

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However, in reality the choice at the grassroots isn’t always as simple as handout vs. empowerment and awareness. And sometimes it might be the more difficult choice between a handout and doing nothing. If no community-enriching project can be implemented, is a handout better or worse than doing nothing at all?

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It is noteworthy that imposed help (addressing a need identified by foreigners) doesn’t necessarily equal a White Savior mentality and handouts. In my experience community-empowerment and humble collaboration with the locals is the more common variant. Take La Esperanza Granada in Nicaragua for example: the nonprofit was founded by foreigners and relies heavily on Western volunteers, but its backbone are local ayudantes (helpers), who guide the efforts of volunteers. La Esperanza Granada engages in education and is proud of its non-invasive approach with the motto “giving a hand up, not a handout”. Imagine Scholar in South Africa takes community-centered groundwork even further: while the nonprofit was founded by a foreigner, the program involves its local students along all dimensions of the framework and should be run entirely by them within the next years.

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imposed mindsets

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Another dimension of imposed aid are imposed mindsets and practices aimed at eradicating local customs that strike foreigners as change-worthy. Sometimes there is a very fine line for nonprofits and volunteers between accepting a certain practice as cultural heritage and thinking of it as downright wrong. Take female circumcision or corporal punishment – are these matters of perspective and cultural differences or violations of human rights commonly agreed upon by the majority of nations? If a tradition is discriminating and harmful, nonprofits and volunteers addressing these issues might be out of line in an institutional sense but doing the right thing from an ethical point of view.  

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On the other hand, Westerners should try to understand cultural facets before criticizing them. Take my time in Ecuador: I lived in an indigenous community where people’s mother tongue is Quechua. At first I was surprised that children wouldn’t usually say “thank you” and so I taught them, just the way I was taught as a child. A little later I learned that there is no real equivalent for “thank you” in Quechua, or at least the local dialect, and therefore a lack of the concept as a whole. Thinking it over, I had to admit: fair enough, there is really no need to say thank you all the time and maybe it has become more of an empty phrase where I'm from. By now I’ve been to several places, where thank you isn’t really big.

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This might seem like a benign example, but it shows that the White Savior Complex can be treacherously subtle; maybe so much so that it doesn’t even attract our conscious attention. Perhaps the idea of having it all figured out in our economically more developed part of the world is engrained so deeply in Western mentalities that it doesn’t make the needle on the white-savior-meter deflect. Of course, no one can measure on that meta-level, but it doesn't seem very far-fetched to assume that Westerners might want to save the developing world by modeling it after their ideals and standards; after all we have a long history of doing that, from colonialism and imperialism to today's capitalism. 

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I've come to find that the "developing" world doesn't need that kind of saving at all, and that it can actually teach us a life lesson or two: for instance on the relevance of social ties and moderate material possessions in the pursuit of happiness; or about living more closely to nature than technology. 

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I think humanitarian engagement should be about all people having the same opportunities and equal access to basic resources like food, shelter, education and healthcare. It should never be about everybody living a Western lifestyle.   

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