There’s an unspoken hierarchy in charity. Some causes raise money easily. Clean water. Anything photogenic. Anything that fits on a poster in five words. Other causes, equally important, often more so, sit on the side of the road getting passed over.
I’ve been thinking about this for twenty years, and I still don’t have a clean answer for why. But I have a working theory. Loud mediocrity will out-raise quiet excellence every time, unless somebody closes the gap.
The people doing the deepest work are usually the ones least interested in talking about themselves. They think the work should speak for itself. And sadly, it doesn’t. And maybe, it never has.
A few months ago, I was hired by a couple I know from church. Shannon and Ash. I’d known them for a while without really knowing what they did. I started asking questions, and the more I asked, the more I realized that these two are doing world-class work in multiple countries, particularly in South Sudan. Schools, kids, and a cross-border food agreement that organizations ten times their size couldn’t pull off. Legit, badly underfunded, exactly the pattern I just described.
So they hired me to fix it. We have ninety days to raise $200,000. If we hit it, grant money opens up, changing what they can do.
I’m documenting the whole thing in public. Wins, misses, the parts that aren’t working. Two episodes are out so far.
Episode one is the setup. Who Alabaster International is, what’s at stake, and why this is hard.
Episode two is the honest diagnosis. South Sudan isn’t the most photogenic version of Africa. The work doesn’t fit on a poster. There’s no five-word slogan for “we gave a kid a notebook and a reason to stay in school.” So it goes underfunded. Not because it matters less. Because it’s harder to see, qualify, and for American audiences to empathize with.
Which is why this problem is worth solving. The quiet, structural work is usually the work that lasts. It just never gets the spotlight, because it’s harder to understand.
That’s the work for the next ninety days, trying to make people see what’s actually happening, one kid at a time, until the work is impossible to ignore.
New episodes on my YouTube and Instagram as we go.
If this resonates, the most useful thing you can do is follow Alabaster on Instagram. Watch the campaign unfold and decide for yourself.
More soon.
Dan