The Problem with Voluntourism
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2023
- Why voluntourism is gross
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*grandpa sputters awake* Whu huh? What's this about Mr Beast now? Oh, never mind. *gramps returns to sleep as the boring non beast content resumes*
I live out of spite so ......this video made my day
You're doing a great job.
They aren't liberal elites in Ottawa, they're Laurentian elites! No better way to imply francophones are the *actual* holders of power and *always* have been! Surfshark!
sorry man. you have made some amazing vids in the past. this and the last "we" video are not one of them. the first one... maybe. but this is just filler... please go back to picking apart shitty reality shows and using them to point out societal issues. that shit is funny
"These countries are not underdeveloped they are over exploited." Michael Parenti
You don’t go to poor countries to make money
@@DocHollywoodMD tell that to oil companies
It's true they pay a surplus on the aide.
That makes absolutely no sense lmao
@DocHollywoodMD where do the rare earth metals for the Tesla batteries come from?
When I was a kid, my church raised 10k to send a team of teenagers and adults to help build a church in Uganda. Even then, I wondered why we didn't just raise the 10k then give it to the local pastor.
For efficiency sake I agree,
But I don’t think it’s a terrible thing to show kids in 1st world countries how good they have it.
@@Hoffmatic Except for the fact that "having it better" is exactly the kind of argument used to prevent change in 1st world countries, like abolition of capitalism which is the root cause of why these other countries have it "worse".
@@BlackLemmy While that's definitely an argument we have to be wary of, way too many people in "1st world" countries, including people from the left, have no idea of the daily lives of people in other countries - countries that their own explore due to capitalism, like you said.
Visiting other countries and understanding that, yes, even non-privileged people in the global North have many privileges compared to people in other parts of the world is very important. Specially since the North influences so much of the lives and politics of the South.
So, be wary of this argument, but seeing one own's privilege is very much necessary is you wanna fight capitalism.
@@kai6377 You seem to know a lot of things about what people know or don't. Do people really don't know how other countries have it ? Do you really need to "tourism" lives in other countries to check your privileges ? Is capitalism not making a living hell for everybody everywhere, in a more or less same or different way ? Isn't saying "most people don't know, don't check their privileges" kind of a way to not having to check your own, or think you already did and assuming it's a one and done job ? I think you might wanna watch the video again to check if you didn't miss some of the points made in it.
@@kai6377 I don't know anybody who wants to end capitalism that doesn't know how bad they have it in other countries which is why they want to end capitalism. It is the entire crux of workers of the world uniting. Any socialist, anarchist, or marxist will be very aware. Socdems are not on the left unless they one day collectively decide to be.
My boy Scott really said "it's unfair of you to call our cultural immersion visit programs 'voluntourism', why, they barely contain any volunteer work at all!"
Craig also literally said his 4 bedroom "hut" had a chef. Would Craig not rate them 5 stars?
We’re not voluntourists! We’re just tourists!
Oh thank god i was coming to say this. He really misunderstood the actual criticisms of “voluntourism” lmao
I thought this was just a joke-y exaggeration before I got to that point in the video, but he l i t e r a l l y said that jfc
@@axolotlking1072 his didnt misunderstand it he just has no answer to it. Hes a capitalist first and foremost and he cant undo the contradiction between charity and the system it operates under.
what i hate so much about voluntourism is how it not only takes job opportunities away from locals but also would literally be more helpful if it was just tourism. a lot of the places these programs send volunteers too are vibrant, interesting, wonderful places to visit, and are worthy of a trip just to explore the culture in a respectful and non-encroaching way. tourism is normally a great source of revenue for local economies, so there’s literally no need for these wealthy teenagers to volunteer there. it would be much better to spend money there at locally owned businesses, restaurants, and hotels.
Exactly. You could create a business that helps make respectful tourism in the global south easier. They handle the marketing and connecting tourists with the local owned accommodations and experiences. Maybe provide the capital for better infrastructure and the training of translators. And for the tourists, they can handle visa stuff, bulk buying travel insurance (including kidnapping insurance if applicable), facilitating acess to the vaccines you need, and building an itinerary of local run stuff. Travel package companies like this already exist, and not only for "exotic" locals. Under capitalism, it would never be a fully equal mutually beneficial relationship; but this would be a lot better and a hell a lot more honest.
They could literally pay local contractors to build stuff, instead of paying money to ship over unskilled teenagers to build stuff
Well said, The best initiatives are those that use money to hire and/or train local people to build something the local community needs the most.This means talking with the local people. Having well meaning but inadequate teenagers making concrete and laying brick foundations while the local tradesmen stand by (and even need to show gratitude !) is just moronic.
some of my family lives in a small village in ghana and my mom always says tourism would benifit a lot rather than white people coming a building random things
Not so fast. Tourism has its own awful can of worms. Becoming dependent on it has removed the agency of a lot of peoples, whose cultures are forced to become little more than performances for foreigners. There is a huge global tourism industry, and so many tourist traps, resorts, etc. don't actually give money to local people. Those things often get controlled by foreign businesses or corrupt officials who pocket the lion's share.
This video reminds me of one of my favourite sayings: "Volunteering is a luxury."
Not to mention companies exploiting volunteers. When I became single again I wanted to volunteer to do some good and fill my time. I'm a nurse so I looked up volunteer opportunities for nurses hoping I'd find positions for a health fair, vaccine administration for the house-less, or even just some public health volunteer roles.
Instead I found a bunch of private nursing homes asking nurses to volunteer for shifts. It wasn't just a few, it was a lot of them. I was baffled because these were private nursing homes asking for unpaid labor. To add to that, practicing nursing in a facility you aren't an employee of puts your license at serious risk. I can't believe it was even legal and I'm still pretty sure it isn't, but there's likely a loophole.
Now I volunteer in the surgery clinic at my local humane society just sterilizing instruments and weighing puppies and kittens.
@@RogueAstro85 Just fyi, this is illegal depending where you live.
@@Username0467 Yeah, that was a few years ago. I just checked again and those kinds of postings are gone so I'm wondering if Texas passed a law against it or had altered the law during the height of pandemic
@@RogueAstro85If you are still looking for ethical volunteer opportunities, I recommend the Medical Reserve Corp. I volunteered throughout COVID with vaccine clinics and testing. I don’t know if it always is part of the local health dept, but this one was.
@@SpaceCowboyKoala Awesome! Thanks for the info, I'll check it out
Cutting edge microchips are currently on a 2 nanometre process. Fabricators are currently investigating Scott from We Charity's skin to see how they can make materials even thinner.
LINUS I HAVE NO IDEA WHO YOU ARE WHAT ARE U DOING HERE
I had no idea you were branching out from design to offer cremation services. Any typeface suggestions for the engraving on the urn?
@@AnInnocuousBlueCube papyrus but thinner
A little disapponted to see the cucked version of this video all the same. I feel like an "it's complicated" ending is a copout. Like... it's very clearly not complicated. It's explained in the video. Literally hiring goons to beat up corpos would give better results than this sort of charity.
from font analysis to dropping bombs, love it
Are you sure this isn’t tangentially about Mr. Beast? “The performance of gratitude” being the labor being compensated certainly feels like it fits too lmao.
I am almost sure the point was WE as example, so i guess feel free to add mr beast.
mr. beast is just a corporate identity so even tho he’s not as bad as WE, there’s still an exploitive element to helping people and posting videos about it. i feel better if the employees of mr. beast are paid well and given generous bonuses and all corporate profit is fed back into actually helping people (like paying to help ppl with a curable disease).
Hey if he wants to pay for 1000 blind people to see again I could give two fucks about what he gets out of it
Same difference
@@sftgp I don't get this complaint at all. everyone knows it's a business. it's a business that uses helping people to grow instead of all the nasty shif businesses usually do. he's done more good than I probably will ever do in my life, more good than a lot of individual selfless people. someone like him shouldn't exist in a functioning society but we don't live in one. and he helps.
I grew up in a church with a large Kenyan population. It was large enough to have a service in Swahili. During the summer, folks would go back to Kenya on a "Mission trip" that was also visiting family and supporting towns folks were from. It was less "Tourists building stuff badly" and more "We're helping fix stuff at James's cousin's school." It skewed my perception of charities and voluntourism because for years I had no idea how fundamentally different an experience we had versus literally everyone else.
that seems sick as hell dude thanks for sharing, my life is richer with this info youve provided
We need more churches like yours
this sounds cool. Genuine connections and also visiting friends & family. People in your church probably got such a rich experience linking with locals who knew what you were all about - oh it's a guy who goes to church with my cousin! let's show him around.
@@ionaf9 It's great. I'm a media guy and so I hear from Peter that he was talking to a guy back at the school asking for tips on touching up student photos. And so I ended up doing touch ups for a bunch of student's pictures. It's fun, rewarding, and also fundamentally not something you see on a voluntour.
That's how it should be done; out of a genuine desire to help improve lives and build connections, not for feel good fuzzies.
I think that a great way to see how a “cultural immersion trip” is still weird is to think about doing this in any other place. Like imagine going to London to volunteer building a school and immerse yourself in British culture by going to someone’s home and following along their daily tasks. That would be so weird and invasive. The thing about these trips people take to places like Africa and other areas of the global south is the locals are themselves the spectacle. Like you aren’t going there and going to a museum to learn about the culture and view artifacts you are going there to gawk at the local person doing their daily water run and think to yourself “omg their life is so hard”. It’s such a colonial way to approach learning about another persons culture and it’s incredibly harmful to the people who you are on the receiving end of your “volunteering”
I was fully going to include this point but it wound up getting cut for time!
Great video by the way! I really enjoy hearing this talked about more. I have thoroughly enjoyed this series!
I'm from North Africa and when I was young and studying at an american language center, they were advertising cultural immersion trips to the UK in which you get to live with a british family for a week and learn how british people live. That was literally the way it was advertised to us. The program included visits to museums and tours of london but the main draw was living with a british family. It was kinda weird and extremely expensive. Though I've never gone and never knew anyone who did.
@@hajarmdn4883 that’s interesting, and sort of sounds more like a language immersion trip which are also popular in America. My school offered trips like that for the French class and the Spanish class too, but they were very different than the “volunteer” trips. The language immersion trips included cultural immersion, and did include things like staying with a host family and stuff like that, but there was no savior complex aspect and no volunteer work. The goal of the trip was to practice your language skills and enjoy the culture of the people who spoke that language. Not to observe the culture as a spectacle of the other. Often the types of volunteer trips offered by organizations like in this video have a language barrier between the volunteers and the locals. Not that sharing a language makes the exploitation of voluntourism ok, but it is significant that most of the time there isn’t really any discourse directly between the volunteers and the locals.
Hiya, I'm in central London and would love a volunteer to come and do a little light home renovation work. You know, paint the walls (there's been a mix of different paints over the years so they need completely stripping and then the insulation needs to be repapered before applying the paint). In return, you can watch me work. Accommodation and some meals provided but you're doing the dishes.
As someone whose paper is currently undergoing peer review, the idea of responding to someone asking about my methods section by going “do you doubt my credentials and my credibility?!?!” is fucking bonkers. That’s like a massive red flag for academic fraud
The only time “what are you, a cop?” Isn’t valid
Thank you. My thought exactly...
I've seen quite a bit of actual corporate marketing materials of that kind, and even there you can't usually get away with no methods section at all if you claim you conducted a survey or a cite if you use somebody else's results... Even in that world "trust me, bro, I'm a scientist" impresses nobody who knows what they're doing.
"Do you know who my dad is?"
It's hilarious as a college student that I have to fucking triple-check my stuff to make sure it's from a valid source, (sometimes I'm required to only use the school's resources as that's the only way some staff can verify it), make sure I'm actually supporting what the source is saying, and then I have to make sure I quote it (or paraphrase it, more commonly because quoting to some profs is like plagiarism), and then if I don't get the citation right, I can get a zero on the assignment because that's technically plagiarism. But a company can say in essence "Yeah I can't prove what I told you but you're a pussy for asking, suck it nerd" and get away with it.
"If youtube doesn't work out, I'm just going right back to line cooking." That's the most millennial statement about job prospects I've ever heard 🤣
I had to replay that part. I thought he said wine cooking and was confused
@@captainoftheneverdie21same
@@captainoftheneverdie21lol YES same
Scott is a pro at "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss" and using plays right out of the abuser handbook: "You hurt our feelings when you tried to hold us accountable, therefore you're the real bad guy here"
ugh, you're being such a bully to Scott right now. Why don't you think about _Scott's_ feelings for a change, huh? My god, you people only care about yourselves!! Scott though? Scott is *helping people.* Haters 😤
"That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did... You deserved it."
The western model is exploit then DARVO, rinse and repeat. Anyone who spins out and crashes wasn't good enough at victim blaming.
@@lindsay6518 how dare you translate my family crest from Latin!
@@justcommenting4981 I laughed way too hard at the idea of such a pretentious and ridiculously long family crest. If I knew Latin I'd make art of it :P
Something that I don't think Scott realizes is that you're not attempting to say that We is 100% bad; rather, they are not doing good ENOUGH. They can do BETTER by accepting criticisms, by realizing that they are contributing to a problem while they are attempting to fix something.
I honestly can't explain why I found the "CJ was too much so we replaced CJ with Ro Ramdin" gag so goddamn funny but it really just hit me
It's just perfect, replacing one chaotic fast-talking genius gen Z youtuber for another.
I cackled, I love them both so much lol
It was so funny! But Ro Ramdin did an eerily good serious-take-me-serious voice. I feel like I shouldn't be in awe but I am.
i love her so much and CJ too
"Oh, if you think so highly of academic research, check out this report."
"How dare you ask whether the report has any basic academic validity!"
lmao
Scott, if you're reading this I can confirm that I, a terminally online American millennial, had never heard of WE until We're In Hell's first video on the topic.
Ditto here, from a terminally online Australian millennial.
Terminally online from Aotearoa, can confirm
As an American, ditto.
I figured he meant the impressively terrible wework. Basically Airbnb but for office space. They crashed and burned hard.
Terminally online German here. Can confirm
I'm Finnish and I'm guessing there's about as high a likelihood of someone here knowing about WE as someone in Canada knowing about the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare.
as a white kid growing up in toronto, its so easy to get a mindset of "canada has 0 issues at all and is the least racist country! look at how bad the united states is" i still have adults in my life who think like that. thanks for picking a canadian charity to go in on, its really easy to dismiss racism as 'not a canadian thing' if you picked an american charity
edit: the segment by Amanda really encapsulates this and states it better than i could lol
Lol Canada is one of the just racist countries that pretend they're first world.
The fact that there are frenchies little bastards that think everything should be presented to them on French or your "attacking their lineage!!!!!"
If you're even accidentally tanned they're immediately tagging you as foreign and a parasite, even if you're there just visiting a friend.
Have you seen how horribly indians are treated in canada? Especially ontario? Canada is more racist than the US.
@@jesssandhu9432 yeah man. thats exactly my point. thats why videos like this are so important. my mom was in highschool when the last residential school was closed, its very ingrained into canadian culture to ignore racism
@@esotericpince Exactly:/ imagine how far we would get as a country if we stopped arguing over race. We're all the same
@@jesssandhu9432 no im going to keep my anti italian prejudices. thats unnegotiable
HEY as someone from rural Alberta I just want to say it would be amazing to see any staircase made out of reclaimed wood because no one here would dare recycle.
In the few times I visited Edmonton, that sounds about right. My dad lived there for about 9 years, and came back to the US raging about how awful it was to be taxed and have healthcare. Truly, he suffered.
Recycling is a hoax imposed on AB by Trudeau to kill our provincial economy :D
You just roasted Alberta harder than wildfires
@@BigpapamoneymanMVPtypebeat Oh we do pay taxes, loads of them. I didn't say he was a rational man.
His excuse case for hating the Canadian healthcare system was because my step mother needed a CT scan of her abdomen because of pain, and their general practice had a 6 week waiting list for the scan. They then went to the ER instead, and she got treated right away (small perforation on her small intestine). He is truly dense for not realizing that this is still a W for Canada, as she was treated right away and they didn't have a bill.
Yeah we have so many old buildings here whose materials could be refurbished, but aren't, and it's so frusturating.
this is very tangential to the topic here, but when I was in University, my roommate once brought over friends from her hometown, and while staying over in our room they collectively decided to ridicule the ever-loving shit out of the place where I grew up. they did this after I told them I grew up there, while they were staying in my room and eating my food. I have never been so humiliated and infuriated by people that I had welcomed into my own home. I was so hurt that it irreparably damaged my relationship with my roommate.
I can only imagine that experience was just a teeny tiny crumb of what it must feel like to be on the other end of a voluntourism trip. And instead of being angry and upset about it, the people are forced to act happy and grateful so that they don't sacrifice the access to 'support' that is supposedly being given out of pure and noble generosity/kindness. It's such an affront to the dignity of these people, its fucking infuriating
That does sound absolutely infuriating.
To me, the “immersive” trip seems like it would actually be more burdensome on the local community than regular “incompetent construction work” tourism.
The “immersion” seems like you’d have to go perform ‘struggle’ for tourists, multiple times per month (weeks?), rather than actually doing anything directly productive and, presumably, less soul-killing.
But I guess there is the advantage (for the voluntour operator) that an “immersive” trip makes for a more pleasant vacation; and because each lucky voluntourist is only working for three days, you probably don’t run out of land and material to build “schools” on quite as fast.
Had a similar experience with a guy from the city centre making fun of the suburb i grew up in. He kept saying that i was from the ghetto and insinuated that i was white trash? That i had steet cred or something? Like it was obvious from the way he was speaking he had never set his foot outside of upper class twit town
This is a helpful analogy. There are many people who cannot understand why their volunteerism is not a good gift.
While I don't know if the right people will read your comment...I think it could help someone especially thick headed to finally empathize.
I had a similar experience with an online friend fleeing their abusive home situation to come live with me and a close friend. Sure, this friend had no job and relied on us to feed and house her, but she complained endlessly about where we lived and everything about it as soon as the initial panic had passed. Everything from insulting the food, the climate, implying people who lived where we lived were all stupid and backwards essentially, and how much she hated everything about the area. It was kind of a lot, especially when my close friend's mom came over to bring food to us and she complained that she didn't like it.
idk the funny thing is this 'friend' of ours who came to live with us during a crisis is also one of those most very "I'm more moral than you" online people who would definitely call herself out if she complained about it on reddit, (and did, and showed us a similar post complaining how ungrateful the person in a fairly similar circumstance was) and couldn't see it.
My former roommate's partner would come over and I'd hear her criticizing things about our apartment all the time, it was so exhausting and made me feel insecure in my own home. I finally spoke up about it and then she had a meltdown and left in tears, yelling about how we don't like her. Allowing a guest into your home and having them look down on you is so degrading.
“Oh you don’t believe me? We’ve had STUDIES done!” “Ok great show us the studies” “oh uhhhhh no”
Curious that they built this villa in "the middle of nowhere" I wonder who they were meant to be helping by building a luxurious mansion so far away from any population that being able to build stairs was a herculean feat
The thing he said about Habitat for humanity in Mexico just seemed like the most hilarious example of exactly your point. I just imagine these incredibly wealthy kids with absolutely no construction experience or relevant skills whatsoever, taking a 4 week vacation to Mexico to "help" build homes while at the same time their parents hire half a dozen illegal immigrant day laborers to build an extension on their home.
Absolutely love how Scott is digging an even deeper hole for himself with every act of "damage-control" he tries to do here. Keep it up Scott from Me to We; it's hilarious to see someone incriminate themselves like this.
Scott and Barbara Streisand would get along well
It’s genuinely fascinating seeing someone that’s as spectacularly bad at their job as Scott is.
The level of petty even within just the first 15 minutes is something I not only expect from an anticapitalist Canadian, but aspire to
As a South African this insight is exactly how i feel. The performance of it and the distancing of foreigners. No comminication and sometimes no care at all
For someone who never worked in accounting, you sure are good at handling all these receipts
Tax evasion is one hell of a teacher
I'm Kenyan and it took me a couple sittings to finish this video. Thanks for making me laugh through it.
Used to work for an animal sanctuary that had a bunch of child volunteers. Any time children volunteer it's for the kids to learn rather than to get actual work done. It actually doubled how long even the most basic tasks took. And that was just for feeding animals and cleaning pens, I can't imagine how rough it would be trying to get kids to help on construction projects. That sounds like hell
that actually sounds like hell 😭😭😭 i volunteered when i was 16 to get work experience bc i wasnt in the right headspace to have a full on job at the time, and even then the most i learned was that i was very good at working tills lol
somehow i have gone 33 years of my life without hearing the phrase "boss joke", but once you said it i instantly thought of like a fucking thousand, lots of which i laughed at to keep my job
This was probably the most surreal lefty videoessay ever made, the fact that you essentially had a running dialogue with one of the pundits of the corporation you were critiquing is mind blowing and groundbreaking, the amount of videos like this that have the “we reached out and they gave no comment” made this vid so refreshing, you are a legend
our school did Costa Rica trips, only the upper middle class kids could afford to go, I remember the girls came back with corn rows and everybody had a tan, apparently everything they built was just torn down after they left so the next school group could build it again
jesus, they're treating it like summer camp
@@ps1hagridoufofcharacter they were pretty naive, I am pretty sure most kids were fooled by adults into thinking they were helping. You definitely know an industry is healthy when fooling trusting young people is core to your success.
@@onezerotwo for sure. i'm definitely not that angry at the kids who trusted the adults in their life, moreso at the adults themselves who should probably know better. but then again, as you alluded to, its the whole point o fthe industry - to keep them unaware
Costa Rica is literally nicer than a lot of places in America
Please people. We’ve got to stop saying “upper middle class.” 1) there are only 2 classes: those who have to work for a living (working class) and those who live off of their property/labor of others (owner class)
2) If your family couldn’t afford to send you on a school trip, your family was low income. The entire fabrication of the “middle class” was the idea that the American working class could afford a home, good schooling for their kids, and a couple family vacations a year. It was a trap just to get the increasingly productive working class (literally our labor has become more valuable every year for the past century and yet our wages haven’t kept up with inflation and corporate profits for 50 years) to accept a smaller and smaller fraction of the profits from our labor.
The change from cj to ro is an amazing example of malicious compliance
Can we get Scott's take on all your scripts going forward whether or not they're WE-related?
HOW DOES THIS MAKE YOU FEEL WHITEBOY?!
@@justcommenting4981 feels great👍
WE can cry me a river they made me sit on the gym floor for a 4 hour assembly in 6th grade
What a privileged perspective *adjusts glasses with one finger* 🤓
After that how dare they even SPEAK! 😂
A 4hr assembly? Gravy balls that is long
When I was still in college as well as a practicing Christian. One of my moms friends was heavily involved in the church invited me out to eat. When I was in college I had to struggle through what was essentially cycles of depressive episodes where I would be somewhat functional and steadily declined mentality over the course of the semester only to pick back up at the start of the Summer. I had always struggled with depression and anxiety my whole life but these were the worst. So when she invited me out she asked if I would like to come do volunteer work in Haiti for a couple months instead. I told her I wasn’t sure and I’ll never forget her response: “Going there it will make you learn to appreciate what you have.” I don’t think she meant it like this, but for me it was like I was only depressed because I was self centered and under appreciative of the life my family had given. In high I would beat myself over my depression telling myself that I was ungrateful. In college I realized that it was not my fault and that my depression made me incapable of enjoying things in life and that through medication and therapy it could slowly become more manageable. So to hear her say that to me really bothered me. It also felt gross to use someone else’s suffering in order to make myself feel better. I never went on that trip because of that and the more I learn about this stuff the better I feel about that decision.
I'm very sorry she said that, I had a similar experience with my anxiety where I was told that I should just pray it away and it really broke my faith (I used to be Catholic). I'm very happy that you ultimately made the right call though, take care of yourself.
I'm sorry that you had that experience. It's such a bizarre line of reasoning: you're cheering someonw up by telling then that, in addition to their own problems, there are also people who are going through worse? Great, now you get to feel like shit for two reasons!
This is a weird comparison, but Scott's description of "cultural exhange" feels like visiting Colonial Williamsburg for a history class.
treating a living breathing culture like a tourist reenactment is truly wild
we: 5 star hotels
you: 5 star hotels
scott: why, if it isnt mr. creative; making up more stuff about us which we never claimed.
Gotta feel bad for Scott, can't even afford a lawyer to send his legal threats.
I love how this video on this charity I’d never heard of until your first video has escalated into this full blown Streisand effect nonsense that still covers super relevant topics.
I taught in an Alaskan bush village of 100% native Alaskans for a handful of years. I was definitely an outsider and did what I could to learn what I could while I was there, but there were also occasionally these church groups and charities that would come visit.
For every bit the outsider observer I felt (and was, make no mistake, I couldn’t ever truly get what it’s like to be someone FROM there), I had the benefit of being there for 3/4 of the year for several years, making friends, learning parts of the language, helping in the day to day operation of things. When these visiting groups came in they’d bring new basketballs for the gym (which is a school gym, we can buy basketballs, idk) and candy and bibles and clothes to give away. They’d stay for a week to a month, running church groups or playing at open gym time at the school with the kids, they might shovel some elders’ walkways or cook at the community house once or twice. But at the end of their time they’d pack up and vanish, with phones full of pictures and feeling that they “got it.”
I stayed long enough to see a couple of the groups come more than once. A couple of the older members might remember one or two of the locals, but for the most part they’d meet my students for the first time, every time. The kids didn’t mind, they got toys and goodies and new people to hang out with (they actually super didn’t need the winter gear and stuff- they either made it themselves, got their native corporation to buy it, or used the plenty of money they have for that to get it) but I also think that’s because they don’t really think about those people then putting the pictures up on a slideshow one day, talking about the legitimate bonds they created with kids whose names they have a 50/50 chance of remembering by the end of the year.
The idea of giving Native Alaskans winter gear is so deeply patronising to me.
A friend of mine had to go on a mission trip of sorts as part of her education. I don't know how to say this gently, but she was kidnapped and held for ransom. She is okay now, but uh. Anyways her school didnt give her credit for this course because she didnt complete the trip.
V fucked up
oh shit
Looks like they don't care about either ends of the people they're exploiting
... not even credit damn
Amazed by the We spokesman having access to your script, something that equates to a piece of exposé journalism, and managing to dig themselves into an even bigger hole
I've had an office job sending professional emails every day for 15 years; if someone gets offended at being addressed by their first name they're just being an ass
When I first started uni I went to a pre-sign up talk to one of these things. The thing is that I legitimately did have experience with construction work, being a concreter prior to my starting university. I went to it because I wanted to help with construction for at least a decent amount of time, and I had heard that the programs helped with building schools and houses for people.
On my arrival to the talk I was informed that the trip would be 2-3 days of construction work, with the remaining parts of the two weeks being dedicated to riding and washing elephants and sightseeing. I told them that I had skills within construction and that I wanted to be more active in that part of things, but that didn't fit within the set out itinerary.
In hindsight, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to pay for the experience of working, which would take away from the opportunities of local people to have paid work in their local areas. But I'm still shocked that the only option was to do an incredibly short stint of actually building something useful, with the rest of it being about sightseeing and tourism, when I sincerely did want to put my prior learned skills to use to help people.
As a scientist someone explicitly stating that hey did a academic study to "confirm" they did a good job shows clearly they had no intention of actually investigating anything with the studies.
I agree with Scott, it's so impressive that people in the middle of nowhere, Alberta, are able to build stairs. That's so impressive for an Albertan!
As an Albertan I can confirm we'll drive for eight hours to see a flight of stairs
After you talked about the email thing where you just kept calling him Scott, I laughed so hard every time you said his name cause I can so clearly picture this guy losing his mind about it. I've dabbled in a few 'cooperate jobs' over my mostly customer service work experience. It always made me laugh how seriously some people take cooperate email politics. They just make no sense to me, but people get BIG mad about dumb shit like not calling them 'ms/mrs/mr' whatever lmaooo. I feel blessed that my current job has a really casual email culture. There's something about an emailed meme that makes it 100 times funnier.
my dad told me he once wrote an email to a woman from a different department and addressed her as „Miss Smith“. all his colleagues then told him it was a huge mistake because she‘s super anal about titles and will call you out if you don‘t call her „Dr. Smith“. They also implied she was difficult to work with. now, naturally, my dad was kinda scared he‘d offended her because he didn‘t know any of that. Her response arrives and lo and behold, she‘s perfectly kind and doesn‘t say a word about titles. turns out she‘s only anal about it with people who are sexist lol.
I was a part of what I'd call a volontourism in mexico before I had the systemic knowledge I did now, but I kept questioning things and realized it wasn't a legit charity the more things went on, it was a tourism business.
I'm late but, I lived in Kenya, my partner was raised in Kenya and lived there till they turned 18, every once in awhile we visit Kenya (once very couple of years when we can afford it). We dread volunteers, they give a bad image of all ppl in Africa. Kenyans do not need your charity, when those white ppl come and offer charity and voluntary work, there's many conditions you need to fill in to be able to get their help. Usually you need to be christian or convert, they also show Natives as poor, needy and suffering ppl, or show their culture as "primitive". In Kenya its cultural that children choose their own name by age 6-7. Organizations like We portray those cultural practices as child abuse. etc etc great video, I'm showing this to my friends.
I'm in awe at the increasingly unhinged sponsored segments that surf shark is allowing this man
Great moments in narrowly avoiding a defamation suit: the series
If anyone's looking for more videos on this topic, Kathrin also has a video on voluntourism that's very well done.
@@thotslayer9914 - yep.
It hit me at some point during this that Scott just wanted WIH to be his mouthpiece. To say the things he wants to say and in the tone of voice he wants them said. Deeply ironic.
Dude your friend CJ is a pro. What a gem of an absolute person. Also, how the fuck do you read this without dripping a threatening fuck you tone? I tried it, and couldn't pull it off.
right? It's impossible. Who talks like that!?
Scott. Scott talks like that.
I have a friend who is a very nice and loving person with all the good politics and stuff, but they went to Africa many years ago to like, "help" and volunteer and says it was amazing, that the people were lovely and it really helped them learn more about the world and appreciate their life better.
And at the time I was more annoyed that they had some moral highground and were implying I should do such things to get myself out of my own head and give my problems some proper context but what I never said was "you're using these people. you're using them as some moral lesson against me, some guilt trip, some 'could be worse' argument AND you went there only to come back and move on with your own priviliged life to make yourself feel better for having done it. As if it absolves you of some guilt. As if you can always win any argument by trotting out these african kids or whatever."
Sure, going to some poor country and helping people is nice (but usually narcissistic), yet much like most charity and help under capitalism, its always very temporary, fashionable, shallow and not the systemic change that the world needs. I'm glad my friend did it, and maybe they really helped some folks, and maybe I should do such things and stop being so self-invloved, but I just know it'll be a drop in the ocean and I'd be angry that it is at best helping symptoms, not the disease.
Its just typical neoliberalism to make a business of helping the poor it creates by design.
the people who ive seen go on expensive trips to "help in africa" almost never volunteer at home and thats what solidified just how much of a feel good tourism trick it was to me
my dad used to joke that theyd travel the world to give the hungry some food just to ignore the hungry at home
Also its bourgeoise elitism to say that you have to travel the world to learn about people and have empathy. If that's the case you wont learn any of that from your travels; these people are just tourists. if they really cared they would give funds directly to communities in need and let them determine how best to improve their lives. Stop sending your obnoxious kids over to do half assed work and rub their privilege in everyone's face.
Doesn't seem like doing those things made this person LESS self-involved.
I have a similar story! A college friend wanted to go to Lesotho on a voluntourist trip and her major goal, I kid you not, was to get a Basotho blanket. She said it was "an incredibly culturally significant blanket" that had to be gifted to her as a white person. And it would mean she had done something if she got it. Which felt off in ways I couldn't then describe. If you check out Wikipedia, you'll find it's given out for certain ceremonies. Her understanding was primarily the young boys' fertility blanket. And while she was discussing her trip she was talking about how she'd have to "make do" with shitty instant coffee because coffee isn't readily available in Lesotho, as she would regularly drink 2-3 pots of coffee in school.
But think of the entitlement to believe you're owed a culturally significant item for another gender because you went into another country as a volunteer. I couldn't word it then but now that I can...
In her defense, however, she was at most 20 when she discussed this with us, and this having happened a decade ago I can only assume she really thought she was doing good and she was just behaving like any young adult would. Cultural appreciation without understanding that her appreciation was othering rather than inclusive.
I don't think the problem with what she did is that it's just a drop in the ocean. The idea that we ought to be crafting big-picture solutions is in most cases its own kind of othering arrogance. (Especially if you have no expertise beyond a better lottery ticket draw for circumstances of birth.)
The problem is that it's drops of charity, and charity can't help but reinforce the differentiation between the needy and the giving.
Her attitude towards your suffering is solid evidence that she didn't learn anything generalizable about compassion. Her gratitude is based on pity, and requires other people's deprivation.
Mutual aid efforts have immediate effects that are also "just a drop in the bucket". Sometimes the only big picture impact is building parallel support systems.
"It isn't voluntourism!"
* Describes voluntourism *
"Craig and Mark never claimed to invent that concept!"
[Reads passage from the former's book that says as much.]
I'm glad you're continuing the pursuit of this...if nothing else to bother Scott.
I have sometimes said what Craig said, "how can people live like this?". I am from the "global south" myself. I don't say it to mean "look at these under developed societies" but to mourn and get angry about the control we weren't allowed to exercise over our own lives. The US foreign policy playbook over the last 70 years has made sure we're kept in perpetual poverty. No amount of western philanthropy can give us back the futures that were taken from us.
"a lacrosse player who had to change schools because a pledge died in a hazing ritual" holy fuck 😂😂
this entire situation is very funny and i hope it just keeps going like this forever.
maybe it will even help "grow subscribers and make money from the channel" lmaoooo
I did one of those volunteer trip things. I felt like a jackass, and I genuinely tried to be helpful. I felt ashamed that most of the other people on the trip were goofing off and wasting resources. Looking back, I really wasnt much better. It's so cringey. It was for us, not for the school we went to 'help'. We should have just sent them the money that we spent on travel. That would have been better. I know better now. I was a dumb kid, to be fair. But why didn't the adults know better?
They did
Memory unlocked of my american relatives being surprised that we had TVs and dishwashers mid-2000s the first time they visited my family in south Europe lol
Perfect timing, I need something to distract me while I finally put away my pile of three weeks worth of laundry that I let get away from me
I believe in you!
have you completed the laundry
i should do that too actually
@@absolutetrash8118 Yes I did lol. I would say it's never going to happen again but my lazy ass is going to let it happen again
Did you know you can just wear clothes until they fall off your body? Yes it's true I found out myself.
Saves so much time!
The evangelical Christian school I attended (up to 8th grade) wanted all high students to do some sort of mission trip. They were planning a trip to Costa Rica to evangelize, I guess. They weren't doing a construction project. I was deeply uncomfortable about going and had never felt comfortable "spreading God's word." I managed to get out of going and get into public school. The people that did go, seemed to just be on a vacation. No evidence of any "mission" that I recall (but this was like 15 years ago).
This is also funny to me, as someone from a predominantly secular country, because Costa Rica is a very religious Christian country?! Like, according to a quick google search, the percentage of Christians there is pretty equal to USA? Just that compared to USA, the percentage of Evangelicals is smaller... but not even drastically, like 20% in Costa Rica, and 35% in USA. So, they wanted the local people to divert from one type of Christianity to another? While they could just as well do that work in USA? Lol.
@@vihmaussivenitaja I thought the same thing, catholicism is literally the state religion and it's a big deal there. I really don't know who they would want to convert.
@@junipermuniper I suspect they just want an excuse to take a beach holiday :D I mean, Costa Rica is amazing.
@@vihmaussivenitaja Yeah, but you see, to a lot of Evangelicals catholicism is barely a step above heathenism. So yes, they are going to save those poor Costa Ricans from going to hell for believing a slightly different version of christianity. I've seen this condescending attitude from evangelical christians, and even though I'm personally an atheist, it still really pisses me off.
the only experience with we I had was when my school merged with another school. The other school had a 'we' club and I never really heard them speak about it, until they got to go to We day. It was so bizarre and jarring that they said it was a charity but they were going to a concert with celebs? Also not a single person could actually tell me what the charity was for - they all said it's for everything. Always sounded shady to me.
30:07 Amanda Maitland's story is exactly the culture I experienced at 4 out of 5 non profits I've worked for in Canada. That's not an averaged number, I've worked for 5 different ones in my career and 4 of them were that exact kind of toxic
It's depressing because I hear this a lot about the nonprofit industrial complex.
ooh in terms of "boss joke energy" the most homicidal I have ever felt was when closing up a shop and the worst human in the world popped in 30 seconds before closing, and then proceeded to take their sweet slow time while making multiple jokes about just making it, while very clearly expecting me to laugh.
I don't know where this person is now but I hope that everyone they ever loves abandons them.
You sound very entitled.
@@chickensalad3535ufff
@@chickensalad3535 he was being very satirical. I got it.
i cant wait for ep 4 where you reveal scott was actually just a social construct the whole time.
as a "local voice in the global south", these people are untrustworthy vampires
"A very intense person" is an amazingly accurate assessment of CJ, while also being the most spectacular understatement in history.
not to ruin the perfect 666 comments, but this is such an important issue to be talking bout and i truly appreciate you covering this. i'm indigenous, specifically oglala lakota but having grown up far from pine ridge reservation where that part of my family came from, i've looked for ways to try and help financially support the communities in that area (knowing that the conditions there are BAD) and i had discovered a voluntourism organization there. $695 a week to build and be "immersed" in the culture. when i had looked a few years back, there was this entire proposal for a building that volunteers would be staying in, i believe. HUGE, fancy architecture, and naturally would use an obscene amount of materials that could easily be used to actually help the people living there, many who live in mobile homes. looking now, it seems that building either never got built or is simply not talked about, because i cannot find that blueprint i saw anywhere, so i'm kind of hoping that means people saw straight through their bullshit, but it still stuns me that they're charging that much money per person for a bunch of unskilled white people to come in and do something that doesn't seem to be doing much. like... these types of organizations are so dangerous for the way they can overshadow real things that can help people, like there are mutual aid groups run by people in the actual communities who will put that money towards things they actually need, so it's such a shame. i've only seen a couple things actually calling this group out, i guess they're supposed to be building beds but people there have waited at least an entire year to get that and that "cultural immersion" thing seems to be bullshit. the organization is called re-member, i'm a pretty outside perspective so if anybody actually knows more about this group i'd appreciate to hear about it.
Thanks for sharing this. I think these companies are basically scams.
We’re in hell drops a 90 minute video and my eyes got wide with anticipation.
When I was 14 I went on a voluntourism trip to Manitoba, called a 'Catholic Leadership Retreat' where we'd visit a no-road First Nations reserve and 'help fix properties' there.
They had us build a fence around the Church and repaint the Priest's office. No help to the community and they actively scared us about the locals, telling us not to interact with anyone except the children. A girl of the same age as me flirted with me and I almost ran away I was so freaked out when they said "their parents will kill you" and one of the other older boys told his own story of sneaking off with girls and an "angry mob" forming.
MMIW are definitely a major reason behind that kind of defensiveness towards the city boys coming in and messing with your girls, even if that anger was there it would be understandable and justified. However, they definitely made all of us other the locals and not view them as people we could learn from or interact with. 'Shut up and go back to making my fence' was the energy if you asked when we were going to help the locals.
I'm from rural Manitoba and it's ridiculous to hear someone say they went on one of these trips to a northern community in Canada. If there's any country on Earth where these problems should not require flown in volunteers it's our wealthy ass country. We stole SO MUCH land and export SO MANY resources and virtually none of that goes to indigenous communities.
In those fly in reservations basic groceries cost exorbitant prices. Its clearer in Canada than anywhere else that these issues are systemic and cannot be fixed with a handful of volunteers.
Hello, I am a student writing a paper based on this topic and I would love to chat with you about your experience. I understand if you are unable to. Thank you!
Wow what a shame. Shame on western white churches esp catholic ones for the cultural genocide they have willfully participated in against native communities here in the US and Canada.
I think ALL white churches need to be banned from native reservations. What they have helped perpetrate esp during the days of residential schools is evil and inhumane and they will never be held accountable. They have absolutely NO RIGHT to ever set foot on what little native land is left. I honestly think it's need to be a law. If Native persons want to seek out white churches, I'm sure they can find them outside their reservation in the nearby white-majority communities.
Shout out to Craig for the amount of work he put into his part of the video. He should be really proud of how much content he gave you to work with.
When I was in high school, basically everything we did in National Honor Society was through WE. Like for Halloween, we'd go collect canned goods for WE Scare Hunger. I never really thought about how weird it was that our entire NHS was just doing stuff for some random Canadian charity
Obsessed with the back and forth between you and Scotty. Such great chemistry! I hope he stays in touch :)
This video really made me think about the falseness of the missions trip to Haiti I went on when I was a kid. We barely did anything except listen to the kids sing and the youth pastor went up and did a sermon in English. We handed out some water in bags, but that's it. Then we spent a couple days in a resort that felt very expensive in comparison with the barrack type buildings the people around the compound had.
1:18:35 : Also, a very important thing to keep in mind about Dow Chemicals is that in 2001, they acquired Union Carbide, a company that in 1984 was responsible for the Bhopal Gas Distaster, when criminal mismanagement and negligance at their chemical factory in Bhopal caused a gas leak that killed 16,000 people and permanently injured another 40,000 at a VERY CONSERVATIVE estimate. Not a single member of the company was ever held responsible for this (the extent of legal consequences was that the CEO Warren Anderson was arrested for a few days before he got bail and immediately fled the country), despites decades of popular movements demanding justice for the victims. And despite the wealth of evidence showing that the company had made aware of the lack of safety features at their plants many times leading up to the leak, but took no action on it to save money.
Now Dow wasn't directly involved in any of this, but their purchase of Union Carbide in 2001 only made any kind of criminal prosecution even more unlikely, because the Union Carbide owners and executives got to wash their hands of the company, and the new Dow owners could also deflect responsibility by saying this was something that happened long before they took charge of the company. So as far as most activists for Bhopal are concerned, Dow are complicit in helping to whitewash the perpetrators of this massacre, as well as in helping them evade justice.
Oh, and also, Dow were the company that manufactured Agent Orange for the US air force to use in Vietnam, so they did directly profit from those crimes against humanity.
All in all, a great choice for a corporate partner in philanthropy for the Global South, I'm sure.
Edit: Just realised you do mention this in your video, I was too impatient with my comment. But leaving this up for a more full context.
I went to a me to we leadership retreat in middle school that also focused on border issues in Southern Arizona. I was from the community that the retreat was based out of and I felt that the Me to We leaders greatly misrepresented my community to the rest of my class. Our leaders were from Canada and didn’t seem to fully understand the dynamics of the Mexican American border community and on multiple occasions gave us false information about the border. It just felt that they were putting my community on show for their own benefit with out really understanding it.
A lot of the "do something for yourself, but also to help people" reminds me of a project we have here in Austria. It's a "voluntary social year". You basically help out at a hospital or a place for elderly people, disabled people, young people, immigrants, or homeless people for 34 hours a week. Additionally to that there are multiple seminars to help you learn about your job there, but also yourself.
I think this is pretty great, as you can help out locally in a way that is actually useful.
yes! there are ways to do mutually beneficial volunteer work that is not exploitative. i wish more organizations would provide these opportunities on a larger scale.
That is perfect. There are so many needs at home! I think it's one thing in the aftermath of a natural disaster somewhere in the world to volunteer, but most of these trips seem to be a thin disguise for an exotic vacation.
If someone truly wants to help why not start at home? (Home nation, state, region, etc?)
WOW A RUclipsR IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE NORTH AMERICA
THAT'S INCREDIBLE, SO IMPRESSIVE
SO BRAVE
SO STRONG
AND AFTER EVERYTHING YOUR COUNTRY HAS BEEN THROUGH.
I HOPE THINGS GET BETTER IN NORTH AMERICA
THOTS AND PRARIES
STUNNING AND BRAVE 😔
You are a legend, please don't get sued into oblivion
I just imagine Scotty saying "Laugh at me will they? I'll give THEM something to laught at!"
Oh - and its really funny how WE keeps showing their true selves for the petty, misanthropic organization they are instead of just living and letting others live
a canadian shame, thanks for bringing attention to this!! found the channel through the first vid and will stick around! hi from toronto :)
Yes send to more Canadians so he keeps making Canadian content as someone who’s American and tired of American content I LOVE when y’all talk about your crazy stuff ;)
Maybe I just need to finish watching your previous work on the topic, but there is something that’s an important bit of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded that I wish you’d touched on more. It’s about the function that NGOs internationally and non-profits domestically serve, which is twofold. Within the globalized capitalist hellscape in which we find ourselves, lack of access to basic services and disparity of resources leads to a discontent populace putting pressure on social systems. This is largely a result of neoliberal policies cutting or privatizing social services within “developed” states and “creating new markets” elsewhere by destabilizing economies that tend towards socialism. Non-profits fill in the gaps in meeting needs caused by lacking healthcare education and other systems. And in order for capitalism to maintain itself, grassroots movements towards liberation are subsumed into the nonprofit industrial complex, which is funded in large part by corporate sponsored foundations who can control what is acceptable for humanitarian organizations to do in order to receive grants and non-profit status. Thus, any sort of grassroots or revolutionary social movements either become toothless and focused on just fighting for reform, trying to fix things in ways that do not hinder capital and are beholden to it, or if those movements try to maintain independence they get slapped with the terrorist label. NGOs become the carrot of neocolonialism, working in concert with the stick that is the global US military presence, to maintain imperial hegemony. Similarly non-profits in the US or other capitalist states are the carrot while the police and the prison systems are the stick. Again, maybe I just need to go back and rewatch your other videos, but this to me is the core of why NGOs are pretty evil, and why no matter their arguments that they’re helping people, NGOs are just fixing problems (or just performing theater of fixing problems as with voluntourism) caused by imperialism.
Not me scoping out CJ's shelf for good books
I did Voluntourism in Ecuador, which i figured after a bit was kinda all fucked by doing it when i was 20, it's kinda f'd from the beginning.
1. you pay money to do the volunteering, yes some of it pays for your stay, food, and support the locals, but you have no real idea how much of it goes to the company itself.
2. we spent two weeks technically in townBUT ACTUALLY it was only one week, half of us went to explore the amazon, and half of us too work in the local village, then flip around the second town. Then it was the whole week it was for only 4 days, only working 10 - 2 at best, as we pushed them to do longer hours so we could do more work.
so the work we did was split into two, teach English at school and dig whole/help build toilets. the thing is nearly none of us are teachers so was pointless for a lot of us who were bad at teaching kids learning English. The building toilets weren't pointless about another mess, safety was minimal, so many people wore no covered shoes while swinging big digging tools, nearly hitting themselves or others, they would fill in the holes if it was wrong making a lot work pointless and any detail work like a brick was just done by the actual workers, we even had brickies in our team who could do that then teachers.
In the end, they could have used half the money we had spent on the trip and pay actually local workers to do what we did better and quicker.
3. Our Guides/ supervisors: very nice people but who i thought were like trained people were just backpackers, people who traveled a lot and knew the language better but not much else. They fucked up a few times, like the time the guy was passing water bottles around and accidentally gave a bottle full of METHO, which we were using to clean our paint brushes, to a lady who'd drunk a bit up and then had to be driven too local hospital to get her stomach pumped, which was dodgy as hell in a backwater hospital where they used cut up Gatorade bootles as drip feed. Poor safety conditions, poor equipment, and a lot of other people got sick or injured that could have been avoided if we had actually trained managers.
4. It did very much have that "make white people feel good helping the poor brown people" as we gave them presents, which was nice but also very much designed for us to feel good, did alot painting murals for no reason except to keep us busy and like point 2, really did shoddy work that could have easily done better by paying actually local workers. Further, it really gave ego boost to some wankers in the group, after found out a worker's wife was sick, he said we should put money together for him so the whole tribe could see more money then ever did before.
like i truly memorable experience, met alot of wonderful people and made me the progressive i am today but not the way i think they planned
Hello, I am a student writing a paper based on this topic and I would love to chat with you about your experience. I understand if you are unable to. Thank you!
45:24 translation: unlike other volunteer groups that put the emphasis on service, WE embraces the tourism aspect of the whole thing.
editing decision of the week goes to cold opening on stock footage of a handshake that is allowed to play just long enough to become uncomfortable.
So nice of them to agree to a collab
I laughed at the whole semantics about voluntourism vs culturally immersive travel, and it was absolutely a great choice to then cut to people that actually went on the trips explaining that, yes, they were actually sold a voluntourism trip.
I was part of a youth group at a wealthy white church in suburban Illinois, and every summer we went to “workcamp” where we’d travel to another region in the US to do construction work by day for local homes. We went to a Lakota reservation in South dakota and several super immiserated rural white areas in the south.
This was like 10+ years ago, and I found a reflection I wrote in the church bulletin a few months ago. I felt deep shame to read myself saying “the inspiring thing about these people… is how happy they were even though they have so little.”
Something I don’t see named enough: obviously neoliberalism and neocolonialism and capitalism are designed to crush and humiliate working class people, but there is also a moral injury done to the people who “benefit” from these “experiences.” It warps your soul to have an extractive relationship with another person like that. To treat them as subhuman in that way. I heard it in the shame in the voices of the people in this video.
Scott is like 😮💨 going on these trips 🤓 helps 😛 the volun-tourists! 😊 Bro it fills them with chilling lifelong shame if they wake up, or it entrenches their white supremacy soul wound if they don’t.
Wow this is really on point and thank you for stating things so nimbly.
Creating this series has to have been such a truly WILD journey
Appreciate everything you put into it, as a displaced Canadian I’ve missed some the insanity over the years
At the end of the day, poisoning someone and then offering them the antidote, even if it's for free, is a worse thing to do than just not poisoning them in the first place.
I love how you put "as late as" in front of 4AM, while someone who works out before going to office would def put "As early as". I'm with you on this one for sure.
fun fact: in many countries people don't really use surnames even in formal situations. in my country people probably would look at you very weirdly if you called someone mr [surname] instead of mr [first name]. we only find out people's last names on bureaucratic situations that require full names like paperwork, reservations or facebook profiles
Disappointed that there were no voices from the communities these charities are supposed to be supporting; particularly damning that We didn't feel the need to produce anyone who felt they'd benifited, even though this would presumably be pretty easy for them.
I absolutely tried to find people who’d received aid from WE or any similar charity and wasn’t able to find anyone. It’s definitely possible that I wasn’t looking in the right places or could have found people eventually but these videos have deadlines.
I just realized that they are called the Ottawa senators, cuz thats where the Canadian senate meets, it took him saying "the political elites in Ottawa" for me to make that connection
The individualist approach is an interesting point. It's very neoliberal to say that outcomes are best achieved through individual action rather than collective organisations.