I love stories like this one. It reminds me of my college years when I partook in a non-profit that was started by my aunt / uncle where we fed the homeless. I learned then that anyone can just step in and do something right in society, you don't have to waste hours, days, months, and years waiting for daddy government to do it.
These stories about acts of kindness like a recent one where a senior citizen was given a speeding ticket while taking his adult handicapped son to the doctor are really just stories about how the society in which they take is broken. If the system wasn't broken then we wouldn't need strangers to pay off student lunch debt and the senior citizen father would have someone to take his son to the doctor.
When Breaking Bad was on there was a comic strip about how in any other developed country Walter White would have went to the doctor, gotten the cancer treated, and went on with his life.
> When Breaking Bad was on there was a comic strip about how in any other developed country Walter White would have went to the doctor, gotten the cancer treated, and went on with his life.
As the saying goes, "Healthcare is such a complex problem that only 32 of the 33 developed countries in the world have solved it."
I don't get where the "33" number comes from and don't inherently agree, but the point? Yes. As someone who is or has been a citizen of the UK, EU, Australia and the US.
The scale at which governments can organise, and (despite much protestation to the opposite) the efficiency with which it can do so, really is unmatched.
Even the word's wealthiest individuals and families (save a few which function as states, e.g., the House of Saud, or some royal families) pale next to the level at which large advanced national governments can operate. The Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organisations in the world, is "rattled" by the present US administrations threat to its mission:
The NGO / non-profit space does do a great deal of good work, and as it's decentralised it's difficult to disable all of it all at once. Though curtailments of major benefactors, ironically national governments in the present moment, or should I more accurately specify one specific government, can wreak havok at international scale.
But NGOs are inefficient, often work at cross-purposes, suffer from corruption, and often have staggering administrative and overhead ratios, with only a minority of raised funds reaching active operations. The Tiny Spark podcast has been discontinued but has an excellent back-catalogue detailing many of the problems with philanthropic charities and welfare projects:
So, yes, you can strike out on your own, and I'd really hate to discourage anyone from doing so. But you can do far more if you link up with others. And governance is really the technical art of linking up with others.
When you target local issues, and don't wait for the behemoth to get to it, I think you'll agree, that you can be drastically more effective. Now if we could get people to do this at scale as discrete orgs, maybe that would prevent some of the churn and issues we see when orgs get too big.
