Costello discusses nonprofits

Emmy-nominated journalist Amy Costello, host and senior producer of the podcast “Tiny Spark,” shared her thoughts on reporting and the nonprofit sector with Hutton Honors students Wednesday morning.

“One thing I see a lot of in the nonprofit world is ego,” Costello said. “It’s cloaked under the notion of doing good, but it’s really all about them. Some people will be like, ‘I’m a surgeon at NYU. I can do surgery in post-quake Haiti,’ when in fact you can’t, and you shouldn’t without proper training.”

Costello created her podcast in an effort to check that ego. According to the podcast’s website, its mission is to “investigate the business of doing good.” To accomplish that mission, Costello researches and asks critical questions about well-known nonprofits to determine their effectiveness.

Costello was inspired to start the podcast after reporting for Public Radio International about a service initiative called PlayPumps. The idea was to install energy-generating merry-go-rounds in African communities with limited access to water. Children would theoretically play on the machines, which would power water pumps so the community would have easier access to clean water.

When Costello first learned about the program, she wrote a glowing report that helped influence United States officials to make a $16.4 million government grant to PlayPumps International. When Costello followed up in the African communities three years later, she was dismayed at what she saw.

“Basically everything that could’ve gone wrong with PlayPump had gone wrong,” she said.
Costello found that many of the pumps had broken and they were too complex for local maintenance. Even the working pumps were not running as planned.

When children did not spend enough time “playing” throughout the day, the women in the communities had to sit on the merry-go-rounds to get enough water, an experience which Costello said the women found humiliating.

“It was a real learning experience for me about how complicated it is to do good,” Costello said. “Although it’s really difficult to ask the hard questions to well-intentioned people, I think it’s very important that we do it.”

One of Costello’s most well-known projects is her critical investigation of the nonprofit TOMS Shoes. She said she thinks the organization, along with all nonprofits, would be more beneficial if its founder had taken into account the opinions of the local people he intended to help.

“Not consulting with the local population can be a major problem,” Costello said. “If the founder of TOMS Shoes had asked them about things to get or what they need, I doubt shoes would even be on their top-10 list.”

Costello talked about her skepticism that consumer dollars can be used to create positive change. In her experience, the one-for-one model — you buy something here, a poor person gets the same thing there — has not been as effective as more holistic on-the-ground projects.

“I think we want doing good to be easy like, ‘I can buy a pair of shoes and help somebody,’” Costello said. “It might be better if you buy a pair of shoes that costs half as much as TOMS and then use the rest of the money for an organization that’s putting in the work on the ground to do a lot of good.”

Costello said she receives some negative feedback for criticizing people and organizations typically seen in a positive light. She said the possibility of offending people is not high on her list of concerns.

“I don’t care what the founder of TOMS Shoes thinks of me,” she said. “I care about the vulnerable children he’s claiming to help.”

Costello is also skeptical about short-term volunteerism, like week-long service trips.

She said she believes the money people spend on flying to impoverished areas and paying for a place to stay, translators and coordinators could be used in a better way.

She said it might be more beneficial to volunteer in your own community and send the money you would have spent on traveling to a nonprofit working in another county.

“Many of these international issues are also present in our own communities,” Costello said. “You could take the money, donate it to an organization to accomplish the same results and then serve in your own community to relieve that desire to help in person.”