what is the hamster wheel?

Working in China with a large international charity

when I first learnt about the hamster wheel

I was a 29 year old, double degree graduate and had just landed what I thought was my dream job in China, working with a large international charity. In meetings with the government, I was referred to as “Professor” and was often introduced as, “One of the finest physiotherapists in the world, under the age of 30.” The reality was that while studying at university, I rarely reached higher than a credit, and that the major achievement of my actual two-year physiotherapy career was the slow recognition that I wasn’t a very good physiotherapist.

Unfortunately my dream job was my first exposure to the hamster wheel of international charity. So what’s the hamster wheel all about?

Think of charities stuck in a loop - seeking funds, spending them, and justifying the need for more. It's a cycle that never ends. This is what I refer to as the "hamster wheel of charity work."

Sadly, they often lose sight of the actual impact they create while trying to keep the organisation afloat.

Shifting from social movements to funded non-profits has its downsides. In American First Nations activist Madonna Thunder Hawk’s essay titled ‘Native organizing before the non-profit industrial complex’ — one of a series of essays in the wonderful book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded — she describes the shift from a social movement to a funded non-profit.

“Once you get too structured, your whole scope changes from activism to maintaining an organization and getting paid, [and] people start seeing organizing as a career rather than as an involvement in a social movement that requires sacrifice.”

My experience in China was far from glamorous. Dealing with the government and managing a long-term project came with its own set of difficulties. Plans hardly ever go as expected, making long-term predictions a challenging task.

As worryingly, to justify more funding, I was encouraged to overinflate our achievements on my evaluation report. Part of my role was to count the number of ramps that had been built within schools by local partners so that children with disabilities could access education.

Even if the actual number was below par, what difference would it make for me to round up by eight or nine here and there? No one would know the difference and, more importantly, the charity had more work to be done. By overestimating our current impact, we could justify more funding to finish the job.

But what if the job was an abject failure? What if we weren’t really welcome? Maybe the best solution would be to go home and forget about the whole thing.

Getting off the hamster wheel takes a level of integrity and self-sacrifice to achieve the outcomes needed. You have to take your ego and your charity’s future out of it. It has to be about something bigger than yourself.

That’s what Redundant Charities too. They step off the hamster wheel and create a world where impact and compassion reign supreme.

So how do Redundant Charities achieve this? I interviewed a number of charities around the world making this change, and you can find out via pre-ordering your copy here (if you live in Australia), or downloading a free sample prior to the international release here.

Together, we can redefine what success looks like in the charity sector.