by Chloe Y
On Saturday morning I took a walk through a bush reserve near my home. I take this walk 3 or 4 times a week. There are 2 benches half way up the walk, which runs up the side of a small mountain alongside the river. In order to give myself time to reflect, and just for something different, I sat down on one of those benches for quite some time, absorbing the nature around me.
At first, it seemed a little bit strange, and quite lonely. But after a while I was able to focus in on certain features in the landscape and calmly observe nature. I heard animals calling to each other, maybe calling to their friends, or maybe telling other animals to back off out of their homes. I heard animals scrapping through twigs and fallen branches in the undergrowth, perhaps building themselves a new home.
I saw nature getting along and co-operating. Fallen trees making pathways for birds and animals, ladders to help them find food. I saw new growth revitalising tired old trees and shrubs. I also watched as nature conflicted with itself. Birds scratching at the bush floor, disturbing insects in their private homes. The river dragging impatiently against the debris of logs and branches caught up in its current.
Most importantly, I saw nature living. Surviving. Animals, trees, water - just doing what they needed to to survive. And I think that survivng and getting on with it is something we could learn from nature. Appreciate the simple things, remember why it's all here - for us to enjoy.
That's what I learned on my date with nature.
Monday 6 May 2013
Review and Interview – Interactions between Media, Spirituality and Giving
Review and Interview – Interactions between Media,
Spirituality and Giving
A Case Study – Operation Smile
By Chloe Y
As the power of spin, the media
and, most strikingly, social media increases, how do not for profit
organisations harness this rising tide? I interviewed Kirby Pearce, Marketing
and PR co-ordinator for Operation Smile in Brisbane about the interaction between
social media and charitable giving, spirituality, religion and giving and how
these relationships play out in cyber space. In the case of Operation Smile,
while social media plays an increasingly crucial role in gaining support and
patronage, the motivation of explicit religious traditions among volunteers and
donors seems irrelevant, and a common spirituality of giving is the driving
force behind patrons. Speaking to Kirby at Operation Smile’s recent fundraising
event at QPAC, a combined initiative with the Queensland Ballet, it was evident
that Operation Smile have a strong mission volunteer, corporate and civilian
donor base. As marketing and PR co-ordinator, Kirby offered valuable insight
into the role social media plays in not for profit organisations and the
interplay between religion, spirituality and giving.
Operation Smile is a not for profit
organisation with chapters worldwide, that serves to offer free surgical and
medical treatment to underprivileged children with facial deformities. Mission
groups of qualified Australian surgeons and nurses travel to developing
countries for a two week period, performing up to 150 surgeries. As Kirby
suggested, the need for these children to have facial deformities treated is
twofold; “there is potentially a lot of health problems that can result from
facial deformity – children can have difficulty breathing and eating.
Culturally and socially, a lot of communities treat facially deformed children
as outcasts and ostracize them”. To perform these missions, Operation Smile not
only relies on skilled surgeons and nurses volunteering, but also on donations
to fund the missions, facilities, medication and equipment. To gather this
support, Operation Smile utilises its online presence.
Globally, social media is playing a
growing role in delivering social information to users. Facebook has more than
half a billion users worldwide (Long, 2012). Social media is successful
as a media and public relations tool because it is a two way interaction
between producer and consumer (Long, 2012). Using social media also
means that social information, that is, information for which meaning is
socially constructed can be delivered to and processed by users at a faster
rate, through a variety of audio visual mediums (Guo, 2012). As Kirby pointed out, social media enables
Operation Smile to reach a much wider audience; “facebook is also quick. It
allows us [Operation Smile] to reach a lot more people in a shorter time than
traditional marketing tools and communication methods”. Kirby also alluded to a
shared motivation for their social media respondents; “social media is useful
tool inasmuch as ‘friends’ tend to have the same interests”. However, the
benefits of social media for Operation Smile are somewhat limited, being that
they do not use it for direct fundraising. A recent Probono Australia survey
showed that this was also the case for approximately 40% of Australian charities with a social media platform.
During the interview, Kirby
suggested that the vast majority of Operation Smile’s social media audience are
active participants in the charity, as donors or volunteers. In assessing the
relationship between participation in charitable organisations and religion, it
can be seen that Operation Smile’s donor base is not fitting with scholarly
theories and statistics on the topic. Arthur Brooks suggests that research
collected in in 2000 during a survey on “civic behaviour” found those who
practiced religion were 25% more likely to give than those who rarely practiced
or had no religion (Brooks, 2003). However, Operation Smile’s
participants “are definitely not outwardly religious. As an organisation we are
not explicitly religiously focussed. Most of our volunteers do so because they
feel it is time to ‘give back’……There is certainly a common sense that helping
the underprivileged is the ‘right’ thing to do” (Kirby Pearce, interviewee,
2013). Scholarly work also suggests that a common spirituality of
humanitarianism and a social justice conscious drive charity work in twenty
first century society.
Hoover and Emerich assert that the
trend for people to make meaning in their lives has led to a convergence of
media and spirituality (Hoover and Emerich, 2010). In addition to this, it is
suggested that new forms of media provide liberation from traditional
institutions and authorities, including religious ones (Hoover and Emerich, 2010). Increasingly, there is a trend
to define spirituality against religion, “the word spirituality has gained new
purchase, becoming reimagined as the distillation of religion, the pure form
left after the removal or religion’s dogma, infrastructure, authority and
ritual(Hoover and Emerich, 2010).” To this end, Clarke
suggests that charitable work fuels spiritual growth and reduces materialism
and self-obsession (Clarke, 2009). This was an idea the
interviewee echoed “Volunteers that go on mission definitely take quite a
journey, and not only in a literal sense. Volunteers are exposed to very
different environments to what they come from, and I think it has a deep impact
on them.” Charity work for volunteers at Operation Smile, and for an increasing
number of people, who define themselves as spiritual as opposed to religious,
is centred on an understanding of social justice.
The spirituality many people
associate themselves with in the twenty first century has a deeper focus on
social justice and environmental activism than religious doctrines (Hoover and Emerich, 2010). This essence of spirituality
is realised and acted upon through the media, and more specifically social
media, whereby people realise a need for social change through information
delivered by social media. As Kirby suggested, “a lot of our volunteers will
comment that they were inspired by the before and after photos we have up on
our website and Facebook. That seems to really affect people, seeing that there
is a change they could be helping to make. That they could really change
someone’s life.” Indeed, Stein and Paras’ theories on secular humanitarian aid
support this idea. It is suggested that while not religious, secular charities
hold humanitarianism and social justice as sanctified, and thus engender their
own spiritual sense (Stein and Paras, 2012). Thus, the relationship
between charity and religious beliefs seems irrelevant, and many people define
themselves spiritually, using this spirituality as the driving force behind
their charitable participation.
Social media plays a crucial role
in delivering information with a social meaning to users. This is particularly
important for not for profit organisations such as Operation Smile, a
non-religiously aligned not for profit organisation, whose volunteers
participate based on a deep rooted sense of helping others less fortunate than
themselves. The motivation for Operation Smile’s volunteers is not religious,
and many have a common spirituality based in social just and humanitarianism.
Bibliography
CLARKE, S. M. 2009. When does Charity Work become Spiritual Practice? [Online].
Available: http://www.articlesbase.com/spirituality-articles/when-does-charity-work-becomes-spiritual-practice-857431.html [Accessed 11 April 2013.
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