Giving Compass' Take:

· Writing for Medium, Aline Müller provides notes on her experience as a former employee at UNICEF and shares the key takeaways from what she learned. Müller focuses on rethinking the current way individuals try to 'help' others and addresses major distortions in society.

· How does Müller show that the current idea of "helping the world" is full of distortions? How is Müller rethinking being a "helper?" How can philanthropists and nonprofits use these notes to better serve in their endeavors? 

· Here's more on helping the world and how small acts can make a global impact. 

As many people out there, I was once sick and tired of working for a commercial company, not feeling my job had much of a good impact in the world. So three years ago I left the startup I worked for and joined UNICEF Sweden. I wanted to make a difference, make the world a better place. I left UNICEF almost a year ago to take a year off and delve deeper in the realms of my personal existential questions, and here are my preliminary conclusions when it comes to helping the world be a better place. Beware that despite my parallels to my experience with NGOs, I am thinking here mostly of day to day help, and not about help in emergency situations where not even drinkable water and food are to be found.

So…. help what? To reduce child marriage, child pregnancy, sexual violence? To stop wars? To connect people to their inner selves? To improve the integration of immigrants? It gives me shivers every time I hear someone say they want to “help the world be a better place”. It’s not only that what we want to help has to be clear in order to be achievable, as much as that sentence itself shows much negative ego as if one was in a pedestal helping those below. As if all someone else was on their knees waiting for our help. “All these children need is to go to school, have medical support..” The help always comes as that which we know and have to offer. But who says that where we are is the best place for someone else to be? That the reality in which we live is so good we need to give a piece of it to someone else? When we build schools to children in unfavored parts of the world, we are building the same type of schools we have in our developed countries: places that work to create future market agents, spreading knowledge that will allow children to take jobs and continue the current market economy we have. I don’t know about you but I am not exactly happy with the state of our market economy, and I don’t wish to keep spreading it. I am also not saying that this is not better than what someone else has -I am just removing myself from the role of a know-it-all. There are many possible futures out there, let people find their own, but if possible give them what they need to build it (hopefully they will make it better than the reality we have achieved so we can copy them after). Which leads me to the second point.

Read the full article about how to help the world by Aline Müller at Medium.