Perhaps charities have their saints, but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the sinners

‘I’m not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner that keeps on trying,” Nelson Mandela told Rice University in 1999, a timely reminder that much of the good in our world is not the product of untainted virtue but of imperfect people who sometimes have very mixed motivations.

In the wake of revelations about sexual abuse at Oxfam, there has been public shock that what we know to have occurred in other walks of life could have been taking place in organisations with such noble aims as Oxfam.

This reveals a fair bit of naivety about the charity sector. In the past, charity would have been defined by philanthropy and voluntary service; the very word charity conjures up the great Victorian philanthropists, such as John Cadbury and Joseph Rowntree. Today, there is huge diversity in the charity sector, which spans tiny community organisations staffed by volunteers right through to multimillion pound service providers delivering huge government contracts.

But it’s possible to exaggerate the differences between charity then and charity now. Charity has always – to a greater or a lesser extent, depending on who’s involved – been partly self-serving. Yes, Cadbury and Rowntree were good men driven by their Quaker faith. But in setting up decent housing and a proper safety net for the communities in which they built their factories, they also stood to benefit from a healthy, loyal and committed workforce.

There are plenty of good motivations in today’s charity sector and a lot of thankless but vital work that goes unrecognised. But many people also derive selfish benefits from their involvement. For wealthy philanthropists, there are the glitzy dinners and private views, the hospital wings to name, the showing off about their latest donation.

Charity employees get the opportunity of careers that give them the chance to make a difference and management jobs at mid- to large-size charities pay very decently. Charismatic founder chief executives can find themselves showered with accolades that lead to government advisory positions or talking-head gigs – just look at the heights scaled by the now fallen Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company. And there’s always the warm glow of knowing that you have helped make a difference.

We live in a world where Mother Teresas are the exception and that’s OK. It starts to get troubling when we’re dishonest about those selfish motives, when we start to believe the myth of our own sainthood. It’s not uncommon to develop a holier-than-thou complex simply because one works for or donates to a charity.

Oxfam shows us how dangerous that can be when it goes unchecked and combines with another unappealing aspect of charity work – its inherent power asymmetries.

Charity should always be about empowering people who find themselves held back, of increasing their agency. But sometimes it results in a traditional “benefactor-beneficiary” relationship: people with money and power doing things to people who are denied the opportunity to shape what’s being done to them and who are expected to be grateful.

People who work for charities have to work hard to hold themselves to account. Lapsing into the myth of sainthood profoundly undermines that. Yes, some of the worst abuse we see in the charity sector might be as a result of terrible people being attracted to work for charities in crisis situations such as Haiti or care homes in Somerset because they know the opportunities to exploit will be rife. It’s also about the failure of management to hold these people accountable and the extent to which working for these charities for years, or even decades – with the amount of power it confers over people’s lives – can itself be corrupting.

‘It is too easy to imagine that we are better than those who do the work we would be too scared to do,” the academic Mary Beard wrote last weekend on Oxfam. I disagree that those of us who don’t work in international aid are wrong to rush to moral judgment on those who do. Yes, aid work can involve working in difficult and risky circumstances, but I suspect what’s far more corrupting for senior staff such as Roland van Hauwermeiren, the former Oxfam country director who allegedly entertained prostitutes at his hilltop villa in an exclusive part of Port-au-Prince, is for years on end being treated like a powerful demigod and living a life of relative luxury in some of the poorest parts of the world. Aid workers must be alert to the tainting impact of the desperate inequalities between themselves and those around them.

The myth of sainthood gives rise to all sorts of other problems: philanthropists making unreasonable and irresponsible demands of the charities they fund; trustees who treat serving on charity boards as a worthy hobby when they are making decisions that profoundly affect people’s lives.

We have to be more honest that what we give to charity, be it time or money, often comes at relatively small cost, and significant benefit, to ourselves. And we should constantly remind ourselves that the fact we find ourselves in the privileged position of being able to give, rather than receive, is the result of a huge amount of luck.