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📚Philliteracy📚

24 Feb, 5 tweets, 3 min read

If you're anything like me, this detail on the breakdown of the "admin costs" of delivering the disaster relief fund for victims of the 1666 Great Fire of London will be like absolute catnip.

These admin costs don't appear to have been very high as percentage of the overall expenditure, but I do particularly love the fact that £114.76 was spent on lobbying.

For those who liked this Great Fire of London relief fund detail, the kicker is that low admin costs didn't make it better - many potentially deserving recipients were unable to access funds due to illiteracy or inability to travel to the right places:

Also, those of higher social status with existing connections tended to receive higher grants.

AND: Pace of distribution was far slower than collection, so fund struggled to meet immediate need.

CAN'T...HANDLE... SHEER... WEIGHT...OF...APPARENT... MODERN... RELEVANCE...

FYI the reference for all is this is a great 2011 paper by Jacob Field on "Charitable Giving and its Distribution to Londoners after the Great Fire, 1666-1676":

jstor.org/stable/4461456…

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📚Philliteracy📚

@Philliteracy

26 Feb

Here we go with Part 2 of our thread on the history of disaster relief funds.

This time looking at some of the key themes highlighted by the way funds were distributed.

The first common theme is complaints about the pace of distribution being too slow in relation to the pace of collecting money in the first place & in relation to immediate need.

E.g. After the Great Fire of London, 1666:

The same was true of colliery disaster funds in the C19th, which often attracted criticism for being ponderous in getting money to those affected by the disasters.

Read 23 tweets

📚Philliteracy📚

@Philliteracy

26 Feb

I’ve been reading a bunch of absolutely fascinating stuff about the history of disaster relief funds lately, so I thought I’d share some of what I have learned, in a THREAD.

Or, in fact, two THREADS.

As I think even by my standards this would be overly long to do in one....

If you like tales of
DONOR MOTIVATIONS!
POWER DYNAMICS!
MODERN RELEVANCE!
CHARITY HISTORY!

Then strap in…

(And if you don’t, TBH you should consider unfollowing me).

So let’s start with the collection side of things. I.e. getting the money in.

First thing to say is that setting up charitable funds in response to specific disasters is a major feature of the history of charity (and has arguably played a key role in shaping its development).

Read 23 tweets

📚Philliteracy📚

@Philliteracy

29 Jan 20

So, last night I finished the book that I have been clogging up all your twitter feeds with snippets from👇

I'll offer some more thoughts on the book as a whole in due course (spoiler alert: I frickin' loved it), but here's one last thread of great material in the meantime. 1/

Firstly, this absolutely killer skewering of 'philanthro-jargon', which resonates just as much in 2020 as in 1974 IMHO.

"In our world, you have to leverage even to get out of bed in the morning".

Bloody genius. 2/

But it's not just the funders who get ripped: he also points out that grant-seekers are often not exactly blameless in this equation... 3/

Read 13 tweets

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