“We Have to Break in Our New Celebrities Slowly”

I’ve always been curious about the relationship between
celebrities and the causes they represent: who initiates it, how
the celeb gets briefed, and so on. If you’ve wondered about the
same thing, the London Telegraph‘s recent
report on actress/singer Elizabeth McGovern’s trip to Sierra
Leone with the California-based NGO World Vision will be
illuminating. Or maybe her story is entirely atypical and doesn’t
illuminate much at all. Either way, it’s an entertaining read:

[P]erhaps because it is a profoundly
Christian organisation — [Sarah] Wilson describes it as “more
Christian than Christian Aid” — [World Vision] is big in the
United States, but has a relatively small presence in our more
sceptical isles, where we are wary of anything that looks like
proselytising (a spokesman confirmed that it sometimes uses charity
funds to set up Christian education courses for those of other
faiths).

I ask McGovern why, as a non-Christian, she chose to support World
Vision rather than one of the many secular, apolitical charities,
such as Unicef. Her answer is unexpected: she had no idea that it
was a faith-based organisation. As it turned out, charity
representatives failed to make their Christianity clear to her.
This, they say, was an “oversight”; they had assumed that McGovern
would take a look at the World Vision website (their logo is a
shining cross).

“I was stupid not to realise it,” she tells me later. “I think the
people at World Vision assumed it would be obvious.” McGovern has
not withdrawn from World Vision, as “on balance, it is an
organisation that does a lot of good for many people.” In addition,
World Vision has paid her band £28,000 to fund the recording of
their latest album and a UK tour, in return for which they have
agreed to promote the charity. Without this money, McGovern says,
her band would “never survive”.

I also enjoyed this impromptu political commentary:

“I get the impression that in Africa people have sex
far more freely than we do back home,” reflects McGovern. “You see
certain cultures where there’s just endemic cruelty to women. I
wonder if World Vision would take on the problem of women wearing
the burka? And that clitoris thing is awful.”

On a more substantial level, the article includes some
thoughtful commentary on the relationship between child
sponsorship, charity, and PR. When McGovern meets Jestina, the
African girl her donations have been sponsoring, the author notes
that “the money does not go to Jestina or her family, but is used
for various projects in the area. The little girl is being used as
the human face of her community, and McGovern is the human face of
ours; it is a feedback loop of public relations.” He doesn’t
declare this as a debunker — he goes on to say that those projects
do good for the community, and thus presumably for Jestina — but
to take a clearer look at what exactly the transaction we’re
witnessing actually means.

Read the rest of the Telegraph story here.