I finished reading Sharon Bala's new novel, Good Guys this week. It's about the rise and fall of a fictional global aid charity based out of Toronto called Children of the World; but more than that, it's about what it means to do charity under capitalism. The story is very familiar—in that it feels pulled right out of real life. And as someone who works in the charitable sector, I found it stirring a lot of unsettling questions within me.

At the core of novel is the question, can we do good in a broken system? And I appreciate that Bala seems to not be trying to offer any clean answers to that question. She explores it from several different angles, people with the best intentions coming to the realization that their efforts may just be making things worse. As one of the characters in the novel, a journalist and writer asks, "It feels like the harder I try to do the right thing, the more I fail. Is it even possible to do good when the system is rigged for so much bad?"

In an interview with Mattea Roach on the CBC Bookends podcast, Bala was asked directly whether or not she thinks its possible to do this sort of work ethically and her answer really stuck out to me:

“I think it is, but I also think it's really easy to unintentionally do harm. And this is something that I also grapple with. I mean, I think one thing is just to actually not assume that you know what's best for other people, but to listen to what they say they need.”

There's an interesting thread around religion in this book and a lot of it is extremely cynical. The founder of the charity is a former Christian rock star and there are other characters with Christianity in their past. However, one thing that I noted was that one of the few characters who doesn't seem to be implicated in Bala's critique is a missionary priest. He's just working in the country running a simple church, trying to care for the people as best as he can. In fact, when the journalist character (who feels like a bit of an avatar for Bala herself) asks the question about whether or not its possible to do good, she asks it to this priest. Who responds, "no, but we have to try." And then when she jokes about what Jesus would do in this situation, he answers, "overturn the tables."

Rick Tobias once told me that a lot of big philanthropy gifts would often come with a reluctance or a policy around giving to faith-based organizations. He said that he would tell them that this is mistake, ignoring that spirituality is often a real part of life for people living in poverty. You're not listening if you're dismissing their faith as naive or somehow less important than other needs. And while that's not meant to exonerate the harm that many faith-based orgs have done (and still do), it is to say that it can be equally presumptuous to claim that religion has no place in meeting the needs of people experiencing poverty.

This is where I appreciate Bala's no easy answers approach and her focus that the only real way out of this mess is untangling it all from capitalism's deep hooks.