Charlie McConnell

Charlie says:

I’m one of those people for whom the current book I am reading is the one that has most influence. This is certainly the case with Bill Clinton’s recently published Giving - How each of us can change the world. This is an inspiring book, highly readable and the one to give to your family this Christmas to explain what you do. Drawing primarily on his experiences with the Clinton Foundation it gives his take on the impact of new philanthropists, established foundations, non-governmental organisations and social activists across the world. Bill Clinton demonstrates that there is life after ‘big P’ politics, and a highly influential one at that. Let’s hope that he is a role model for other recently retired leaders closer to home. As an interventionist Third Way Democrat he also rightly reminds us of the key role that governments must play and of the limits of charity and the role that philanthropists can have. I especially liked his call for foundations and philanthropists to harness wider business strategies for the public good. Currently barely 5% of the potential capacity of most endowed foundations is invested in programmes for public benefit, with the remaining 95% invested in commercial for-profit businesses that have little to do with the philanthropic mission of the founder. This reflects the recent interest here in the UK in mission-connected investment.

When I left school in 1968, few of my generation – the baby boomers – aspired to a career in business or the military, the traditional routes to employment taken by the men in my family. I chose to spend most of the past 35 years of my career in adult education and community development.  It was a book cover, rather than the book itself, that inspired this career choice. Only One Earth - The care and maintenance of a small planet was a report of the first United Nations conference on the global environment. What hit me in one of those paradigm-changing moments was the cover photograph of the earth taken from space - the lonely blue planet in all its fragility and oneness.

I wanted to get involved in politics and grass roots community action. In my view, whilst capitalism had contributed towards the creation of the affluent society from which I’d gained, unregulated it was just too exploitative of the planet and the poor. I dabbled in student activism but I found the far left engaged in little more than naïve gestures and unfathomable Marxist rhetoric. I read Marx – we all did, or pretended to – and I still feel that a structural analysis of power makes sense. But I was hungry for other political insights. 

It was at this time that I came across Karl Popper’s book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, in which he critiques the totalitarianism of both the left and the right. Popper was an Austrian Jew (later an agnostic) who escaped to New Zealand before World War Two. He eventually settled in the UK, working at the London School of Economics, where one of his students was George Soros. After becoming a multibillionaire philanthropist, Soros established the Open Society Institute to advance the Popperian defence of the open society against authoritarianism and dogma, and his foundations played a vital role in building up civil society in central and eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War.

My final choice is the writings of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian social activist and adult educator. Born in 1921 to middle class parents in Recife, he became familiar with poverty and hunger during the 1930s’ depression. These experiences shaped his concerns for the poor and his subsequent inspirational adult literacy work. In 1964 a military coup put an end to this work; Freire was imprisoned and later went into exile in Chile. In 1968 he published his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire was a Christian Socialist who embraced liberation theology and became a special education adviser to the World Council of Churches. His philosophy of education stands alongside Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, as one of the basic primers for social activists and community educators across the developed and developing worlds. Freire's writings had a profound impact on Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa.

Essentially, Freire wants us to think of development work as a dialogue between the development worker and the community, learning and working together to identify problems and solutions. In other words, we need to give the poor a voice. From the 1970s Freire’s approach influenced the community education and development education fields in the UK: the professional training standards body for these occupations, of which I was its first Chair, was called Paulo in his honour.