Charity Without Impact is Dead

By John Molineux, January 30, 2025 Ultimately all charitable work stems from Jesus's "golden rule," to "do unto others as we would have others do for us."  If we were in need, we'd want to be helped, so we should help those in need. But we wouldn't care about intentions or even the fact that someone tried--what we’d care about was that it actually helped.  In fact, the difference between well-intentioned but ineffectual help and actual successful help is--for the person in need of it--precisely the difference between help and no help. 

In Matthew 7 and Luke 6, the same two chapters where Jesus states "the Golden Rule," Jesus also teaches, "by their fruit you will recognize them."  If charity were a tree, its fruit would be impact. Like a tree without fruit, charity without impact is dead. 

Despite these things, it is fairly rare for charitable organizations to define and measure their impact.  This is understandable to a certain point--and even beautiful.  Organizations are started when compassionate people see needs and begin meeting them, and certainly no one needs to feel bad about helping people without giving much thought to defining and measuring impact.  But the organization comes to exist in order to organize the efforts to help--presumably in order to scale it.  We leave out the main thing if that “organizing” doesn't include spelling out and keeping track of the help you are aiming to give. 

If the old saying is true that "what gets measured gets done," organizations that don't define and measure impact likely aren't having too much of it.  Such an organization is like a business that doesn’t bother to count how much money it makes--it may still make money for a while, but not nearly as much as it would if it could measure the return on each of its investments.  Measuring impact is also how you maximize it--investing more in the things that have greater and less in the things that have lesser impact. 

Impactless charity may be worse than merely oxymoronic and wasteful--it may be harmful.   Rick Warren says this: "Having traveled the globe for thirty years and trained leaders in 164 countries, I've witnessed firsthand that almost every government and NGO poverty program is actually harmful to the poor, hurting them in the long run rather than helping them (1)(emphasis mine).   Having spent two decades living and leading an organization from the field, I have witnessed how corruption, abuse, and enabling behaviors can permeate every area unless we are specifically positioned to prevent them.

To the extent that harm from charitable work is alarmingly common, and impact somewhat rare, our field is in crisis.  Everyone who gives to, or works for, an organization that does not take care to maximize impact and minimize harm should either stop or force reform.  Doing otherwise is akin to selecting “no preference” between helping and hurting. Such charity is like faith without works—dead.

In his book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb makes the case that the complexity of systems we don’t understand presents a risk of unintentional harm such that "interventions should be limited to cases of extreme necessity, where the costs of inaction are intolerable.”  This is precisely why physicians follow the Hippocratic Oath: "first, do no harm."  Despite this, just a few centuries ago, doctors regularly followed practices that harmed patients: bloodletting, the use of mercury, drilling holes in the skull, or going from working with cadavers to assisting childbirth without washing hands (2).  Over the last couple of centuries, the field reformed itself, became scientific, and respectable, through the reform of medical education and accreditation, the establishment of licensure and regulation, the formation of professional organizations like the American Medical Association, and the establishment of ethical codes and peer review. 

Looking back, it is clear to us now how broken the field of medicine was.  Doctors had to demonstrate their allegiance to their oaths and their patients to reform from harming patients, to extending lifespans by decades.  We need a similar transformation in our field--charity. The framework that my organization has adopted for thinking about impact is simple.  We aim for impact that is:

Life Altering - such that anyone who loved that person would give almost anything for

Depends on Us - passes a "but for" test such that it will not happen without our involvement (there is no viable alternative)

Won’t Create Dependency - won't contribute to people becoming dependent on charity or cause them to seek more of it

We have found such opportunities to be rare and difficult to find.  But they are precious, and we should search for them as treasure--looking especially for high-impact-on-the-dollar interventions that are scalable. 

You can summarize the criteria above this way: avoid doing harm, and try to do as much good as possible.  It is obvious that we should all be seeking to do that.  Is it just as obvious that we far too often fail to do that?

Together we need to face this reality and reform our field, to bring about a world where someone who asks you to give to or engage in charitable work without concern for the impact is seen as like someone who asks you to invest without telling you anything about the expected return, or to take medicine without regard for whether it helps or harms you.  

It will be a long road, but I believe the first step is widespread public acceptance among non-profit leaders that we have a duty to define, measure, and maximize impact, as well as avoid harm.  We need to begin holding our organizations and each other responsible for ensuring our beneficiaries receive the impact for which our donors entrust us with their money.

- (1) Rick Warren, Foreword to The Poverty of Nations: A Sustainable Solution, by Wayne Grudem and Barry Asmus (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 19.  (2)  This practice continued for years after Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis published data demonstrating a dramatic, immediate, and reproducible effect of handwashing on reducing mortality in childbirth.  Rather than his conclusions causing reform, Semmelweis was professionally isolated because his ideas conflicted with the prevailing theory of bad humors.  He was eventually forcibly committed to an asylum where he died from the very thing he had demonstrated how to save people from--a hospital infection.  

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Love Justice International exists to share the love of Jesus by fighting the world’s greatest injustices—most notably through anti-trafficking transit monitoring that has helped intercept over 45,000 people from being trafficked. Founded by John Molineux, whose early trips to Nepal stirred a lifelong call to protect the vulnerable, Love Justice is a powerful example of how intentional, data-driven action can change individual lives and shift global outcomes. Learn more at lovejustice.ngo.