Government stepped back. Altruistic people stepped up - and the money meant to fund the work has been compounding mostly in private foundations.
The End of Charity interrogates the existential questions: should 'social service' charities even need to exist at all and is the increasing funding squeeze not ultimately leading the sector to collapse under its own contradictions? We tell the human stories from the frontlines - and we follow the money until it moves.
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We interrogate this through two lenses: human and systems. Every episode: lived experiences, interrogation, and the outlines of solutions.
Michelle is a fundraising strategist, charitable gift-planning advisor and founder of Wish Fairy Incorporated. After more than 25 years in the charitable sector, she knows where the money flows, where it gets stuck and how absurdity and unnecessary complexity displace simple, elegant, community-led solutions. She combines expertise, lived experience and justice-oriented analysis with a talent for finding the punchline hiding inside institutional nonsense. Michelle believes charity should create agency, redistribute power and ultimately make itself less necessary.
Shani Eribo is a big-picture thinker, a fundraising strategist, and a doctoral researcher in the Public Policy program at Carleton University. After fifteen years working in the sector across three continents, he has a keen appreciation of how public obligations became "charitable causes", how philanthropic capital travels upward instead of outward - reinforcing inequality - and why the organisations helping to meet basic human needs are always the ones left scrambling. Shani believes that the provision of basic social services should be a public responsibility rather than a fundraising target - and the segment of the sector that addresses these needs should be wound up and reabsorbed back into the state - and that beyond this, is where real charity should begin.
Every episode moves through all three.
Stories from the people the system runs on - fundraisers, frontline workers, “immigrants”, the ones being constrained to wearing multiple hats like a badge of honour.
Underlying structural investigations: government outsourcing, the tax subsidy behind every donated dollar, the disbursement quota, donor-advised funds, foundation opacity. Who built this, and who it serves.
The turn. Harm reduction, policy recommendations, community-governed capital, global comparables that prove need can actually shrink.
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