Commodifying the Social Through Social Entrepreneurship: A Case Study of ‘WE’

As a twenty-something year old, I speak for both my peers and myself when I say that many of today’s youth are finding it increasingly difficult to generate meaning in their lives. Most of us have abandoned grand visions of changing the world and ‘making a difference’ at the doorstep of adolescence, when we realized that our world is not one that welcomes change with smiles — at least not the kind of change that threatens to pull the rug from under power’s feet. We now know better than to challenge a system that refuses to be challenged and that penalizes those who try; we have learned that it is wiser to trade grand dreams of equality and justice for smaller ones of personal happiness. Deep down, however, many of us still held onto those grand visions suppressed by our budding adult sensibilities. The remarkable thing about youth is our capacity to believe in ourselves — to earnestly see our agency as something that cannot be fully contained by society — and perhaps this is why the Kielburger brothers, touting their WE brand of social justice, shone as they did like a beacon of hope for thousands of Canadian youth who were starving to make a real difference. 

ME to WE, a social enterprise founded by Marc and Craig Kielburger in 2009, is a for-profit organization that generates funds for the WE Charity, a non-profit organization established by the brothers in 1995. A minimum of fifty percent of the enterprise’s profits — which come primarily from its offering of ME to WE volunteering trips, motivational speakers, and line of ethically-sourced products — are donated annually to the Charity. The rest of the profits are funneled back into ME to WE to grow the organization. The WE philosophy is driven by the vision to empower youth to change the world “with their consumer choices”.¹ It’s not difficult to see the appeal of this promise; not only does ME to WE affirm youth’s aspirations to make the world a better place, it also does so by simplifying the daunting task of changing the world into actionable items. Far from seeing the intimacy between the for-profit enterprise and its partner charity as an ethical conundrum, the Kielburgers proudly describe the arrangement between ME to WE and We Charity as an innovative form of charity and the epitome of youth empowerment in the 21st century. WE is just as much as a beacon of hope to the Canadian Liberal Party and corporate players as it is to socially-minded youth — for a very different reason. The social enterprise’s success in melding consumerism with social justice and in selling this hybrid identity as a ‘cool’ brand of social justice to its youth audience signals enormous profitability. The Kielburgers said it best when they attributed WE’s success to its role as a pioneer for social enterprises by showing that “[it’s] possible to do good and generate profits…a classic win-win”.² Is this not the kind of democracy we’ve always dreamed of?

In this essay, I would like to address the viability of social entrepreneurship as an instrument for democracy. By using ME to WE and the WE Charity — which I will collectively refer to as WE — as a case study, I suggest that the brand of social empowerment promoted by WE and similar social enterprises function, in reality, to disempower youth through a discourse that supplants a consumer identity over their budding social and political awareness. The process of overwriting citizenship with consumerism begins with the commodification of notions such as equality and the public good; this discourse is legitimized by WE’s affiliation with political and corporate bodies of authority at its numerous pedagogical sites. In the following sections, I begin by problematizing WE’s formulation of ‘citizens as consumers’ and its commodification of social justice with reference to the tenets of a true democracy. I then turn to a discussion of WE’s doctrine of activism-through-consumerism and problematize this discourse with two examples, the WE Are Silent Campaign and ME to WE Trips; and finally, I examine how the WE pedagogy enables WE to legitimate not only its own discourse, but that of corporate and political entities whose affiliation with WE reinforces the organization’s authority. 

To unravel the picture that reveals the WE discourse not as one that genuinely empowers and uplifts youth, but a corporate force descending and capitalizing upon youths’ momentum for social change, I would like to begin with a question that borrows from Henry Giroux’s discussion of youth and the link between education and and public citizenship in On Critical Pedagogy: what kind of public good or public citizenship can be articulated through a discourse for the future that is embedded in the language of consumerism? What is at stake is not only the viability of the social justice discourse at the heart of WE’s brand, but the concept of social entrepreneurship as a whole, with its commitment to both profit and democratic values. If we hold that a democracy, in the truest sense of the word, is a kind of society that is capable of reflecting upon itself, then its citizens too must be capable of self-interrogation. A truly democratic society is therefore one that holds itself accountable to a set of public values generated from the input of its members, who themselves are independently engaged in “an ongoing pursuit of ethics and justice”.³ In this context, the word ‘justice’ should not be understood as a fixed outcome — such as in the phrase ‘justice is achieved’ — but as a commitment to taking up the task of continuously defining and negotiating the collective values by which one wishes to live alongside others. Put differently, the flourishing of a democracy is contingent on the degree to which its citizens feel empowered to articulate meanings and values that they feel are important to them. What WE promises, in its claim to empower youth as consumers, is therefore to swap out the difficult yet necessary requirement to commit oneself to creating democracy for the much easier option of voting with one’s dollars. Implicit in the WE doctrine is the idea that consumerism is interchangeable with citizenship — if not a superior version of it. 

The doubts that this paper casts on WE’s dual commitment to both profit and social good is, admittedly, not the first of its kind. Even prior to the WE Charity scandal of 2020, WE has faced scrutiny for not drawing clear boundaries between the ME to WE social enterprise and its Charity counterpart. Specifically, the WE Charity’s activities on the domestic end revolve primarily around the 16 000 WE Schools across North America and the UK.⁴ Any school can become a WE School by adopting for a year a series of learning programs that are designed to empower students from their own classrooms, ‘ME to WE’ style.⁵ In principle, the WE School initiative falls under the charitable branch of WE and is therefore not affiliated with the for-profit ME to WE. This distinction loses its force, however, considering that promotions for ME to WE products and services are embedded within the curricula. In other words, the issue that most critics have with WE is that it has failed to separate its profitable branch from its charity with sufficient clarity, raising concerns about exploiting students as consumers.⁶ My foremost concern, however, is not with logistical blurriness, but is directed at the way that WE School curricula reconfigure social justice and related concepts under a neoliberal corporate logic. My view draws support from Giroux’s discussion of corporate time and particularly his observation that it “accentuates privatized and competitive modes of intellectual activity”.⁷ In the context of my critique, what is being accentuated through WE’s corporate logic is precisely a privatized and competitive notion of social justice. 

Time, as it functions within politics and culture, is a framework that “legitimate[s] certain social relations”.⁸ Through the lens of neoliberalism, the time-scales by which we think about the future become compressed. With profit being its absolute priority, corporate time requires absolute efficiency; the vision must be complete before we even begin, and we must get there as fast as possible. Within the framework of corporate time, there is no room for trial and error — nor is there a need for it, since the future to which one hurries has already been determined. These suggestions are particularly troubling in light of the fact that WE School curricula reproduce the corporate logic of ME to WE and instill in its student participants the false idea that the only legitimate way to enact social justice is through the corporate parameters set out by the organization. Through partnership with WE, schools become pedagogical sites that disseminate WE’s discourse of consumption-driven activism; this reshaping of social and political agency under consumerism terms has a profound effect on youth’s capacity to envision “the institutional and ideological conditions that promote long-term analysis”,⁹ which is a necessary condition for democracy. Consider, for example, the one-year structure of the WE School program alongside WE’s claim that “[according to] the research of Mission Measurement… service-learning students are 1.3 times more likely to be engaged in civic and political life”.¹⁰ Aside from the questionableness of quantifying an individual’s civic-mindedness with numerical values, the configuration of citizenship as a tangible learning outcome that can be achieved through participation in a year-long training program is a perfect replica of corporate culture. Under the dictates of corporate time — which allocates exactly one (school) year to ‘make a difference’ — the absolute prioritization of final outcome and efficiency transforms social activism from a process of open-ended learning to focused labour. Perhaps the most efficient and investment-worthy approach to making a difference within this tight deadline is to frame the problem in a way that requires the least amount of effort to solve; instead of critically examining structural inequalities that give rise to homelessness, it is far easier to collect a hundred canned goods at the end of the year and assure yourself that this will ‘fix’ homeless. It is evident that the kind of corporate citizenry and social activism engineered and incentivized by WE is fundamentally incompatible with democracy’s demand for a citizenry that is not afraid to question the system and “talk back to power”.¹¹ There is no doubt that many youth who enter the We School program felt compelled to take this step in the first place because of a growing awareness of  their own positionality within power structures. Through the WE curricula, however, their budding identity as political agents are assimilated into the logic of corporate time.

When notions about democracy and social goods are refigured through the lens of corporate time, the only kind of civic imagination available is one that centers change on the private rather than on systems of power. Despite the appearance of taking the collective — or the ‘we’ — as the basic unit for its movement, the neoliberal formulation of WE as a social enterprise precludes the possibility of formulating citizenship and social justice in any other way than upon “corporate-consumer affiliation”.¹² Consumer culture, which takes self-interest and personal happiness to be the only metric of the good, is ignorant toward the reality of its enmeshment — and of its privileged status — in power structures. I turn now to two specific education programs, the 24-hour WE Are Silent Campaign and ME to WE Trips, to illustrate how the filtering of social crises through the lens of the private absolves the activist-consumer of their complicity in structures of inequality and reframes doing good as a matter of feeling good. Through the promise and delivery of instant moral gratification, WE strengthens its claim over the very definition of citizenship and social responsibility. 

The WE Are Silent Campaign is a popular WE School activity that encourages students to take up 24-hour vow of silence to take a stand for a human right of one’s choosing by “speak[ing] up with silence”.¹³ It is worth noting that the emphasis of the campaign falls on choosing a cause to be silent for, rather than the question of whether going silent is a meaningful way to give voice to others. In fact, students need not even concern themselves with the question of how to use their voice, since WE has already decided for them that the best way to to speak up is to not speak at all. By carving out time and space for students to think about inequality, The WE Are Silent Campaign is perhaps a step in the right direction toward creating a space in which students can “produce the conditions of their own agency through dialogue”.¹⁴ This possibility, however, is severely diminished by the fact that social and political empowerment cannot take place without literal dialogue. Moreover, the fact that the campaign as a pedagogical project is marketed as a general intervention detached from context, reveals that WE’s commitment to social justice is devoid of any consideration for systemic inequality. The configuration of activism as a first-world resident descending upon injustice unfolding in a foreign land from an ethics-free vantage point erases any awareness of the massive inequality that upholds the privileged position of do-gooders. As such, students are not brought to question why they have a voice when millions of other youth do not. The normalization of privilege and gross inequality draws a false equivalence between privileged youth and their silenced counterparts, and this becomes the basis for justifying the commodification of the latter’s suffering. When there is a refusal to name the oppressive conditions that give rise to suffering, this renders attempts at showing solidarity — such as the vow of silence — nothing more than a mere spectacle. 

The problematic premise of ME to WE Trips — an international voluntourism program marketed as volunteering trips — is not unlike that of the WE Are Silent Campaign. Socially-conscious and privileged youth volunteers purchase tickets to travel overseas into impoverished partner communities. Equipped with minimal knowledge about the community’s history, politics, and culture, volunteers are told to expect “transformational outcomes for both travelers and community members alike”.¹⁵ Whereas the WE Are Silent Campaign is more subtle in its taking of corporate-consumer affiliation to be premise of the program, the ME to WE Trip concept overtly commodifies charity and merges the consumer with the volunteer. This is a curious mix; on the one hand, WE must keep its consumers happy and their privatized interests continuously fulfilled. On the other hand, WE claims to be able to keep them happy via a sense of fulfillment derived from having transformed a community for the better. These are conflicting commitments, given that genuine social transformation would require a capacity for self-interrogation and political agency at odds with consumerism. The fulfillment that WE promises is not therefore the truly meaningful kind derived from genuine engagement with a partner community; what it offers is instead the illusion of genuine social activism while appealing to a privatized notion of philanthropy. In line with this priority, WE allocates far more resources toward ensuring that its volunteer-customers feel like they are making a difference than on ensuring that they actually are. Consider, for example, the online advert for ME to WE Trips on WE’s website, which contains the description of partner communities as “welcoming” and with “open arms” alongside images of friendly locals — one of a group of smiling Southeast Asian children and another of an Indian woman adorning a volunteer with flowers.¹⁶ The official narrative of these trips may be centered around the need to serve underprivileged communities, but the language of the advert makes it clear that every aspect of the experience, including the underprivileged locals themselves, is carefully curated to satisfy the volunteer-customer. Under the motto of ‘doing good must feel good’, ME to WE Trips offer consumers the opportunity to purchase a socially-subversive activist experience without actually having to step outside their privilege. In the same way that questions about privilege are altogether ignored in the We Are Silent Campaign, the privileging of consumer interests over those of the communities they have pledged to help in Me to WE Trips renders the mission for social justice a meaningless exercise. 

WE’s careful cultivation of a consumer identity ultimately benefits the organization itself, as it elevates WE — in the eyes of its youth consumers — from a corporation bound to ethical obligations to being the authority on what it means to be ethical. The primary goal of WE’s activism-through-consumerism ideology is not to improve public life (in one’s own country or abroad) as it so claims. From volunteering trips to classroom workshops, every avenue for social activism that WE offers is instrumental to the organization’s ultimate pursuit of profit. These programs also function to restrict notions about social justice within the parameters of corporate logic, foreclosing the possibility of articulating social justice as a public and collective pursuit, and it is precisely this closing down of the civic imagination that enables WE’s neoliberal notion of social justice to legitimate itself. To illustrate this claim, I turn now to an analysis of WE Day as a site on which the WE discourse is reinforced.

WE Day is an annual stadium-sized event organized by WE that has been attended by hundreds of thousands of youth across North American and the UK.¹⁷ Entry to the event can be acquired by completing one local and one international initiative through the WE School program, effectively making WE Day a reward mechanism for WE Schools. Upon entering the event venue, attendees are greeted with booths advertising ME to WE merchandise and volunteering trips, among other WE-affiliated products. Inside the stadium, attendees are entertained by a lineup of household names — celebrities, CEOs, and the occasional politician. The purpose of the event, according to Craig Kielburger, is to celebrate youth who are making a difference in their local and global communities. In light of the fact that WE’s priority is to instill its consumerist brand of social justice in youth, it becomes clear that, rather than cultivating the conditions necessary for genuine social and political empowerment, the true purpose of WE Day is to collapse the distinction between the social and the commercial. As WE’s consumerist brand of social justice takes over as the dominating discourse on social justice, consumption becomes the only option available to youth who absorb its logic. By rewarding good consumerism with even more opportunities to consume, WE Day functions as a launching pad that celebrates aspiring youth activists’ crossing over from public culture to commercial culture — a process that has already been set into motion back in WE School classrooms. 

The embracing of a concept of social justice that is wedded to commercial culture works to WE’s advantage because it makes WE, as a state-sanctioned and well-connected monopoly supplier of the activist experience, the ultimate authority on what social justice is. This authority not only gives WE the power to reformulate concepts such as justice, equality, and ethics through its network of products and services, it also doubles as a protection against charges that are typically levied against corporate entities. Whereas, for example, a fast fashion company is consistently scrutinized for outsourcing labour and openly condemned as unethical, the ME to WE merchandise line is able to avert similar criticisms because the unethical nature of its business practices are rendered less visible under the cloak of WE’s commitment to fair trade. Through its network of pedagogical sites, WE cultivates a false public culture in which the unfairness inherent to the unequal power dynamic between WE — a multi-billion dollar enterprise — and its village-sized foreign partners, are never interrogated. Realizing that WE wields the power to shape the discourse on corporate ethics, corporate giants such as Wallgreen and Microsoft flock to the organization in hopes that they too may gain immunity from criticism by putting up the illusion of being socially-conscious without being actually committed to the social. The overload of celebrities and CEOs at WE Day sends to the young audience the clear message that not only is WE endorsed by both popular and commercial culture, the individuals on stage who represent the dominant culture are also trustworthy by virtue of their affiliation with WE. What we are marching toward is a paradoxical society in which injustices are openly condemned, but continue to prevail at its very foundations. Youth, in this picture, have been rendered mere vehicles for WE and its corporate affiliates’s covert profit-making. WE Day, as it stands, is far from a platform of youth empowerment; it is stead a meeting ground on which countless corporate bodies converge in their interest to tap into the market of well-intentioned youth. 

Having traced these effects, we arrive inevitably at the question of what could have been done differently. The disruption of the prevailing empowerment-through-consumerism discourse circulated by WE that is inherent to the ethos of social entrepreneurship must take place, I think, on the very site in which the discourse is disseminated. In the context of WE, the obvious place to begin would be the classrooms of schools that currently are or are candidates for WE Schools. Instead of outsourcing civic education to a private enterprise like WE, our education system must invest in and make space for a pedagogy that nurtures students’ budding social and political awareness. One might suggest that it is far more practical to regulate WE’s education branch more harshly or for schools to discontinue their partnership with WE. However, these solutions do not address the heart of the problem — which is that public education in its current state is not creating the “ideological conditions” necessary for the creation of citizens that are fit to participate in power.¹⁸ The lack of a proper civic education leaves open a power vacuum in the classroom that reads like an open invitation to alternative discourses on public life, such as the ME to WE ideology and the tempting logic of social entrepreneurship. As Toni Morrison observes, if an educational institution does not fulfill its obligation as a “guardian of wider civic freedom”, another regime will simply step into the role.¹⁹ Even if WE was expelled from classrooms — as long as youth remain incapable of interrogating power, a new entity will quickly take its place. It is now up to the education system to turn away regimes and their discourses of false empowerment at the door by teaching youth how to turn down these discourses themselves. 

Notes

1.  “Meet Brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger.” ME to WE. Accessed April 18, 2022. https://www.metowe.com/about-us/our-team/meet-craig-marc/#:~:text=Co%2Dfounders%20of%20the%20WE,Social%20Enterprise%20and%20WE%20Day.
2.  Wingrove, Josh. “Marc and Craig Kielburger’s Do-Gooding Social Enterprise.” The Globe and Mail. Accessed April 18, 2022. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/news/national/marc-and-craig-kielburgers-do-gooding-social-enterprise/article4389008/.
3. Giroux, Henry A. “Neoliberalism, Public Pedagogy, and the Legacy of Paulo Freire.” Essay. In On Critical Pedagogy, 130. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 
4. “We Charity: We’re in This Together.” https://www.we.org. Accessed April 18, 2022. https://www.we.org/en-CA/.
5.  “We Service-Learning.” https://www.we.org. Accessed April 19, 2022. https://www.we.org/en-CA/our-work/we-schools/we-service-learning/.
6. Marie-Danielle Smith September 9, 2020. “How We Charity Found Itself Mired in a Star-Studded Cronyism Scandal.” Macleans.ca, April 6, 2022. https://www.macleans.ca/longforms/we-charity-kielburgers-scandal/. 
7. Giroux, Henry A. “Neoliberalism, Public Pedagogy, and the Legacy of Paulo Freire.” Essay. In On Critical Pedagogy, 135. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 
8.  Giroux, Henry A. “Neoliberalism, Public Pedagogy, and the Legacy of Paulo Freire.” Essay. In On Critical Pedagogy, 131. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 
9.   Ibid., 133.
10. “Evaluation and Transparency: WE Schools.” https://www.we.org. Accessed April 19, 2022. https://www.we.org/en-CA/transparency-reporting/we-schools. 
11.  Giroux, Henry A. “Neoliberalism, Public Pedagogy, and the Legacy of Paulo Freire.” Essay. In On Critical Pedagogy, 131. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 
12. Jefferess, David. 2012. “The ‘Me to We” social enterprise: Global education as lifestyle brand.” Critical Literacy, 6.1: 19.
13. “We Are Silent Campaign.” https://www.we.org. Accessed April 19, 2022. https://we-org-publisher.netlify.app/en-CA/our-work/we-schools/we-schools-campaigns-and-curriculum/service-learning-campaigns/fundraising-initiatives/we-are-silent. 
14.  Giroux, Henry A. “Neoliberalism, Public Pedagogy, and the Legacy of Paulo Freire.” Essay. In On Critical Pedagogy, 131. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 
15.  “Travel and Make an Impact – Me to We Trips: Me to We.” https://travel.metowe.com. Accessed April 19, 2022. https://travel.metowe.com/en-CA/. 
16. Ibid.
17. “We Charity: We’re in This Together.” https://www.we.org. Accessed April 18, 2022. https://www.we.org/en-CA/. 
18. Giroux, Henry A. “Neoliberalism, Public Pedagogy, and the Legacy of Paulo Freire.” Essay. In On Critical Pedagogy, 133. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 
19. Ibid.

Bibliography

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“Meet Brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger.” ME to WE. Accessed April 18, 2022. 

“Travel and Make an Impact – Me to We Trips: Me to We.” https://travel.metowe.com. Accessed April 

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“We Charity: We’re in This Together.” https://www.we.org. Accessed April 18, 2022. 

https://www.we.org/en-CA/.

“We Service-Learning.” https://www.we.org. Accessed April 19, 2022. 

https://www.we.org/en-CA/our-work/we-schools/we-service-learning/.

Wingrove, Josh. “Marc and Craig Kielburger’s Do-Gooding Social Enterprise.” The Globe and Mail. 

Accessed April 18, 2022. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/news/national/marc-and-craig-kielburgers-do-gooding-social-enterprise/article4389008/. 

Read more at By Audrey Wu.