Canva Comrades
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The internet has not turned out to be a great boon for the political education of the masses, but some corners of the web are doing good work. Activists are able to spread information (news, protest details, decolonial history) and share callouts for mutual aid by posting infographics on social media with an app that was built so that corporations wouldn’t have to hire graphic designers to make their marketing material: Canva. These Canva-made mutual aid callouts reveal an online culture that values informal direct donations through grassroots organising over tax-deductible charity fundraising. The sentiments behind this culture are the culmination of a few different trends over the past few decades but really have their origins following an earthquake in the Caribbean 15 years ago.
On Douz Janvye 2010 (‘12 January’ in Kreyòl), Haiti was struck by a devastating earthquake. The scale of the disaster and its impacts are difficult to imagine, but former Governor General of Canada Michaëlle Jean’s reaction when she visited Haiti days afterwards was that it was “like an atomic bomb fell on Port-au-Prince”. Over the course of 30 seconds, the magnitude 7 earthquake reduced buildings and infrastructure across the country to rubble, killing possibly over 300,000 and leaving more than 1 million people homeless. The images left the world in shock.
Governmental and non-governmental aid organisations flocked to the country and called on the goodwill of people to donate. It was hard not to open your wallet, or, as was common at the time, send your donation via text message. In fact, over $13 billion were raised in pledges and donations globally, and nearly half a billion dollars that Haiti owed in debt was wiped. In the weeks following the earthquake, humanitarian agencies spoke of how difficult it was to supply the aid to many parts of the country, due to the damaged infrastructure and the fact that Haiti’s rural areas were already difficult to access.
Months went by and there were reports of uneven distribution of funds. Misleading claims by the NGOs that “99% of shelter needs” were provided, which in actuality may have just meant handing out a tarpaulin or sheets. Around the one-year anniversary, news outlets and aid organisations released reports on the progress of reconstruction, and the numbers (of those available) were grim. News footage of tent cities, rubble, and severely malnourished children had people wondering where all this fundraising money was going.
Laura Wagner, a survivor and scholar of the earthquake, wrote for Salon on the 6-month anniversary, “No one seems to know where the aid is… [it] is invisible.” Five years later, NPR and ProPublica released a report titled ‘In Search Of The Red Cross’ $500 Million In Haiti Relief,’ revealing that although the American Red Cross claimed to have provided homes to over 130,000 people, they had only built 6 permanent homes. The other point of contention is the fact that the charity in question was running a $100 million deficit in 2010. While the American Red Cross asserted that all $500 million was spent on Haiti relief programs, they refused to provide a list of the programs they supposedly ran and how much they cost. Given this lack of accountability and seeing how little the situation seemed to have improved since the earthquake, the charity lost a lot of its credibility in the eyes of the public.
Haiti, being subject to hurricane seasons as well as other natural and political disasters, has been in need of aid and donations several times since Douz Janvye. When Haitians and the diaspora have made callouts for funds, they have explicitly asked the public not to give to the American Red Cross and other large charities, but to donate to smaller, more localised charities and people on the ground. Today, we see similar mobilisation for donations for a range of causes that follow the same guidelines: redirect money away from officious charities and into the hands of those in need. This scepticism of charities is actually part of a broader trend of distrust in public institutions, be it NGOs, governments, news outlets, and pharmaceutical companies. It’s a lack of transparency that has allowed this distrust to fester. So rather than putting their faith in a top-down charity model, people are turning to grassroots mutual aid organising and spreading the word online, and they’re using the free graphic design app Canva to do so.
Canva-style infographics have their origin in meme culture on the internet. When social media platforms added the feature to easily share other accounts’ posts, news began to spread like wildfire. Infographics became the medium of choice for news outlets due to the ability to economise information and, if provocative enough, to increase the likelihood of people sharing and commenting on them. Facebook learnt that negative emotional responses were a consistent element of virality — crazy Karens, clickbait, tragedy — and one such highly shareable type of content were GoFundMe campaigns. Cute images or video footage of the fundraisers explaining what they were raising money for accompanied by sad or inspirational music, was like digital catnip in the early 2010s. The campaign page also showed a scale with the target fundraising goal and how much money had already been collected. Both of these elements encouraged people to share the campaign which had a set goal everyone could work together towards to directly help this one person/family, all handily facilitated through email and social media.
Nothing has been more emblematic of the public’s distrust in institutions and the online aid response than the Genocide in Gaza. As a result of governments’ worldwide failure to act to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza, and the media’s biased and lacklustre reporting on it, millions upon millions of people learned about the history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine through TikTok and Canva-made infographics on Instagram. When Israel attacked and blocked humanitarian workers in the already aid-dependent Gaza, Palestinians or their families created GoFundMe’s which were shared on social media, and then eventually became collated and organised through the grassroots group, Operation Olive Branch (OOB). A further development to this tactic is the explicit teaching of how social media algorithms promote posts. Through OOB, influencers and celebrities volunteered to be paired up with a family in Gaza’s GoFundMe campaign to boost fundraising efforts for them, encouraging their followers to engage with and share their posts to increase the chance of virality. Individuals could even look through OOB’s spreadsheet and specifically support a family with newborn children or one with disabled or elderly relatives. Similar online awareness and donation campaigns were made for the people of Sudan, Tigray, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and now the OOB spreadsheet has donation and information links to those causes as well.
Mutual aid obviously pre-exists 2010, and as Myriam J. A. Chancy points out in her book, Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters (2023), scholars have been criticising the charity model as response to humanitarian crises since the Rwandan Genocide. But Haiti was the catalyst for our current online approach to mutual aid, which was fostered by our failing Neoliberal institutions. And I think it’s kind of hilarious that Canva, an app designed for marketing interns who are too young to know the ‘graphic design is my passion’ meme, is used to educate the masses and drive funds to where they’re needed.