Cause Celeb (Chris Martin Involvement Since 2002)

[busybeeburns]

Celebrities are queuing up to become charity ambassadors, but do they make a difference?

 

BONO DOES it. Madonna too. Likewise Scarlett Johansson, Annie Lennox, George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. David Beckham and Geri Hallliwell, famously, have also dabbled, while Brad and Angelina do it so much it's hard to see how they have time to squeeze any film-making at all into their busy schedules.

 

"It" is charity work. Many of we normals also do it, of course, though our efforts are unlikely to see us rewarded with a title. Such honorifics - Global Ambassador is a common one - are reserved for celebrities and have become the ultimate accessory for the star with a conscience. Or, as the cynics are not slow to point out, with a film, book or movie to promote.

 

The major recipients of these starry good offices are non-governmental organisations such as the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (Unicef), or big charities like Oxfam and Amnesty International. But there is scarcely a charity in the Western world that doesn't have some sort of celebrity endorsement available when there's a campaign to be launched or a petition to be handed in.

 

Raakhi Shah is UK Artist Liaison Manager with Oxfam. If she were to sit down and play Celebrity Ambassador Whist with her opposite numbers in the world of good works she would have an almost unbeatable hand. As well as Johansson and Lennox, her portfolio boasts Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Helen Mirren, Gael Garcia Bernal and Chris Martin of Coldplay. If you were looking to trump that lot you'd need a Geldof at the very least.

 

Although Oxfam's Global Ambassador programme was only officially launched last year, Lennox is a longtime supporter of the charity and recently fronted the anti-poverty I'm In campaign. Johansson has only been involved with Oxfam since 2005 but, let's face it, she hasn't been famous for very long either. In her time with the charity she has visited India and Sri Lanka on behalf of a campaign promoting education for girls. In Uttar Pradesh, where literacy rates are just 19%, she visited a rural Dalit school where she was photographed playing games with the pupils. "Once you've met amazing people like the Dalit girls you just can't turn your back," she said afterwards. "I was shocked by a lot of what I saw."

 

Bernal, too, is genuinely interested in and moved by the issues. His major work for Oxfam concerns fair trade and globalisation but when the G8 met at Gleneagles in 2005 he made his own way to Edinburgh for the protests. He based himself in the activists' centre set up in Forest Café, a notorious crusty hang-out near the university. He could be found there into the small hours.

 

Coldplay's Chris Martin has been involved with the charity since 2002, travelling to Ghana, Mexico and Haiti to publicise its Make Trade Fair campaign. In 2003 he was in Cancun helping to lobby political leaders during the World Trade Organisation summit. Importantly, he also talks about the issues in interviews, so you can open Mojo or Q and read his thoughts on globalisation or the problems faced by farmers in the developing world. That may not necessarily translate into cash, but it does raise awareness. A survey conducted by Oxfam showed that 84% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 knew about the Make Trade Fair campaign because of Martin's involvement.

 

Shah, for her part, is clear in her own mind about these celebrities' commitment to the cause and points out that Helen Mirren's connection with Oxfam dates back to the late 1990s, nearly a decade now. But at the same time she is under no illusions about the nature of the charity-celebrity relationship - or why it is necessary.

 

"Sometimes the issues we work on can be quite complicated and the media gets bored of the story, so it's another way of highlighting those issues and getting them to the forefront of the news again," she says. "Celebrities have a natural platform because of their profile and the level of publicity they get anyway, so Oxfam using them is a great way to get the issues out there."

 

Identifying which celebrities may be amenable to which charities, or which campaigns, is the task of recruiting sergeants like Shah. A close reading of the gossip magazines is all part of the job - you never know what will be revealed in the pages of Heat or Grazia. But it isn't a case of just grabbing any old celebrity. An interest in the issues is required and so, it seems, is a degree of personal probity.

 

"It's always been hard to recruit celebrity ambassadors but we're quite clear about not just getting someone for the sake of it," says Shah. "It's about added value and making a difference. That's the reason Oxfam uses them. We do work out what the benefit would be."

 

Does that mean that Pete Doherty, although a tabloid fixture, might not be welcome as a spokesman for Oxfam? "It's about knowing your audience, knowing who Oxfam's supporters are and also being accountable to them and our beneficiaries," she replies. "Would someone like Pete Doherty add value to what we're doing?"

 

Comedy value, perhaps, though precious little of the sort she means. But it isn't always easy to spot a calamity in the making. The animal-rights charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals must have been delighted when they recruited supermodel Naomi Campbell to front an anti-fur campaign - doubly so when she agreed to bare (almost) all in the name of the cause. But when she sashayed down a Milan catwalk in 1997 wearing a fur coat they were less than impressed. Campbell was fired. Or, in the language of Global Ambassadors, recalled.

 

Then again, who would have thought Geri Halliwell would make such a good fist of her charity work? The former Spice Girl became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund in 1998 and by all reports has thrown herself into the role (though she did also get a TV documentary out of it). Earlier this year she was praised by no less a figure than George Clooney, who called her an inspiration for "her feisty approach and the fact she wasn't afraid to have an opinion. Her work with Unicef and sexual health charity Marie Stopes in the third world was inspiring. And her address at a UN Youth summit in 2000 was brave - it's so easy to not get involved and she just gritted her teeth and went for it".

 

So much for the charities. But what do the celebrities themselves get out of the contract? Cynics might say they are using the charities as much as the charities are using them. Certainly that's true of the basement league of the celebrity world, the drifting shoals of pop and TV has-beens who crave nothing more than a picture caption in a mid-market tabloid. But what of the A-listers who don't need publicity or, more interestingly, who actively discourage it ordinarily? Is it vanity or guilt that leads them to do good works? Are they indulging a need to feel loved? To feel humbled? To feel guilt-free as they pad around their Manhattan townhouse?

 

"I think it's unfair to say that the celebrities just do it to feel good about themselves," says Raakhi Shah. "I think they see a difference as well. I think if celebrities just did something but didn't see the added value it wouldn't make sense."

 

Not everyone is so convinced. Celebrity PR Max Clifford is ambivalent about the whole business. "A lot of stars I've met over the years have told me how much they care about this or that particular cause and charity and, because I know them, I know they don't give a monkey's," he says. "There's an awful lot of people who are desperate for any kind of publicity and they assume that if you get yourself involved with a charity it looks good for you and you get more coverage. Strictly speaking that isn't true. A really big name does help a charity but with the so-called celebrities the media aren't that interested anyway."

 

Besides, he says, charity work isn't a constructive way of generating publicity. "I would never get a celebrity involved with a charity unless it was genuine because people very quickly see it for what it is and it backfires the minuses outweigh the pluses unless it's something you are genuinely sincere about and you will be there year in, year out. Otherwise don't do it."

 

Clifford gives as an example the case of Heather Mills, who has worked with the Adopt-a-Minefield campaign on behalf of those injured by landmines. "If you were to say to many people, Do you think Heather Mills was involved with disabled charities for their benefit or hers?' I would think you'd find 90% said it was for hers."

 

Although the rise in the number of celebrity charity ambassadors is a recent phenomenon, the idea itself is not new. American actor Danny Kaye is credited with being the first of the breed, taking up the cause of Unicef in 1953 when a plane he was on caught fire en route from London to New York. After an emergency landing in Ireland, Kaye found himself talking to Maurice Pate, Unicef's executive director. Perhaps it was the shared near-death experience that caused the pair to bond; perhaps Unicef's aims simply appealed to Kaye, the poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn. Either way, he became the organisation's first goodwill ambassador in 1954 and held the position until his death in 1987. He was succeeded in 1989 by Audrey Hepburn, who would go on to testify in front of the US Congress on behalf of Unicef, proving as able and committed an ambassador as her predecessor. Today, Lord Attenborough, Harry Belafonte and David Beckham are among Unicef's international ambassadors. There are also regional and national ambassadors, a sort of celebrity hierarchy which runs from chess player Anatoly Karpov (regional) to Beckham's former Manchester United team-mate Ryan Giggs and Scottish actor Ewan McGregor (both national).

 

Danny Kaye's was no idle or passing interest. "I believe deeply that children are more powerful than oil, more beautiful than rivers, more precious than any other natural resource a country can have," he once said. "I feel that the most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life is to be associated with Unicef." It's hard to imagine David Beckham coming out with something so moving - then again, Danny Kaye was useless at in-swinging corners and defence-splitting passes, talents that don't go unrecognised in many of the regions in which Unicef operates. Beckham, like Halliwell, has also proved a willing ambassador. Earlier this year he visited Sierra Leone where he met five-year-old Senyo at a feeding centre in the town of Makeni. He has also fronted an Aids awareness campaign in the country.

 

Out of the political ferment of the late 1960s emerged a newer, less clean-cut form of celebrity do-gooder. Its apogee came in the form of Bob Geldof and the Live Aid concerts of 1984 but its origins lay in an event which took place a decade and a half earlier.

 

In August 1971, George Harrison hosted the Concert For Bangladesh in New York's Madison Square Garden. With a little help from his friends - Ravi Shankar, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr to name four - he raised nearly $250,000 for disaster relief in that war-torn and flood-stricken country. The money was distributed by Unicef.

 

At the press conference announcing the details of the Concert For Bangladesh, a reporter said this to Harrison: "With all the enormous problems in the world, how did you happen to choose this one to do something about?"

 

His reply? "Because I was asked by a friend if I would help. That's all."

 

Five years later, inspired in part by Harrison's example, the first of a series of filmed concerts in aid of Amnesty International took place. They were produced by John Cleese and American social activist Martin Lewis and the third is the most famous: The Secret Policeman's Ball, which took place in 1979, the same year Amnesty International published a list of the names of the 2665 people who had "disappeared" in Argentina since the coup by Jorge Rafael Videla.

 

Bono, for one, has credited these concerts with raising his political awareness several notches and it was on the Secret Policeman's Other Ball, in Amnesty's 20th anniversary year in 1981, that Bob Geldof first worked with Midge Ure, his future partner in the Live Aid project. The latter event, more than any other, cemented the belief that celebrity could play a part in opening both wallets and doors.

 

Professor Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, accepts this as a reality of modern life. He thinks celebrities can strengthen the brand identity of the charity they are involved with but he is sanguine about their overall efficacy, particularly with regard to the people they are supposed to be helping.

 

"I think they also strengthen the idea of development as charity, which is not helpful. Development needs to move from a mindset that asks what the rich can give the poor to what the rich can stop doing to allow the poor to help themselves. For example in trade policy, climate policy, narcotics, small arms and off-shore financial controls."

 

That said, he agrees with Max Clifford's assessment that on the whole celebrities gain little by agreeing to promote a charity.

 

"The celebrity obviously gains something, but my sense is that there's little commercially to be gained. It's more in line with philanthropy, and about lending a name and time instead of cash. In many ways I think that's more laudable than simply writing a cheque, although it's also more visible in terms of free publicity If the public senses real and quiet commitment and where there is some obvious link with the celebrity's own experiences or life, then I think it can be inspiring." But, he cautions: "Where it's seen as jumping on a bandwagon, then it will breed cynicism. Like a relationship, it has to be based on common values and goals and to be seen to be that."

 

In other words we, the public, are the final arbiters when it comes to judging who is and who isn't genuine in their commitment to a given cause. And we act accordingly, either giving or not giving; listening or not listening; setting up a clamour for change - or simply enjoying the sight of Brad, Scarlett, George and the rest walking the red earth instead of the red carpet for once.

 

http://www.sundayherald.com/life/people/display.var.2086367.0.cause_celeb.php

[rudy_o]

 

Celebrities are queuing up to become charity ambassadors, but do they make a difference?

A survey conducted by Oxfam showed that 84% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 knew about the Make Trade Fair campaign because of Martin's involvement.

 

 

No!!! They should write 'people between the ages of 17 and 24' !!!!

I'm 17... :D

 

But it's absolutely true. I never know about MTF before i saw it was written on chris's hand. :thinking:

 

And i think chris does it with honesty and sincerity. Even though the impact is might be just a little, but i think he's very good in his charity jobs.

[uuvbbz]

^_^

 

Good.....Good..