Solvable Problems and the Politics of Public Things: A Charitable Appeal in the National Health Service in Shetland

Recent sociological scholarship argues that we should expand understandings of organising for social change to include less overtly politicised activities such as mutual aid. Thus far this expansion has emphasised service provision and excluded fundraising appeals for public goods. Appeals are often considered professionalised charitable projects in which publics are passive audiences, and the use of charitable appeals in the welfare state is seen as accelerating state retrenchment from the provision of public goods. This article reports an extended five-year case study of a charitable appeal to purchase an MRI scanner for the NHS in the remote archipelago of Shetland, including observation, interviews with staff and fundraisers, and analysis of appeal documents and news and social media debates on the appeal. Based on this case, I argue charitable appeals are a distinctive mode of organising for social change. Leveraging the concept of solvable problems and Honig’s politics of public things, I demonstrate the potentialities and limitations of charitable fundraising appeals as a mode of social action. Specifically, appeals require the articulation of a ‘solvable problem’ and a tangible, material goal, both of which can silence more diffuse or intransigent problems. However, I argue that fundraising appeals also generate opportunities to articulate community identity, to deliberate about public goods and to generate new affective relations around the ‘public things’ appeals can provide. I conclude by proposing some features of a charitable appeal for public goods that might more effectively interpellate us into new patterns of deliberation and mutual care.