Talk about the poor but not helping them

For the past few years, I spend my time working in an ecosystem where colleagues, clients, and donors share concern to bring impactful solutions to improve the life of people who are often excluded socially and economically. We talk about low income segment who earn less, who rely on cash because she/he does not have bank account, and who juggles between working and doing household responsibilities.

However, sometimes the actions that we did is counterintuitive to what we wanted to achieve. For example, and this happens quite frequent in various topics, where we were invited to some luxurious hotels to discuss let's say how to improve bansos distributions in remote regions. I mean, I like fancy hotels and its food, but knowing that the one day meeting package costs around IDR 600-900k per pax while understanding that in some areas people are waiting for bansos worth of IDR 600k/3 months just does not sit right with me. We just splurge money talking about it than actually use the money to help them.

Another example, there is a situation where I need to give souvenir to the respondent as sign of gratitude. I buy sets of sembako using company's fund because it's part of logistic cost. There were times which I tried to buy sembako from very small warung, owned by elderly couples that we cared about. Unfortunately, I could not use the company fund because this warung does not provide proper receipt and the company would not reimburse it. Eventually, I bought stuffs for my own with my own money and went to big supermarket chain for the sembako. I know company's fund is not a charity, but it still hit me till this day.

Sometimes, we just talk about solution to the poor but not actually helping them.