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Miles, Book Review  43 

  

Book Review 

 

Amateurs without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of 

Global Compassion 
By Allison Schnable  

 
Reviewed by Carrie A. Miles 

 
 

 
 

2021. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 

$29.95 

 

The audience for whom this book will prove most 

useful is also the one most likely to be offended by the 

use of the word “amateur” in the title. But author 

Allison Schnable does not intend “amateur” to mean 

incompetents bungling around the developing world. 

Rather, she uses the word in its original meaning for one 

who loves, or people who engage in a pursuit from 

amor (love) rather than on a paid, professional basis. 

Schnable contrasts the organizations such amateurs 

create, which she calls “grassroots” international non-

governmental organizations (INGOs), with more 

formal INGOs staffed by development professionals. 

Run by volunteers whose motivation is primarily 

personal and expressive rather than result-oriented and 

technical, these small, amateur groups comprise a rising 

tide in international development. 

While this new breed of volunteers is made up of 

amateurs in the sense that they are neither trained in 

development nor part of organizations like World 

Vision or the Peace Corps, the term is not intended to 

imply that they are unskilled in the services they provide 

internationally. Indeed, participants in grassroots 

INGOs may be, among other things, water quality 

engineers, educators, businesspeople, or doctors by 

profession. Unlike employees of professional INGOs, 

however, who are paid and likely live in the countries 

where they serve, amateurs “remain embedded in their 

careers and communities in the United States” (4). 

While the much larger professional INGOs have grown 

into impersonal bureaucracies run by professional 

managers, grassroots INGOs rely on personal 

relationships with both supporters and recipients.     

Schnable identified grassroots INGOs from the 

U.S. tax rolls of international 501(c)(3) organizations. 

The book reports on (1) what Schnable finds from 

those rolls, (2) a content analysis of the websites of a 

random sample of 150 of them, and (3) her in-depth 

case studies of five. The number of INGOs with tax-

exempt status, both grassroots and professional, has 

grown rapidly, from 1,000 in 1990, to 13,030 in 2015. 

Most of these organizations are small, with annual 

budgets of $25,000 or less. Among the examples of 

grassroots INGO projects in developing countries are 

those that provide clean water, solar energy, medical 

equipment and requisite training to use it, vocational 

training, scholarships, markets for arts and crafts, 

schools, orphan projects, and sanitary products that 

allow girls to attend school.  

Given that opportunities to participate in 

professional efforts are extremely limited, and that the 

cost of working internationally has been dropping 

rapidly, Schnable’s study provides the important insight 

that grassroots INGOs are likely to play an increasingly 

large role in international humanitarian outreach. In 

addition, for practitioners, her observations about the 

limitations of amateur organizations offer relief from 

the pressures of trying to be what they are not. For 

example, leaders of amateur agencies can be 

overwhelmed by suggestions for marketing and 

fundraising offered by enthusiastic friends and growth 

consultants. Yet Schnable finds that amateurs’ funding 

and labor come “almost exclusively [from] individual 

donors within the leaders’ personal networks” (160). 

This suggests that amateurs may do better to focus on 

developing those relationships, rather than wasting time 

creating Instagram or Facebook appeals that no one 

outside their network will ever see.  



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 4(1),  Summer 2022 

Miles, Book Review  44 

  

Because most grassroots INGOs focus on personal 

relationships and providing goods and services, 

Schnable considers them to offer charity rather than 

actual development programming. Lacking knowledge 

of the practices of development, as well as any in-depth 

knowledge of local culture, language, and previous 

development programs, amateur efforts, Schnable 

argues, can be inefficient. On the other hand, her 

discussion of the goals of professional development 

suggests that professional INGOs are not efficient 

either. Citing the inside-back cover material from the 

1991 volume of World Development, Schnable finds a 

statement of development goals that lists  

 

improving standards of living, and the human 

condition generally, by examining potential 

solutions to problems such as: poverty, 

unemployment, malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, 

lack of shelter, environmental degradation, 

inadequate scientific and technological 

resources, trade and payments imbalances, 

international debt, gender and ethnic 

discrimination, violation of human rights, 

militarism and civil conflict, and lack of popular 

participation in economic and political life 

(“Aims and Scope”).  

 

In answer to the question of what development 

professionals “actually do, day to day, to bring about” 

their goals, Schnable replies, “Mainly, they talk.” 

Meetings and trainings are their primary activity (79). In 

the meantime, Schnable admits, too much of the 

delivery of the kind of aid originally offered by INGOs, 

such as wells, food, and education, which seem to be 

what recipients really want, falls to the amateurs (80). 

Schnable includes a chapter on the role of religion 

in these organizations, noting that many grassroots 

INGOs are associated with churches and that recipients 

of their services are usually local congregations 

(Chapter 7).  Religious networks provide support for 

amateur organizations on numerous levels, including 

providing the conceptual framework for understanding 

what they offer, initial contact in the host country, 

financial support, volunteer labor, and, finally, ongoing 

supervision of projects in the Global South. One item 

CRDA readers might take as a caution is her 

observation that as religiously-motived INGOs become 

more professionalized and dependent on government 

grants, they lose much of their religious identity and 

begin to operate much like their secular counterparts. 

In general, however, when Schnable discusses the role 

of religion in amateur agencies, she seems to get things 

backwards, implying a deliberate intent on their part to 

“use” religion in service of their charitable goals. Such 

an attribution overlooks the possibility that the motives 

driving these amateur aid-agencies are not a thing 

separate from religion, but an integral part of it.  

If there is a weakness in Schnable’s analysis, it is 

that by attributing amateurs’ dependence on personal 

relationships to their personal preferences, she misses 

the better explanation found in the structural 

constraints amateurs face by virtue of being amateurs. 

Amateurs have, by definition, no established 

infrastructure to give them entry into their target 

country. They must, of necessity, rely on personal 

contacts even to get started. In addition, because 

grassroots INGO volunteers do not live in the country 

they serve, any project that continues in their absence 

requires the involvement of nationals, who also 

participate in the project through personal 

relationships. Without marketing departments, 

advertising budgets, or grant-writers, amateurs must, 

once again, rely on personal relationships for financial 

support and volunteer labor. Although Schnable later 

notes that religious amateur groups “use” religious 

networks to replace the infrastructure of professional 

agencies for initial entry and for sustaining action in the 

host country, she appears unaware of the extent to 

which these connections themselves spring, by 

necessity, from personal relationships.  

Schnable continues by describing grassroots 

INGOs as “supply-driven with strong expressive 

characteristics,” writing that amateur organizations 

“emerge from the entrepreneurial initiative of a founder 

whose own tastes and energies play a determining role 

in shaping the organization” (184-5). She is certainly 

right, to a degree; yet being supply-driven does not 

necessarily distinguish amateur from professional, and 

expressive needs ultimately have little to do with how 

amateurs operate.  Schnable offers clear evidence that 

professional INGOs are also very much driven by taste, 

not that of their staff, but of their funders. She cites 

Monika Krause (2014), who writes that professional 

INGO employees spend much of their time on the 

look-out for “good projects” – i.e., new programs that 

meet the demands of possible funders rather than the 

needs and interests of the recipients.  It may be that one 

of the problems is that in some cases the “goals of 

development” are abstract/intangible, and the programs 

funders support often lack practical value for their 

intended recipients. Unable or unwilling to miss a day 

of work to attend a program of no perceived value to 

them, potential recipients may be understandably 

reluctant to attend. Schnable probably did not come 

across this practice in her case studies, but in some 

countries, professional INGOs motivate attendance at 

their programs by paying participants a “per diem” 

stipend (Jones 2006; Ribakare n.d.). Grassroots 

INGOs, however, do not have the resources to get away 

with offering services that their national partners do not 

want. Those that survive beyond the expressive 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 4(1),  Summer 2022 

Miles, Book Review  45 

  

enthusiasm of an initial trip abroad must balance what 

they want to provide with what their intended recipients 

would like to receive. Otherwise, nothing happens on 

the ground. Having the flexibility to work with 

recipients to meet these needs is, in my opinion, the 

strength of the amateur INGO movement. 

Despite this quibble, Amateurs without Borders 
offers valuable information and insights. I have already 

recommended it to several friends who run such 

“amateur” agencies and I recommend it to the CRDA 

community. 

 

References 

 

“Aims and Scope.” Inside the back cover of World 
Development 19, no. 6, 1991, no page number. 

Jones, Ann. 2006. Kabul in Winter: Life without 
Peace in Afghanistan. New York: Metropolitan 

Books.  

Krause, Monika. 2014. The Good Project: 
Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the 

Fragmentation of Reason. Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press. 

Ribakare, Pontien. Private conversation with the 

author. 

 
 

 

Carrie A. Miles is a non-resident scholar at Baylor 

University, executive director of Empower 

International Ministries, and the author of The 

Redemption of Love; New Man, New Woman, New 
Life (2006); and Face-to-Face (2015). She studies 

family and development in Africa, India, and the U.S.  

 

Author email: carriem@fastmail.com 

 

 

mailto:carriem@fastmail.com

