UPDATE (September, 2021)

September 21, 2021·20 min·2 clips

A leaked email reveals how We Charity told donors the exact opposite of what they told the Canadian public about their closure.

Jesse Brown delivers follow-up information on We Charity after his investigative podcast series The White Saviors. He reveals a leaked email from Craig Kielburger to Allstate Foundation, We Charity's largest corporate donor with over $90 million in contributions since 2014. While publicly telling Canadians they were closing to protect humanitarian work in Kenya, Kielburger privately told Allstate they were scaling back in Canada to focus on U.S. growth and build their partnership. The email made no mention of the Canadian scandal or investigations. Brown reports that We Charity has announced closure of humanitarian aid work in all countries except Kenya, including operations in Ecuador, India, Sierra Leone, and Haiti. The organization claims mission accomplished and sustainability achieved, though the timing coincides with ongoing crises in these regions. Currently, We Charity operates two different websites - a memorial page for Canadian visitors and a fully functional site for American users. The American site continues claiming they built 1,500 schools and offers new educational resources, while the Canadian site removed this claim. Brown estimates hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of American students are currently engaged with We Charity materials in approximately 10,000 U.S. schools, mostly unaware of the Canadian scandal. He shares new information from former We Charity ghostwriter Rob Benninger, who reveals how the organization gamed the New York Times bestseller list by sending employees in vans to buy their own books across North America, then mailing them back for reuse at events. On August 19th, We Charity's lawyers sent a preemptive libel notice trying to prevent publication of The White Saviors podcast, which aired the next day. No lawsuit has followed. In response to the podcast's success in Canada, We Charity employees and Kenyan Twitter accounts launched a coordinated campaign posting over 2,000 tweets, making 'Jesse Brown lies' the top trending topic in Kenya. Brown interprets this as an attempt to suppress word-of-mouth promotion rather than reach Kenyan audiences, since fewer than 700 episodes were downloaded there. The campaign appeared designed to shame people who recommended the podcast, successfully reducing social media promotion. Brown emphasizes the story continues as We Charity regroups and reinvents itself internationally, particularly maintaining its U.S. operations while shedding its Canadian identity and scandal.

As heard by us

A careful update on WE Charity's American afterlife.

Jesse Brown returns to The White Saviors with a tighter, more current read on WE Charity. He treats the piece as a follow-up in practice, not a sequel, and lays out what has changed since it first ran.

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You want the latest WE Charity fallout, with new details and context attached.

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