You can't make a situation worse by focusing on it while feeling bad. And I think we can be pretty sure that anyone looking directly at the conditions of this event won't be honestly feeling good within themselves about it.

The reason for this lack of effect is because you have insignificant attractive power (in the Law of Attraction sense) when you are not in alignment with your broader self. Feeling bad indicates a lack of alignment.

All that would happen in this negative part of the meditation is that the participants would make themselves feel miserable for a while in a highly focused way. I think we can assume there must have been some element of positive visualization following that negativity...it is hard to imagine a meditation leader who only focuses on bad feelings.

As Vesuvius implied, the real value in looking (briefly) at something that makes you feel bad is that it launches a rocket of desire for what you prefer instead.

And then you can use that newly-launched desire as the excuse to focus and come back into alignment, and achieve the manifestation of your newly-launched desire as a by-product.

So, in a sense, using that approach of negativity first would give more of a kick to the positive aspect of the meditation provided you didn't stay in the negativity too long.

Good intentions and a couple of dollars will get you a cup of coffee.

I agree that it does seem like a backwards approach. What was the rest of the meditation? It wouldn't surprise me if this was an attempt to motivate people to give, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Most television commercials that solicit donations do so by showing you the horrors that your giving is supposed to fix. These commercials are very successful at raising money for the cause.

Some meditations require a visualization of the negative first, so that you can observe a contrast between the way things are and the way you would like things to be. This corresponds with the asking step of the manifestation process, as described by Abraham. But once the contrast is observed, you're supposed to let that go, and move on to the subsequent steps of manifestation.

This doesn't seem like it could help them. It could stir up compassion for them which would make the efforts of healing more concerned and concentrated. That is the only benefit I could see.