Tales from the Hood’s response was spot on, especially in the vein of questions I had been giving him. I, and PEPY, should be practicing what I’m preaching. His reaction on his blog was:

“I completely agree with your second paragraph. Please share the URL for a page where we can find external evaluations of Pepy programs (in their entirety), recommendations, full disclosure on your funding streams and operating budgets (including expat and local staff salaries), audit reports, and information about how you build accountability into your programs so that I can link to it on this site.”

My response below:

I agree with your point, I and PEPY, and nearly every organization out there, can do better at being open about what we share and what we learn. I can see why you might have taken offense to my comment, seeing it as holier-than-thou as if I was claiming that PEPY is indeed doing everything right. I am the first to admit that we are not at all, but I do think that it is important to STRIVE to be honest and improve. Strive for more honest PR. Open ourselves up to dialogues with those who have questions about our programs. Conversations with people who disagree with me or with what we are doing at PEPY have been some of the most productive conversations I have had in the cyber world. It helps me learn, gives me a chance to voice the “why’s” behind our decisions, and helps me see the failures I might have missed. In this case, your critique of PEPY as not transparent enough is indeed an impetus to improve, so I thank you for that

I should have included a line in my comment stating “I am not saying we should run around screaming about our failures, but we should admit them, be open to discussions about them when asked, and not only highlight our successes. Nor am I saying I’m doing a great job at that now.” I should have included that, and yes, you are very right, we can do a better job about this at PEPY.

We are trying though, and we are working on doing more. The places we do share are those where I believe it is most important: with the communities we work in, with our partner organizations, with the NGO membership organizations in Cambodia that we belong to, with our staff, and with the individual donors who support us. We regularly correspond with these people openly about where we have failures.

We share some of this information through the critical views section of our website where we have discussed critiques of our work. We have our 990 up on a page in About Us called “Our Funding” http://pepyride.org/about-us/our-funding?896dfae06aed6a520ee2014926e62bae=986bb4bc6d20d554afbba58a85bc3c65 showing all of our expenses, and we have a link in our donations stating that all foreign staff salaries are funded directly by donations allocated as such. It states my salary and our Managing Directors salary by line and by name on page 2. We were the only two full time foreign salaried staff in 2008. As an FYI, our foreign staff salaries are determined by equating them to local equivalents. Our Cambodian Country Manager was receiving $1100 per month, and when our Managing Director (a foreigner) and I instated salaries for ourselves. We determined our salaries by equating them with our local Country Manager’s considering that our workloads and hours worked were always equivalent if not higher. We both get $1100 per month too as of August 2008 when we were given a large grant which in part required us to pay ourselves rather than work at PEPY part time and bring in income elsewhere as we had been doing. The grant is on a three year basis to help us transition to complete Khmer leadership. Most of our programs are fully managed by Khmer staff, but there are still quite a few areas where I need to let go of the reigns and let their decisions be final, and this is something I am indeed working on.

You have a good point that having an operational budget up in addition to our 990 will be a better way to show more details about our spending. Our appendix does include expenditures by category, but I will speak with my staff and my board first, and make sure that we get additional financial information up. You are correct, all these details should all be on our site and I will look to improve our transparency there. However as you can see by this email, we are happy to give these details in a public way when asked.

On our PEPY team journal we include a critical views section including times where people have disagreed with our work. We have a lessons learned section where we also write about things that we are working to improve. I don’t think NGOs have to have a section saying “here are our mistakes” but should admit them when asked. That question I wrote in the above is one I do indeed ask when I meet with NGOs. Their answers and reactions are important to me, the same way it would be when asking a friend what they are working to improve in their own lives. If someone gives themselves a 5 out of 5 all of the time, I’m skeptical to say the least.

Extreme transparency for all organizations might be a very good thing for the industry. I’m not opposed to the idea. I assume (hope?) there was some sarcasm in your reply as well. I think it is important to engage in the critiques of our NGOs, and I’m happy to do so, in this case and in any case which pushes us to improve the work we do.