Posts categorized under Development

05 August 2010 ~ View Comments

How do YOU define “Responsible Travel”?

I recently wrote a piece about PEPY Tours on World Nomad’s website.  I am reposting it below as it relates to a lot of the themes of this blog: Responsible Giving, voluntourism, Cambodia, etc Fast Five Profile: PEPY Tours One of the PEPY riders on her bike for Cambodian based PEPY Tours 1. Who are [...]

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25 July 2010 ~ View Comments

Process vs Product Driven Development Models

I loved this piece!  It is not only the part where Christopher London says “A building can’t teach.” when referencing donating school buildings that resonated with me, but his whole conclusion that product-driven development might sometimes be easier but less effective. Sing it, Christopher! (I wrote to his organization to get approval to re-post this [...]

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31 May 2010 ~ View Comments

Why do you hate SCALE so much?

I don’t. I want to clarify. My piece in Beyond Profit called “Much Ado About Scale” was intended to be anti-scale. If we can scale a quality solution: fabulous! It was intended to encourage other ways of looking at reaching more people with our ideas, rather than just trying to encourage organizations to “scale up” [...]

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22 February 2010 ~ View Comments

Our Development Philosophy

You can read more about each of our programs on the PEPY website, but I thought it might be more important to tell you the WHYs and HOWs of the decisions we make in our program design, rather than just talk about numbers of trainings and books we give out. Our development philosophy is based [...]

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25 December 2009 ~ View Comments

Are Hybrid Organizations Half Bad, Half Good, or Just Confusing?

Or, like so many of these questions which try to put who sectors into a “good or bad” category, does it just depend on a case-by-case basis? This post on Social Edge talks about hybrid organizations and I added the comment below which relates to other thoughts I have posted on my blog about social [...]

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22 December 2009 ~ View Comments

More orphanage tourism (No!)

I recently tried to post a comment in response to this listing on Trip Advisor which encourages visits to orphanages while traveling in Siem Reap. As my comment was not  a review of the area, it was not approved, so I am posting it here. — I am writing in response to a post stating [...]

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02 November 2009 ~ View Comments

What does “international volunteer” mean to you?

vol⋅un⋅teer  [vol-uhn-teer] –noun 1. a person who voluntarily offers himself or herself for a service or undertaking. 2. a person who performs a service willingly and without pay. It would probably make a lot more sense if we stopped using the title “volunteer” for positions where people are getting paid.  The result is that I have [...]

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