Ahh, bednets. NGOs sell the idea of giving things away by equating each thing we give away to “the poor”, like a bednet, as equal to “saving a life”. If only it were that easy…. This week a fascinating group of visiting students told us about a campaign that had happened in their school to [...]
Over the course of the last five years we have jotted down many rules and given presentations internally at PEPY about our writing guidelines. I spent the better part of the day today locating them and compiling them, and they have a lot of the same themes. Here are a selection of the Do’s and [...]
We want to know that our money went to “the right place”. We have been taught to be fearful that our donations might aid corruption or not be used in the way we had intended. As such, it’s easier for us to build buildings than invest time in people through things like trainings & education [...]
Last week I wrote a blog post complaining about volunteer sending organizations trying to “sell” their 17 year old volunteers to NGO organizations. I then got a very well thought out response from 16 year old Naya Herman who is considering volunteering abroad and so I decided to answer her two questions in two new [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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” [...]