This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project.

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In the private sector, picking the right people to work for your business is not only an approach, it is a sacred strategy. Extensive resources go into personality tests, interview questionnaires, highly paid consultants and entire HR departments to deal with attracting, hiring and retaining talent.

Yet after six years working in the development sector in Cambodia, Pari has witnessed many, many organizations make the fatal but depressingly common mistake of blatantly ignoring their team and its development. We’ve spent time in many organizations without job descriptions, performance reviews, or clear recruitment processes. We’ve talked to staff who have never been asked for their feedback, and who don’t know where to take their grievances.

Developing countries struggle enormously to develop and retain talent; there are more African doctors working in America than there are working in Africa. Under these circumstances, you’d think the development organizations tasked with building society would value people above all. But it’s rarely the case.

Why the paradox? Building an empowered, innovative, ambitious and motivated workforce calls for an intensive investment of time in people. Often organizations are not able to, cannot or are unwilling to make this investment in the short-term, and as a result the stability, growth and ‘greatness’ of their organization suffers enormously in the long-term.

Management guru Jim Collins takes it one step further when talking about what it means to go from a ‘good’ organization to a ‘great’ organization: “First get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it. The ‘who’ questions should come before the ‘what’ decisions – before vision, before strategy, before organizational structure, before tactics. First who, then what.”

I often note that HR is the hardest part of my job, and my team is relatively small at 15. Searching for an intangible set of characteristics in a person is never easy, and relentlessly developing, empowering and challenging them once they’re on board is a much greater challenge. But if there is one thing I have observed in ‘great’ organizations, is that they value their team immensely. They involve their team in every big decision, foster lively debate, develop policies as need arises, thoughtfully tie compensation to performance, and engage in a high level of communication with their team.

This list is far from exhaustive, and we’re always learning what it takes to build a great team. Got ideas? Share them below.

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This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Parivartan Project. Pari is a social enterprise that provides fundraising, marketing and organizational development services to grassroots development organizations that ‘believe in better’. To learn more: www.thepariproject.com

This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project. She asked to share a reflection she had written about one of Pari’s clients, Epic Arts.

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I’m lucky that one of my favorite clients also happens to be one of my favorite people. Our friend Hannah started volunteering at a small disability arts organization called Epic Arts six years ago. Today, she’s the managing director and has been running the show for a few years.

In Cambodia, having a disability carries a double stigma; it is thought to be a result of your karma. Families often shut their children away. If those children are hearing impaired or blind, they are rarely given a medium for communication unlike Chicago, where I grew up, where we have hearing aids, braille and sign language. Many times parents give up early on their children ever being ‘normal’.

Epic Arts uses the arts as a way to connect to the students. But it’s not your average finger painting/pipe cleaner curriculum. Last year, they hosted a highly acclaimed modern dance choreographer from Japan, who worked with the dance students on a contemporary dance piece called ‘4D’; the deaf dancers couldn’t hear the notes, but they knew the music. And they performed it beautifully in Trafalgar Square.

The grounds in Kampot have been custom designed by a British architect; the floors are ‘sprung’ so that students can safely learn circus, break dancing, aerobatics, and yoga. The arts room hosts puppet making on a grand scale; life-sized cars, houses, and paper mache people line the walls.

All this is very expensive compared to more basic arts programs. You could never argue the work is ‘sustainable’. The staff to student ratio is extraordinarily high. They invest a lot of money in capacity building for their staff, many of whom have disabilities themselves. Per student spending is in the thousands of dollars per year – in Cambodia, where the average person makes approximately $500/year. If you ask Charity Navigator, they’d be a ‘one star’ charity cause they spend a lot on admin and overhead salaries. The total cost to build the Arts Center could have provided homes to 100 families.

But Epic Arts always a special magic – everyone who visits there says its so – and I’ve always wondered where it came from.

Han was in the office today, and I asked her what ‘believing in better’ meant to her. She spoke repeatedly about wanting to achieve the ‘best’ for her students. It doesn’t matter that we’re in Cambodia. It doesn’t matter that the ‘beneficiaries’ are disabled. It doesn’t matter that many of their parents don’t think it’s worth the time investment. It doesn’t matter that donors don’t GET why the number served looks low.

Han doesn’t have any false notions of saving these students, or curing them or healing them. She just wants to provide them the same opportunities a student in London, Hong Kong or New York would have. It’s not just that she invests time in the students; it’s that they are on a relentless quest to create a new future for them. They’re pushing themselves constantly – the next performance, the next exhibition, the next global tour – cause in doing so, they’re showing the staff & students what it means to push yourself into greatness.

Epic Arts isn’t easy to fundraise for; I should know, because we’ve been doing it for nearly 2 years now. It breaks with traditional measurements for effectiveness and impact, and challenges us to reconfigure. Epic Arts highlights the importance of flexibility, figuring it out as you go, and making a deep commitment to those you ‘serve’. Though Hannah would never say she serves. She’d say she just delivers the best.

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This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Parivartan Project. Pari is a social enterprise that provides fundraising, marketing and organizational development services to grassroots development organizations that ‘believe in better’. To learn more: www.thepariproject.com

I (Daniela) have served on an informal advisory board for Epic Arts for the past year, and I too have been witness to the impact Epic Arts has had on the lives of both their staff as well as the students who are able to go through their programs. In reading through Allie’s reflection above, I pictured a class I had been able to sit in on recently at Epic where young teenage deaf students had been invited to a workshop series using movement and dance to teach sign language. It was beautiful to see students communicating with each other using sign language for the first time when most of them had gone through more than 10 years of their lives with no formal language. Allie’s piece brings to light the disconnect in how we often value NGOs. Is it the overhead to program ratio that matters more, or the impact the group is having? And how do you value that impact vs. the alternatives? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

Jargon. NGO’s are full of it. Yesterday our EMC had a meeting in CD with the VCD. This is actually a true statement.

We don’t just acronym-ize everything, we also use regular words which once had a commonly defined meaning and use them in so many varieties of ways that in the end you might as well have said “blah”. Your “sustainability index” could be your “blah index” for all I know. What is this sustainability you speak of? I started a different post a few years ago with the same sentence it seems… I guess I’m still unsure!

I was recently asked how I personally define “sustainability” when talking about our work at PEPY, and here is what I had written. Tear it apart, use it, or throw it away. It doesn’t matter because EGBOK and IYQ and all that stuff. TTFN

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We view “sustainability” in two ways at PEPY:

1) Financial sustainability
This is easy to understand. We question if, financially, the program can continue on into the future. Part of the appeal of the Sahakum Apeewat Sala (Communities Developing Schools) program model is that we are working to expand the opportunities for active community members to improve their schools and education systems by connecting them to the tools and knowledge they need to do this on their own. The school development plans are created and enacted by the community, and this part of the system can continue on without PEPY and PEPY’s funding in the future. (That said, this “sustainability” makes the programs take a LOT longer to achieve high levels of impact, though it is more likely that that impact can be “sustained” at that level. This is a debate we are currently having in our strategic planning – higher impact now with lower long term impact in the future, or tiny step by step impact now and long into the future… the right choice we decided, as we often do, is “it depends”.)

2) Investing time in people
We believe that one of the keys to “sustainability” is to invest time in people, rather than buying short-term fixes in the form of material things. In other clichéd words, “Teach a man to fish and he can eat forever.” Yes, some of our programs still “Give a man a fish” in many ways, and we are working to find the right balance that we need for the long-term success of our programs, but we are generally aiming for the “Teach a main to fish” model. Our analysis of the SAS model’s sustainability components rests on the training components of the program. When community members who want to see their local schools improved for their children are empowered with the knowledge of what rights they have to government support for education, how to request support when those commitments are not met, and a system to examine and take action around problems and their root causes, they can continue to use these skills long into the future.

Is this how YOU define sustainability?!

Layheng Ting is PEPY‘s new Director. Here is a piece she recently wrote for the PEPY newsletter which I thought I would re-post here.  Thanks Layheng, and welcome to the team!

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Sustainability has been a buzz word in development work for a long time, but how to actually make a project sustainable still remains a big challenge. At PEPY, the challenge is no different from elsewhere. This is the second year in a row that PEPY has focused on helping schools become sustainable using a borrowed model called SAS (Sahakum Aphiwat Sala), or “Communities Developing Schools” in English. This model was originally developed at the Schools for Children of Cambodia, in which one of our consultants, Andrea Messmer, was involved with its development and implementation. I personally believe in the model, as it has so much potential to help schools be self-sustainable if implemented correctly. Like any other sustainability model, it comes with its own challenges.

From my interactions with the SAS team during my first month at PEPY, I can say that the model is now gaining momentum. Our team has worked to form active School Support Committees (SSCs) in each of the three schools we are implementing the model with. Each SSC has identified the problems that need to be fixed and has developed an annual development plan. Last year’s main projects included community initiatives like building shade structures for students to study in, life skills training from community members, and effective teaching and learning (ETL) workshops for teachers. This year, one project that has been recently accomplished is school land filling. This project involves filling low areas at school with soil to raise land levels in order to avoid flooding during the rainy season. A second project, building a school garden, is on its way to success as well.

Two main income generating projects, fish raising and mushroom growing, have been identified by the SSC in their development plans, and our SAS team has been working very hard to help them figure out if these programs could provide the schools with a decent income. If these two projects are successful, next year schools can continue these projects by themselves without any intervention from our team. For the mushroom growing project, one difficulty the SSC faces is the lack of expertise in mushroom spore making. For fish raising, it is a completely new experience for the SSC, but according to the business plan, it would be a worthwhile project for the school to try out this year.

To improve the capacity of SSCs, the SAS team has so far provided SSC proposal-writing classes, which were attended by many committee members. Through proposal-writing trainings, the SSCs can gain the ability to find various sources of income by themselves after PEPY moves to a new target area, as SAS is aimed to provide transitional community support for 3-5 years.

The SSCs were so enthusiastic about the trainings. While the momentum is high, the SSCs’ ability to grasp the contents of the training varies, and thus the SAS team is now trying to figure out the best strategy to make the proposal training most effective. The most recent school visit to two model schools was a great learning experience for the SSC, and the team was able to bring back new ideas to develop their schools.

Despite signs of success, some challenges remain. From our past experiences, we realized that in order for the schools to be more sustainable, we need more in-house technical staff. This would allow more capacity building of teachers and leadership training for school directors and the school support committee, which is key to improving the quality of education offered at our partner schools. In the past we hired technical experts external to PEPY to offer training to the teachers, and that is not enough. We have so far interviewed a number of candidates for these technical expert positions. When we have technical experts on our team, we will start a rigorous training for teachers and management.

In the first month I have spent with PEPY, here are some lessons I have learned from being involved closely with SAS program:

1. Lack of teacher motivation might hamper the entire SAS process. We can only do so much if teachers do not have the motivation to teach well. To help fix this, it is important for the SAS team to learn how to ask the right questions to the SSC, so that everyone understands that a teacher’s motivation is important, and that low salaries might hamper motivation. Thus, in their next school development plan, they should focus on raising community support for teachers’ salaries if they see it as a problem.

2. The community can only do so much to help schools with their stretched pockets and their doubts regarding the usefulness of education. To respond to this, PEPY’s next step would be to focus even more on community mobilization through brain gain and encouraging educated community members to continue to be involved at the local level. With this in mind, PEPY should work more closely with the Junior High School to ensure a quality education, so that students who graduate from Junior High can do well in High School, pass the high school exit exam, and can continue on to higher education. I believe when students from the community continue to succeed in their schooling, get a job, and give back to the community, they will set a good example for the next generation to follow and the community will have more belief in education.

3. PEPY should continue to find ways to involve the community in all the programs that it has been implementing. One of the biggest outcomes I have seen from PEPY’s programs is the VCD initiative.  Students from Chanleas Dai have created their own organization called “Volunteers for Community Development” and they are taking action to improve their own communities, which is exactly the type of initiative we want to foster.

I can’t see any better model than SAS in helping such a marginalized population to be able to achieve what they deserve: a quality education. Community involvement is the best solution to making schools successful in such a circumstance.  I look forward to continuing to work with the PEPY team to try to find the best ways to provide communities with the skills, models, and motivation to forge ahead in making improvements to their schools.

Yesterday I posted a piece which has gotten a lot of attention that is questioning our human tendency to focus on the hero story rather than the impact of development work.

My complaints are not so useful if I don’t consider giving alternative options … so here we go. Here are some of my take-aways for the Would-Be-NGO-Fan-or-Donor which also apply to the Budding-Do-Gooder. There are MANY more ideas for guidelines than this and countless development blogs which focus on responsible development work (like this one), so don’t take this as a complete list.  I will focus on a few topics relating to yesterday’s post in order to help us avoid the hero-story dilemma and to stop incentivizing people to move to a “poor place” and take immediate action. I believe that, if we all stuck to this code of conduct, we’d have at least slightly fewer failures in the social sector and our money would be having more impact.

PLEASE add your thoughts to this.  It is not a thorough list, and I’d love to read more ideas about what I might have overlooked.

The Would-Be-Donor and Budding-Do-Gooder’s code of conduct

I, the soon-to-be do-gooder or donor to one, do herby commit to doing good through following these principals of high-quality do-gooderness:

1)   I promise that, if I know nothing at all about a social issue that I would like to effect positive change in, before choosing which group to fund or starting my own project or NGO, I will ask others who DO know about the issue to educate me a bit more before taking action. If the project I am considering being a part of is in a country or area I know little about, I will ask a range of people who live in that area their opinions and value those over mainstream media reports.

2)   If I can find a role model in this area, I will even go out of my way to thoroughly research or work for their project for a period of time so that I can better understand how and why their work is successful. As a donor, I will choose to praise and fund people who do research before starting large projects and who value and acknowledge that we have to learn before we can help.

3)   I will do research to educate myself by asking a range of other organizations working in the same sector to understand the lessons they have learned and to try to avoid making the same mistakes others have made in the past.

4)   I will ask a range of people working in the same field who they respect in the sector and why. I will ask people about their failures and what changes they have made to their programs now rather than in years prior which have increased the impact of the work they are doing.  If they can’t or won’t answer questions relating to mistakes they have made, I will not give them funding nor will I consider theirs a highly respectable model worth repeating.

5)   If I feel that I understand the sector, the common mistakes and the issues involved, and if my proposed solution is embraced, not only by my family who are pretty much obliged to love my ideas, and not just by local media in my hometown who know little about the work I am trying to do, but is supported by a range of experts and experienced do-gooders who are also working in the same area, only then will I consider taking action.

6)   I will focus on designing and refining the impact of what I am doing first before I start thinking about branding, logos, and fundraising.  If I am donating to a project, I will fund groups who speak about, focus on, and answer questions relating to their impact rather than being wooed by the NGO choices with pretty websites, main stream media, or late-night TV features.

7)   If I am not the beneficiary, as in, if I am trying to help a group of which I am not a part (perhaps “the poor people of such-and-such place” or “people with a, b, or c problems which I don’t have”), then I will first seek to find a leader who IS part of that group, and consider partnering or working for them first rather than taking charge on my own. As a donor, I will value organizations which are spearheaded by a local person or member of the beneficiary group, or at minimum, a group working towards such leadership.

8)   If I dare to then start something, knowing the hard work, the common problems, and the level of commitment this is going to take, I commit to admitting my mistakes along the way and sharing them with others so that they can hopefully learn from them too. I will admit and share my failures, and I will not try to hide them. As a donor or super-fan, I will “like” organizations who talk about and share the lessons they learn with others and I will value discussions of failures.

9)   I will always remember that I am human and that I can’t solve all of the world’s problems at once. I will keep in mind that I have my own needs as well, and that I shouldn’t make life-long promises to anyone if I am not sure that I will commit to keeping them in the future.

10)   If a donor, journalist, friend, or fan praises me saying that I am “like Mother Theresa,” thinks I’m so great for “dedicating my life to the poor,” or says “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you go out there and do something,” I will correct them. I will let them know that development work done poorly CAN cause a lot of harm, and I will give them examples because I will have seen some of these while doing my research. I will remind people about the IMPACT of the work I am doing and tell them that is what they should focus on, not the fact that I’m so brave/cool/or nun-like. As an observer, I will become a fan of people who don’t let me compare them to Bono.

Please add more!

I heard a disturbing story this week. A friend who works in Battambang, a northwestern province of Cambodia, told me that she had recently met a young traveler from Australia in her late teens who said she was starting an orphanage.

When asked why she came to Cambodia, she said:

“I was so inspired by a story I saw on TV that I decided to come here myself.  Cambodian kids are SO cute!  Now I have three of my own!”

Uh oh …

The most disturbing part of this statement is the issue that this girl is treating Cambodian kids like Barbie dolls—as if she can just pick the cutest one off the shelf, take it home, and call it hers. But I want to focus on the bigger picture. Why did this girl think coming here to “save” Cambodian children was ok? Where did she get the go-ahead to do this?

She got the thumbs up from us. From society at large. From what the media chooses to highlight. And from hero-worshipers who focus on the WHO of social causes and not the WHAT.

This teenager had been inspired by a TV feature she had seen about another young girl who came here to Cambodia at 21 years old and later, as the media describes it, “saved Cambodian orphans” by becoming their “mother.”  She was given awards in her home country for setting up an orphanage and the media produced a documentary starring this girl, reenacting not only her original rescue of 17 kids from a horrible orphanage, but also her own reenactment of how she took in additional kids she had found who were living with other families whom she felt needed a better home.

Although the media was clearly trying to highlight this girls bravery, her story of leaving a wealthy society behind to help the poor, and her remarkable instinct to act while so many others might have been too scared, for a range of reasons, to do so, the media and the award judges probably did not consider that other young people might view this as permission to go to a poor country and “getting a few cute orphans of their own”?  It seems like they should have.

I think we as a society need to be careful how we highlight philanthropy and who we choose to idealize. The stories people hear about development work around the world tend to be those of people who have led lives others might envy (working in film, Hollywood producers or starts, wealthy New York elite, etc). The media LOVES it – they love talking about how beautiful people, who could have continued to pursue popular and idealized careers, “gave it all up to help the poor.”

But they rarely focus on WHAT those people are doing—or better yet, HOW is they are doing it? Before we turn “do-gooders” into national heroes we need to move beyond the hero story of leaving fame and fortune behind and ask the tough questions. We need to do due diligence and dig into the WHAT of these organizations, not just the WHO, to be sure we are promoting responsible, educated, long-term efforts which can be models for replicable positive change.

In Cambodia, the Ministry of Social Affairs has guidelines around orphanages, and they—and so many other child protection groups around the world—state that keeping children with their families or extended families should be top priority where possible and, if that is not possible, one should consider foster care or small (8 children per adult recommended) family-style living. By promoting media pieces, awards, and articles which make it almost seem easy to take a child out of a bad situation and put them into a better one just by the nature of only rewarding and recognizing the act of removing the kids from where they were, we are giving others permission and incentive to repeat those actions.  The media rarely digs into best practices around an issue. In the case of orphanages, the media didn’t think to discuss alternatives or to do into questions about what globally respected child rights organizations describe as best practices in this area. When people fall in love with the hero stories they see on Oprah – people building schools, digging wells, building libraries – they often take a deep look into the story of the person taking action, but gloss over the details of the organization’s actions.

If we skip over those things, all we see is a hero’s story. The desire to help is something we need to embrace and then harness for good in the most responsible way. But, good intentions are not enough, and we can’t continue to praise people because their IDEA was good, or their INTENTIONS were good. This post is not intended to say that things which start out without following best practices can not be great or praise worthy in the future.  This post is to remind people who vote for “hero” awards, people who work in media, and all of us who talk about/donate to/volunteer for/idealize those who have gone out to “do good” in the world, to BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PROMOTE THROUGH YOUR PRAISE!

By praising things which make development work look easy, which make it seem like any person with no specific training can come in and start a successful NGO project, which only focus on praising how something started but overlook the discussion of the long-term systems in place to ensure a positive impact, we are setting up more opportunities for development work disasters. This isn’t the first time a young, self-identified-as-unqualified person has been praised for taking in orphans in a “poor country.” Nicholas Kristof promoted this type of action in the New York Times by highlighting a 19-year-old girl who started a children’s shelter in Nepal (see Maggie’s story in this DIY Aid article).

I feel passionately about this issue because I was once the young idealistic 20-something myself who started something I too was unqualified to start (and I sure am glad that what I started didn’t involve taking children into my home!). The reason I have this blog is to share the lessons I have learned in order to help prevent people from making the same mistakes I made. When I was twenty-six, some friends and I organized a bike trip across Cambodia, and we thought we could improve education by building a school.  We were fortunate to realize that starting a school on our own would not have been the wisest decision, so we found an NGO building schools and raised funds for their work. Were we praised for this “heroic deed” or building a school in a poor country when all of us came from rice places like the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Finland?  Yes, of course!  Lots of people wrote notes or articles about our heroic deeds.

But what were they praising?  A bunch of kids building a building which would sit there empty if we left it at that.  It has taken us five years of hard work to try to make that initial investment of a building worth while as we realized that other organizations were more concerned with building buildings than building education.

We started off funding this work by offering “voluntourism” trips, where people could “save the world in a week” and come volunteer in Cambodia.  What we learned early on was that we were doing two major disservices by offering trips which were focused on giving rather than learning: 1) by rushing to help, we were encouraging people to take action before they fully understood a problem or a goal, which can often lead to unnecessary mistakes; and 2) we were creating experiences which made US feel good, which were catering to the universal desire to be a hero, and which were more about filling the needs of the looking-to-feel-needed traveler than of the “beneficiaries” of the projects we claimed to be supporting. We realized through our own missteps that we have to learn before we can help, and that sustainable change takes time and expertise.

My friend Nik made a great comment about this mentality when she said:

While I understand the desire to help kids who are in bad situations, I can’t understand why people think the logical solution is for the kids to be then entrusted in the care of a young girl. If we come across someone who says their community needs a well, no one would just start digging on the spot and fudge their way through it, would they? It would be obvious that you didn’t know what you were doing!

But sometimes it isn’t obvious to the “doer”, and that is why I think we need more development education initiatives in schools, for travelers, and for the philanthropists.  It also isn’t always obvious to the media, and then the media sells heroes to the public based on their personal story of taking action without the knowledge to back that up, as if that were a GOOD thing.

So why do we allow this when it comes to KIDS—real humans—rather than wells? And why do we incentivize it by making people heroes, thereby encouraging others to do the same? After seeing too many cases of people who have been praised as heroes who then leave the project they started after a few years when it gets too hard, I think we need to redefine a hero as someone who takes the time to research, learn, and make sustainable choices in an effort to make their project NOT all about them, but about the impact the media seems to always overlook.

The media is not afraid to dig deep into the hero story. They are looking at THEM with a microscope – interviewing their parents, finding out about her past – but they are not looking at THE WORK they are apparently being praised for with the same microscopic lens.  Where is the interview of the the stakeholders? Where is the discussion of long-term plans for the wells, for the schools, for the kids?

It is interesting that, for all of the general population’s talk about wanting to understand the impact that an organization has before we make a financial contribution, we seem to say one thing and yet do another. We get blinded both by great advertising and by fame, yet we state that we understand the responsibility of donating. When we donate, we are voting with our funding – we are voting for what we want to see repeated. If we don’t do our homework and we fall victim to flashy branding or tear-jerking stories, we are voting for something we know little about. In this case, the media voted, and more teenagers are coming to Cambodia to start their own orphanages.

Let’s focus on impact rather than on the “hero” if we want to praise successful models which we’d like to see repeated. This is not to discredit the entrepreneurial spirit – I love people who see a problem and come up with new and previously unimagined solutions to the world’s problems – we need those people! But I’ve learned that those of us who are inclined to jump into action with our ideas need to take a breath, look around and ask questions, and examine other possible solutions which have already been tried and tested, ESPECIALLY when it comes to kids. We continue to dole out praise for this type of work at the same time that the mainstream media is finally recognizing that orphanages and orphanage-based volunteer work can cause such negative impacts!

Kjerstin Erickson, founder of Forge, gets it right when talking about the focus on “The Social Entrepreneur.” Her complaints from her SocialEdge blog against focusing on the founder’s story can apply here:

“…the mythology of The Social Entrepreneur revolves the whole story around the individual. Through a shrewd sleight-of-hand, our attention is turned away from the collective movement and toward an individual onto whom a Hero’s Journey is imposed. The drama of such a tale is high, but at what cost? Kings and Queens are made, and many a speaking career launched…but what is sacrificed? What collective narrative, what real representation of holistic social change, what inclusive vision for proudly joining hands as small cogs in a big wheel?”

She knows all about the problems of focusing on the “hero” rather than the work because she herself went to Africa as a teenager and then started up a development organization.  She too was recognized around the world as a talented young woman who had every opportunity available to her through her Stanford education and yet she chose to “do good.” It must have been frustrating for Kjerstin to get praise around her hero’s journey all of the time when she was probably more proud of the cases when people dug in deeper and learned about her work enough to praise her for her IMPACT, not her decision to put her pretty face into a poor country.

THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THESE HEROES CAN’T OR DON’T GO ON TO DO GREAT THINGS!  If anything, let’s hope the praise and fame incentivizes them to continue to improve their work.  In my own story, once all of these people had donated their hard-earned money to help us build a school and praised us for our efforts, I felt a need to prove them right.  When we realized a school does not teach kids, people do, we could have walked away with a pretty building with our name on it, but instead we stayed.  We started off unqualified, and in my opinion, NOT worthy of praise.  I would NOT recommend anyone to move to Cambodia and start an NGO when they know very little about the people/place/systems.  We didn’t deserve praise when we got it. BUT, now, after five years, there are parts of our work and our programs that I think can and should be viewed as repeatable models, and many other organizations are coming to look at or train with our programs to see them repeated.  In other words, for all of the heros we have commended for how they STARTED, we should check in and check in to commend them for how they IMPROVED as, we don’t want to provide incentives for unqualified people to start things.  We want to inspire people to support or learn about models which work to positively impact their goals and target areas, and that takes a lot more time/effort/know-how and commitment than just the heroic act of starting something.

There is a debate going on in the comments of this blog right now which has gotten into this “hero’s journey” dilemma as well. One of the commenters admits that his respect for the popular organization, charity:water is due in part to his love for the founder’s “leaving big fancy job to save the world” story. If we are going to focus on impact, we need to dig deeper and know what we are funding behind the famous face.

We need to dig into the WHAT of these organizations, not just the WHO, to be sure we are promoting responsible, educated, long-term efforts which can be models for replicable positive change. We should be praising people who go out and learn – who go out and educate themselves on the responsible ways to have an impact before they act, ESPECIALLY when it comes to taking kids in. If we don’t and if the media continues to depict acts of young people with little or no qualifications working directly with kids as heroic, then we are providing incentives for more development disasters with other young people “getting a few cute orphans of their own”?  What a shame.

Watch what you promote.

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NOTE: This post was changed to remove a name/organization, but the message and previous examples are still the same with additional examples added in.  The point is still the same: Promote good impact. Not just good and interesting people.

ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE: I recognize that criticism is less helpful than suggestions for improved future actions. Read this next post about actions you can take as a budding-do-gooder and a wanna-be-responsible-donor which can help us avoid funding or starting irresponsible aid projects.  This is by no means a complete or thorough list – please add your thoughts!

Resources:

How to evaluate an orphanage, by Saundra Schimmelpfennig

Before you pay to volunteer abroad, think of the harm you might do, by Ian Birrell

Cambodian Orphanage Tourism, on Aljezeera

Orphanage Tourism: The Catch-22 of Orphanage Funding, by Eric Lewis

Orphanage Tourism in Cambodia: Good Intentions are Not Enough, by Saundra Schimmelpfennig

A Protest Against Orphanage Tourism, and other orphanage tourism related posts on this blog

Sasha Dichter of Acumen Fund reminds us to be generous and use our heart, but to “ask the tough questions”

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 programs.

If we fund a building, we can see it and touch it and know that our money went where we had intended it to go.

But, what are we missing when we invest only in things we can put our name on?

We are missing out on investing in real change.

The changes we say that we want to see in the world—in health, education, the environment, and in all of the social ills plaguing our schools, families, and our planet—cannot be fixed by investing in things. More schools, more bednets, more health centers, more books, and more school uniforms are not going to solve these problems, no matter how many we give away.

We can’t emblazon our name on a person’s forehead the way we can on a hospital building: Funded by the Smith Family. Investing in people isn’t as rewarding in the short term – you don’t see a space turn from empty to full, a building go up brick by brick, or books lining shelves. But, as we fill people with knowledge and skills, connect them to the ideas and resources they need to make the changes they want to see in the world, and create opportunities that didn’t exist before, we start to fill the real voids we have in the world: people with the skills and passion to go out and make the changes they believe in.

We made this mistake at PEPY. We came to Cambodia and built a school, thinking that a new building would improve education, not realizing that a safe space is only the tip of the iceberg of what is needed to improve the quality of education in a place. The rest has to do with human beings. We need a revolution of philanthropy. We need fewer people donating to build a well with their name on it or to build empty schools and health centers with beautiful plaques hanging on the walls, and more people supporting educational opportunities for people to learn the skills and bring in the income to solve their problems on their own. I’ve invested in the wrong things many times and I’ve seen what it takes to make changes. I know now: buildings don’t change lives. PEOPLE do. So rather than writing our names on more buildings, let’s get out our tattoo pens and start investing in people to change the world.

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Disclaimer: The author does not REALLY think that we should write on people. She does though really think that we should INVEST in people, even though we can’t put a name plate on them. Please note that no people were harmed in the taking of these photos and that all investment in all of us in the images was in the form of opportunities to connect and learn, not tattoo ink.