My goodness… I have never gotten more emails, Facebook messages, and general questions about a social sector issue than this week with #KONY2012. “What do I think?”, you ask?

In case you have really not heard anything about this, which if you are reading this blog I find shocking, then just google #STOPKONY or #KONY2012, and you should be well on your way to learning more.

I think this campaign and subsequent backlash, is bringing a few important issues to light:

1) Most people do not really understand the system their money is going into when they donate.

Our friends asks us to give, and we do.
We hope it’s going to a good cause. (90% of us)
Only some gather ANY information at all before donating. (69%)
Few self describe as doing any “research” at all before donating. (33%)
And almost no one compares non-profits. (6%)
(Hope Consulting)

And it doesn’t even really matter if we do compare, as most of us don’t understand what questions are important to consider and how to evaluate “impact” on any given issue.

2) A lot of NGO money is wasted because few are asking good questions. And “program costs” does NOT mean what you think it means.

I sometimes want to create a TV ad campaign, like the “Rock the vote” ones, that says “I ASK QUESTIONS” reminding people to ask questions before they donate money. But then I realize, it might make matters worse, because we’re asking the WRONG ones.

People still focus on one question when it comes to donating: “How much of my money is going to the cause?” They problem is, many of us are making incorrect assumptions about the answers we get. I do commend Invisible Children for breaking their $9 million annual fundraising down further than most in their reaction post where they address the campaign’s negative feedback but even then, some might not understand that just looking at the Management & General spending numbers is not the whole story. Many think “programs” means programs in “a poor country” and don’t realize that programs can mean TV ads, and the salaries for the producers, and the office in the western city they work out of, and the annual holiday party etc…. which is usually all legally reported above board, it’s just that people don’t understand it and it is not in the interest of most organizations to try to explain it. To learn more, read about why looking at administration costs is meaningless via this example from Good Intents, or buy her paper on the subject of why non-profit overhead doesn’t mean what you think it means, which I might just do myself. Additionally, an organization that legitimately spent 0% on overhead but did not achieve their mission is not better than one that only spent 1% of their money on their programs, but did. Hence, we’re asking the wrong questions.

Here are two slideshares we made for Investing Time in People last year which get further into this:

3) Even the NGO directors themselves are often asking the wrong questions…. especially when they are far away from their “cause”.

Some of the backlash about the KONY2012 video’s facts being wrong or issues being poorly framed are not things I have any clarity on as I don’t know much about the  issue, but it does resonate with my belief that the further away you are from an issue, the less likely you are to get the facts, needs, strategy etc right…. distance makes the decisions grow wronger, perhaps? (Forgive my “heart grow fonder” joke attempt, it’s late here.) In our work in Cambodia, the office where I worked out of was in the major town, which was only 65km from our main working area, but even then, I made a lot of the wrong decisions because of that distance and even more because of cultural and language differences. Many mistakes though were easily righted once I spent time in the community we were working with and I listened more, but if I was far away, I would never have noticed. There are so many NGOs running out of major North American and European cities managing projects on the other side of the world, and this distance inevitably means there will be more misunderstandings, delays in making changes once ineffective policies are made, and incorrect assumptions than if those same people were located next to their “cause”. Even better would be if the people from the “cause” were managing the solutions themselves! Being on the board of PEPY now, I am again caught in this struggle knowing I’m probably giving wrong advice from a distance and if an organizations management is nearly ALL away from the cause, then that can be even more likely.

4) Social media is changing the power dynamics of the world.

If Invisible Children wanted people to know about Kony, well then the negative backlash has only aided their cause. As the BBC points out, social media now quickly gives us two sides to a story and “people are becoming more critical about what they read online, especially when it comes to charitable causes.” But the problem is, now that we have more and more information being thrown at us, we can get a lot of 140 character news feeds, but not a lot of depth, unless we seek it out. Even journalists rarely have, or take, the time to dig deeper into these issues, as was clear with the Greg Mortenson scandal.

That said, more than 50 million people have viewed this video. As Robert Wright pointed out in The Atlantic, “Invisible Children has accomplished what may be the most potent demonstration to date of the ability of new technologies to stir citizen activism. If it has done so irresponsibly, and/or in an ultimately ineffectual way, it still will have been part of a dialectic that yields something worthwhile, and maybe very worthwhile, down the road.”

This debate brings up other issues, Whites in Shining Armour ones, the need for media to display the realities of development, and much more… but for me, I’ve had enough #KONY2012 to keep my brain busy for one night!

(Pssst! Share your thoughts below or good links you think we all should read on the issues this debate brings to light which are important to YOU, please )

This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project about the impact one NGO has had, and lessons that can be drawn .
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In 2008, acid attacks in Cambodia arrived at a tipping point, with daily news coverage, new cases, and gory photos dominating the public discourse. What caused the increase? Beginning in May 2008, one high profile case dominated the national news and captivated the country. Chea Ratha, a Military Police Brigadier General, allegedly paid 5 of her bodyguards a ‘bonus’ to throw acid on the auntie of her lesbian lover, radio personality Sok Lyda. Many believe that Ratha ordered the attack after Lyda called off their sexual relationship.

Ya Soknim was left with severe scaring on her face and torso, and ultimately passed away last year.

The coverage started a cascade of similar attacks and by the end of 2009, there were approximately 40 new cases reported. An NGO Pari now works with was created to support the victims of these attacks: Cambodia Acid Survivors Charity (CASC).

Founded in 2006 by the team from Children’s Surgical Center, CASC was intended to provide rehabilitative and social support to the small number of acid burn patients the hospital treated in its burn unit.

Research compiled by LICADHO in 2003 reported 44 acid attacks in a 3-year period, beginning in 2000. By 2010, CASC was recording 40 new cases per year, with approximately 20 attacks. In some instances, children were not only innocent bystanders, but collateral.

From the start, CASC was in a unique position to respond to these cases. After being treated at a Burn Unit at CSC, victims were taken to recover at CASC. There, they had access to physiotherapy plus therapeutic support.

By late 2009, a movement had begun to stop the impunity of high-ranking perpetrators. Never serving time and currently wanted by Interpol, Ratha’s victims are left to appeal for refugee status, afraid for their safety at the hands of her bodyguards. CASC, via its Program Manager Ziad Samman, was soon called upon to create systemic change.

CASC teamed up with LICADHO and CCHR, and began to gently lobby the appropriate government representatives. They started with the Ministry of Women’s Affairs believing that if they weren’t going to care, then who would? Leveraging existing contacts to get key meetings, the management team soon had the ears of many government officials’ wives.

Today the law is nearly ratified, having been approved by the King. CASC continues to provide ongoing support to relevant government officials, at times providing advice and counsel to ministers’ dealing with the rubber industry lobby, or the acid wholesalers and distributors.

On its own, the story of a small grassroots NGO advocating for an issue would not be remarkable. Yet CASC is a tremendous case study: without any budget for lobbying, advocacy, awareness, marketing or development, CASC is working to dramatically change national policy, has helped create a function within the legal system to prosecute perpetrators, and thus provided the deterrent we all hope is needed to prevent a continued increase of these attacks in Cambodia.

Up next? Ziad says public perception needs to shift away from the victims, and the inherent presumption it was their fault. He wants Cambodians to understand 48% of all victims are actually male, and not everyone is burned because they were on the wrong side of a love triangle.

To achieve this goal, he’s still focused on advocacy at the grassroots level: CASC victims going into district health centers and meeting with village leaders to tell their stories. He’s also aiming to train the next generation of Cambodian journalists to report the issue from a different lens in hopes of reshaping attitudes.

I think more is needed. I think Cambodia is ready for a visually confronting mass media campaign that presents the reality of acid burns, and makes the consequences known. I think Cambodian society is ready for a campaign that challenges victim culpability, and explores deeper issues related to education and empathy.

What is the lesson that Ziad taught me? That the people I met are not victims, they are survivors. Today they stand as evidence of the changes Cambodian society must undergo – the value it must start to place on all its citizens – before it can advance in its freedoms. At the same time, the adoption of the acid law is evidence of the progress it is already making, and its good intentions. For the future of this issue, only time will tell. In the meantime, Cambodia is lucky to have Ziad and CASC on its side.

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This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Parivartan Project. Pari is a social enterprise that provides 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.

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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!