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 [...]
UGH! I am SO fed up with these “pay to volunteer” organizations making money and taking in young gap-year kids and then “offering” them to us as employees where we “only need to cover their living expenses.” REALLY? You want me to take your unskilled 17 year-old, play babysitter for a few months as they [...]
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 just added some thoughts on the Social Edge discussion about about the Fetishization of Metrics. Add yours there as well! —- The more we focus on metrics, the less human we become. We focus on metrics to allow us to not personally interact with a problem and yet still try to “understand” it. The [...]
In a post by my friend Paco, who works for Better World Books, he questions what BWB’s role can be as a social venture working to improve literacy globally. I added some thoughts here as well. http://donniya.blogspot.com/2009/10/books-for-africa-literacy-in-africa-and.html I recently went to the BWB office in South Bend, IN and was SO impressed with the team [...]
Are there any “scalable” & profitable social ventures? There is talk of “social ventures” being our saviors from the likes of the non-profit world. Do they REALLY exist? Or are they mostly hybrid models which still rely heavily on their non-profit arms in order to succeed at scale? It is VERY hard to find examples [...]
What is this “sustainability” thing all about? It is a word that gets thrown around so often by NGOs, donors, and most people working in development, yet what is means in the reality of our day to day decisions is less often understood. I wrote part one of a two part look at PEPY and [...]