In business school you are surrounded by people who believe in the power of markets. There are people in my class who are passionate about freeing markets, about scaling enterprises, and about generating profits. Yet some of those SAME people are advocates of giving things away in development work. I have had countless discussions with people who see “aid” as the only way to help “the poor”, and debate with me about why that aid needs to give things away.

I am in Cambodia for a few weeks meeting with our team at PEPY (more for my good than theirs, as I missed them and couldn’t stand being away too long!). Standford University’s MBA program just came through on a learning trip and met with our team at PEPY Tours and I joined for the day as I always enjoy meeting with students, especially groups like this looking to discuss social enterprise. This time, I got into yet another discussion over dinner with an MBA student who was holding the position that if you don’t give things away, you can’t reach all of the people who need it now.

One of her arguments was that “since people don’t have things now, the distribution channels clearly don’t exist to get them what they need.” The problem is, aid is much worse at creating distribution channels, especially long term ones, and any that do exist will be destroyed by giving that same product away. When will our MBA programs start teaching that business is “your country” is based on the same principals as business in “their country”? Imagine if you started your next software company or organic farm or hedge fund, and someone started giving away the exact same goods or services for free to provide aid to the people of America (which, as we all know from our debt levels, we might well need). I bet those MBA’s would be less excited about giving things away if it was their business that was at stake.

Take eggs in Rwanda. This is a fabulous two minute video highlighting an example of a distribution system being destroyed by aid:

I have been away from Cambodia for only 4 months and all of a sudden there are hundreds of small kids bikes with back racks all over the rural country side. I have seen so many aid organization’s bike projects over the years designing “the best new bike for ‘the poor’” and here is a basic small Chinese-made bike which is nearly perfect for the needs and finally reaching these so called “poor”. And why are they everywhere? Not because someone gave them away. I should know, as PEPY used to have a small bike scholarship program in the area before – probably harming markets and surely delaying the purchase of bikes like these. Fortunately we stuck around long enough to learn that we needed to be investing time in people rather than giving away bikes. These small bikes I see today are not available now because of aid but because someone is making money off of selling them and therefor has found a way to make sure that they are available far and wide… and I bet that person didn’t even need an MBA to figure that out.

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.

I am about to do a presentation to students from Yonsei University about leadership as it relates to humanitarian work and my experience at PEPY/PEPY Tours. This is a part of the presentation, adapted in part from my 20 Lessons I Learned post.

Thought I would share it in a pretty format! Also, it’s a good reminder for ME to use these lessons. I am a better “teacher” than I am “doer” of some of these, and I need to remember to practice what I preach! It goes to show, just because we know a better way, does not mean we do! But, as with anything, I think the more we try and the more talk about it, the more we adapt these improvements to our own actions.

Next week we have strategic planning sessions in Cambodia for our board and management team at PEPY… we’ll try to keep these lessons (and more!) in mind as we set priorities for our future!

Thanks to @jenrikay who did a lot of this design work and has been teaching me how to make my slides less boring!

When I first saw “Changing the World on Vacation“, I had to cover my eyes for half of the film. Did I REALLY say that, do that, THINK that? Ugh….

Watching the first year of our work at PEPY is like watching someone act out the exact opposite of what I now believe in terms of responsible tourism, development work, and “volunteering”. It’s PAINFUL to watch…

But, it’s a good reminder that my opinions and beliefs were formed, and that I too acted in the ways I am trying to see changed. It makes me hopeful that others can change too, and that ideally they can learn from my mistakes rather than repeating them themselves.

I just recently got to see some footage Daniela Kon, the film maker, had taken in late 2008 or early 2009 when she returned to Cambodia. It is great to see the progress of my own learning, and interesting to note that it took me three years to realize that “orphanage tourism was wrong” but I still hadn’t realized that some orphanages are not only exploiting children through forced dance shows, but through so much more including taking them from parents and corruption so deep that it involves bribing police to be allowed to drag “orphans” through the streets to advertise “free orphanage tours” to tourists. (I had written some of my reactions here.)

I went from naive to enraged with a rest stop at shocked along the way.  Here is a look at my reaction to the film from nearly three years ago:

Daniela Papi INTERVIEW (2009) from DEEDA PRODUCTIONS on Vimeo.

A friend just sent me this photo…

Like with hero-worshiping in the social sector, when the media and then general public praises and supports a model which sounds like a quick fix to big problems, we get copy cats. Now we’re not only “giving things away” once, we’re giving DOUBLE things….. oh goodness.

It will be great if we can harness these great intentions all of the purchasers have and use these popular brands to steer us towards support which is about BUILDING markets and skills rather than increasing dependencies on aid. I recently wrote a piece about how we might be able to use the popularity of a brand like TOMS (the company BOBS above is copying) to help steer people away from giving things and towards investing time in people.

Did anyone see that TOMS recently launched an eyewear line where each pair “helps give sight to a person in need”? What do you think about this new eyewear line which is partnering with an NGO rather than giving shoes away? Share your thoughts!

When I first read Greg Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea, I loved it. It was 2007 or 2008, I had just spent a few years beginning our work at PEPY, an organization which had started with our own school construction story in 2005. The story resonated with me. I loved that he was talking about building schools in a place where we had recently only heard about building wars. I was onboard.

Over the past few years though, I have looked back on my own actions when starting PEPY, and realized that we made a big assumption in our work: that school buildings equated to improving education. You’ve heard us say this before at PEPY, but here it is again: We learned that schools don’t teach kids. People do. (And from this recent Mortenson fallout, I’m glad to read that other people feel this way too! “Why Three Cups of Tea Are Not Enough” – TIME Magazine)

We began shifting our focus away from building structures and towards building human capacity. We realized that we’d rather see kids studying under a tree with a great teacher than sitting in a beautiful empty building. Now, if we could have BOTH, that would be fabulous, but focusing on the human aspect of education was where we realized the dearth of effort lay.

As we began to focus on people, I became more judgmental of organizations selling “things” as the educational solutions to donors. Donors, who had grown accustomed to being able to donate a set of books, a uniform, a bike, or a school with their name on it were asking us how they could do the same with PEPY, and I realized that our first few years of selling donors the perceived ability to make changes in human’s attitudes and actions through giving them things was flawed. We were fighting a losing battle by focusing on the wrong investments.

This realization made me question Greg Mortenson’s school building work: although schools were definitely better than guns, weren’t teachers better than schools? In other words, I realized that I admired many things about Greg Mortenson’s work with the organization he co-founded, Central Asia Institute (CAI), but that revering him as infallible hero would not leave room for a view that his work, like all work, could always be improved. I began to realize that some criticism, both from ourselves and from the outside, is always needed to continue to strive towards higher goals.

I was just as shocked as anyone to hear the news of the 60 Minutes report this week about unethical behavior from Greg Mortenson and the CAI team. I had a lot of reactions: I was sad that so many people’s hearts were broken, glad that I had never donated to CAI when I had considered it in the past, angry that so much money has perhaps slipped through the cracks when it too could have been used to further education, and worried about what the impact of this news might mean.

My first reaction though, like so many others, was “If you can’t trust him, who CAN you trust?” And this is when I realized I too had bought too much into the hero worshiping of an NGO rockstar. I had only read the book that he himself had written about his work, yet I somehow believed I had received the full picture of his story. If Pol Pot had written an auto-biography after the Khmer Rouge, I wouldn’t read it and assume it was the only side of the story I should read, but when a person is doing “good” work, or “aid” work, they somehow become beyond question in our mind.

Because someone is “doing good” we assume everything about them is good, and visa versa. I have met a few people over the years who said they liked Pol Pot. One woman told me stories of having lived in the area where he was from and how he was good to them, how he took care of people, and how she had respect for him. When I hear these things my mind immediately refutes them as exaggerations or untruths. How could someone I have categorized in my mind as so “evil” do anything good? “And who cares if he did do some good things, he is still EVIL,” I would think to myself.

Once we have decided if someone is “good” or “bad”, rather than just “medium” and therefore capable of both extremes, it is hard for us to change our opinions.  I have heard many people react to the news about Greg Mortenson with opinions like “but all of the good he is doing still outweighs the bad” and “it must be an exaggeration as there is no way these allegations are all true.” These defensive views were my natural instincts too. Why? Because so many of us had put him in our “hero” category. Because we had mentally stood beside him and checked his name on our ballot for the “good person” poll. And because if we find out that WE were wrong, that he is not 100% good, that he is capable of anything bad and therefore no longer infallible, we don’t want to believe we have made a wrong vote. I believe that part of this reaction is in our own self interest – not wanting to be wrong and not wanting to use the effort it takes to make a mental shift of our own perceived realities. If we had miscategorized one person…. what about the rest? “If we can’t trust him, who CAN we trust?”

The effect of a large collection of people having to make this mental shift can have some far-reaching results. Being disappointed by someone makes it harder to feel as confident in our hero worshiping of others we might have viewed as thoroughly altruistic. I am of two minds about this news: The majority of my initial reaction is worry about the fallout the news about Greg’s fallibility will have on the NGO sector as a whole. Another part of me is glad that we are having to receive this type of news about an NGO “hero” and that we are all forced to go through the arduous task of mental resifting which inevitably leaves us feeling more vulnerable in the future. My fear is that the majority of that vulnerability will translate into inaction: people wanting to “help” when they come across an injustice they see, a goal they have for our world, or a problem they want to see fixed but feeling stuck and unable to take action for fear of being “tricked” again by someone selling a solution they might later find out is flawed. My hope though is that some of this vulnerability will translate into action for self-improvement on the part of donors.

Some people get mugged and then go out into the world with more fear. Others sign up for a self-defense class and perhaps emerge more confident than before. Let’s hope there’s more of the later.

By donor action, my hopes are that this news will result in:

• people taking the time to educate themselves more about the issues they are looking to effect change in and the best practices in those areas
• people becoming less likely to donate simply based on the hero story with less money going into projects whose impacts were overlooked due to more focus on the novel than on the reality of the NGO work
• donors asking more of the NGOs they support, not in terms of more heartbreaking books or more GPS coordinates of the things they give away, but rather more transparency and follow up on the impact of their donations
• board members asking more questions, pushing for audits, and requiring financial transparency from their teams
• and most importantly, more people realizing that NO ONE is a hero all the time (except maybe Mother Theresa…. Oh wait! Woops, hero-worshipping again – she is human!)  and therefore, that each of us are also capable of creating (perhaps obliged to create?) extreme good.

Perhaps it is good to continually remind ourselves that we are all human. By remembering that even Pol Pot was capable of good acts and that a man who helped build schools was capable of using donated funds for chartered flights to book signings for personal gain reminds us that we too are capable of both extremes. Perhaps this is the most difficult part of swallowing this reality. If Greg Mortenson isn’t some kind of “natural born altruist”, if he isn’t innately “good” at his core, if he is flawed like the rest of us and just as capable of self-interested pursuits, then it means he is human, just like us. And it therefore means that he was capable of that selfishness the whole time, yet he choose good very often (and it seems he choose poorly often as well). And if he is capable of that and not a “hero”, therefore, so are we.

He’s just a guy – and he could, and SHOULD, strive to be better. We too should strive to be better. We should strive to ask better questions and not hero worship someone so much that we allow them to go 14 years with only 1 audit. We should give our money to places we research and then follow up on our impact. We should strive to close the feedback loop and know where our money goes. And most of all, most shocking, and most hard to imagine: we should realize that there aren’t “good” and “bad” people. We are ALL capable of choosing heroic, challenging, phenomenal, life-affirming acts EVERY day. Those who choose to act heroically, those who were in our hero vault, were not wired differently than us after all – they are human too. So, you too can be, and are, a Greg Mortenson – capable of all aspects of the work he has done, both the good and the bad.

Choose to do with that what you like. I hope we all choose to dig deeper, aim higher, and strive for our most altruistic self from this news. I hope that each of us, including Greg, continues to strive daily for self-improvement to create our own TRUE hero story and then live out the results with integrity, transparency, and the constant quest for the good we are capable of ourselves.

I have purposely stayed out of the “TOMS Shoes = Bad Aid” campaign that has been going on for the past few weeks and haven’t tweeted about it. It was not because I am not strongly opposed to aid which is about “giving things away”, as I clearly have learned from experience that that is an ineffective model but because I’ve learned through this blog that I need to be better at not just complaining about things and stamping out good intentions, but instead trying to find ways to harness them.

I have come to the realization that, although giving shoes away might be “bad aid” – Blake (the founder of TOMS Shoes) and the TOMS Shoes brand are in a unique position to generate PHENOMENALLY positive impacts now and through the efforts of the next generation. TOMS has opened a door and thousands of young Americans are lining up to walk through it (bare feet and all).

I wasn’t planning on discussing this yet, but then these two things happened:

a) Saundra and the Good Intentions are Not Enough team made this video as an anti-campaign to TOMS Shoes “A Day Without Shoes” called “A Day Without Dignity”

b) I shared the video with some people I know who also care about the issue of fostering responsible development models among the next generation of development workers, and I was quoted in this blog.

So – now it looks like I should write about this, and I want to be clear about two things:

1) TOMS Shoes isn’t an aid organization, they are a shoe company, so I believe we can’t judge them as if they were an NGO. They are opening up a HUGE discussion about doing business better, they are getting kids across America to think about their purchasing differently, and they seem to be very motivated by good intentions.

2) TOMS Shoes is only relevant as a discussion point in this space of charity models based on “giving things away” because they have been SOOOOO successful in other ways: in their marketing and in their building of a movement. If they were a local shoe store giving away a thousand shoes a year then they would a) not have a big chance of destroying markets through their giving nor would they be a viable source of funding for more large-scale solutions such as building local shoe factories and b) they would not be responsible for indoctrinating such a large populations of American youth with a “giving” model of development work.

Because of TOMS overwhelming success as a brand, Blake is in a very unique position. He, along with other NGO marketing heroes, like Scott from charity:water, have a whole generation of budding young do-gooders drooling over their every word. This is a fabulous platform from which they are now uniquely able to spread education and learning. If they take this generation with them on a development learning journey, if they bring everyone along from the “giving things away” charity model to a model which a) takes in local needs/opinions/input b) requires local buy-in both in terms of strategy as well as funding c) develops and supports local markets rather than giving away products and d) talks about the complexity, flexibility, long-term commitment and investment in human capital (rather than just investment in goods) which it takes to create high impact development programs to even begin to reach some of the goals we see for our world, then they are going to be great heroes.

Failed models of unsustainable charity have been tried over and over again with little large-scale impact, but people don’t know much about it unless they are living it. Why? Because it’s not a closed feedback loop.

Have you ever bought a car? Or a house? When doing so, did you read what Toyota wrote about Toyotas and then go out and buy a Toyota? No! You read that, plus you asked a lot of other people, people who owned them and could tell you if they were good or not, or you read reviews from people who had done the same. If you made a mistake and bought the wrong car, then you knew it a few weeks later when you were already bringing it into the shop to get fixed. You would have been mad at yourself for doing poor research and investing in the wrong thing and then when it came time for your next purchase, you would have done much more research and follow up to prevent making the same mistake.

It is VERY rare that we get a closed feedback loop in our donating. We might talk to other DONORS who have given, but if you have given to a charity researching cancer solutions, have you had a chance to talk to scientists working on the project to see how they think they are progressing? Have you talked to other scientists from a third party who are educated enough on the work to be able to share their findings? If you have written a check to Greg Mortenson’s project, which is getting destroyed on “60 Minutes” tonight for corruption it seems, were you able to speak with people in Pakistan to know a) if the school was wanted b) if it was built well c) if the money was used properly, etc? No…. and so if you DID invest in the wrong thing, it is very likely that you don’t know it. If you did, of course you would change. But since you don’t know, and it’s nicer to feel good about our donations than bad about them, it is rare that we try to really dig deep and find out how the aid work we support could be improved.

We know that we can’t keep giving things away – and that the people who need those things would be better off if they were able to bring in income to have excess funding to purchase those things themselves and decide how best to allocate their resources to support their families rather than waiting for us to give them the things we think they should prioritize.

I came to this stance having giving a lot of things away myself: t-shirts and toothbrushes to kids in the Philippines, volunteer trips throughout Asia, and most recently schools in Cambodia through an organization I started called PEPY. But, we realized we were making a mistake by giving things (schools, books, uniforms, supplies, etc) away. We realized two important things: 1) that schools don’t teach kids – people do and 2) that we would one day be leaving, and if we were, than our inputs needed to create impacts which would continue to bear fruit long after we left.

I had the closed feedback loop most people don’t get to have as I saw the impact of the work we were doing day to day, yet this learning curve still took me the last 5.5 years of living in Cambodia to achieve. I could have done things MUCH more effectively if I had known about failed development efforts and more responsible solutions which had been tried before me.

There is a whole generation of young people out there primed and ready to go out into the world and “help” and we can help THEM be more effective by pointing them in the right direction. Ideally, they could all have a conversation with someone like Ivan Illich, but since that might not be possible, they can learn from those people they are already idealizing and following.

So, Blake and Scott and now Adam (from the speedily growing Pencils of Promise) and the inspired and inspiring Sean from (Falling Whistles) – you hold the keys today. You have the keys to the hearts, brains, and future actions of a whole generation of American youth looking to do good with their money, their time, and their futures. Let’s take them on a path where they are inspired to invest in people – invest TIME in people – and by that I mean give people the skills, connections, capabilities, ideas, and opportunities to solve their OWN problems, set their own goals, and fulfill their own needs. By showing America’s youth a way to positively impact the world through investing in the skill development of others, by taking them with you on your learning curve, and by continuing to rock your marketing so that you can reach more and more people with these messages, you will help prevent some of them from making the same mistakes so many of us made before them. YOU have the ability to speak to this generation and help them to use their power, influence, dollars, and votes to empower, rather than hinder, the communities and markets of the world. We’re all cheering for you to use your exceptional influence to make this generation get the learning curve faster. Close the feedback loop for them.

…and let us know how we can help! The development bloggers (myself included) need to throw out a hand and collaborate. We should all be reaching for the same goal. Let’s find a way to get there together – using your marketing genius and engaged following and the lessons learned from development successes and failures to empower today’s youth to make the changes our generations before them have failed to do!