Below is a model for how our Child Clubs are designed to help children visualize and achieve changes they want to see in their communities. The model is simple, and it is similar to how we try to design all of our programs at PEPY:

This is the same process for how our community school development program works: the community (teachers, parents, school support committee & administrators) identify the problems THEY want to solve, we connect them to new ideas and a methodology for how to think about framing a solution, and they take actions to solve their problems.

This is how our new HR system is designed to work at PEPY as well: our staff members share their personal short-term goals and their life goals with our “Goal Guide” who helps them think about ways they can achieve these dreams. The milestones might look like setting up a savings plan/account to achieve their goal of buying a home or a moto, helping them acquire the skills they will need to reach their dream of owning their own business, even connecting them to internships outside of PEPY if their goals are in areas where we can not provide them the necessary training. From there, THEY need to choose to take those actions if they desire.

Not all of our programs involve self-identifying problems and not all of them are based on community led problem solving but we are now focusing more on these areas.  The process above, though effective at creating more lasting changes, is time consuming. Sometimes it is so much easier to go for the low-hanging fruit and try to quickly “solve” problems for others, as we have tried to do before, but we have found that the slow and steady community-led changes are the ones that last.

Do you have thoughts on this? Examples of your own work or programs you know about which relate to these ideas?  Please share!

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 struggle to add value to our organization while being tempted away by the likes of “Bar Street” and expat adventures, and you want me to PAY them to have his “life changing experience” while branding it “volunteering”?  NO… thanks anyway.  I wrote a comment like this back to an inquiry a few months ago, and the response was “Yes, well their living expenses do not need to be very high and we can negotiate those,” in which case I realized that even their email-responders must also be 17 years old.

I am being a hypocrite -  I know this.  I have done trips in the past where I was able to fundraise for my trip and I certainly have volunteered my time in ways where I was clearly not qualified to be “helping”.  Having done those things though, I think I am still, if not better, able to state clearly: this should not be common practice.  Additionally, PAYING a 17 year old kid to work in an organization is taking this even a step further which makes me half want to yell into the email when I get this kind of request and half laugh at the audacity and ludicrous idea overall.

There are all these volunteer placement organizations based in Siem Reap which send volunteers to teach English at orphanages, but I have already written a lot about my strong feelings against orphanage visits after having learned from making many of these same mistakes myself.  Those groups sometimes call us to see if we will take their volunteers, and to the group that emailed today asking if we would take their 17 year olds as they were in a “dire situation as their other placement canceled”, offering that I would once again only have to cover their living expense, I wrote this reply:

Hello Name-Removed Lady–

I assume my response from a few months ago when another member of your team contacted us about taking your volunteers was not passed on.  I rejected the “offer” then as I will now because I do not believe in this type of program.  These are 17 year old kids, many of whom have little to no experience other than having been privileged enough to go to good high schools.  I am fine with them wanting to come help, but I am not at all fine with:

a) their being allowed to “fundraise” for their flights, as if their time would be more valuable than using that money to directly support these causes.  The experience they will get and the lessons they will learn in Cambodia are indeed worth paying for, and I assume many of them come from families that could indeed afford this.

b) the fact that your organization has them fundraise over $5000 and they then still expects the NGOs on the ground to cover costs. Once again, if they want to “volunteer” – they should volunteer – and at minimum cover their own expenses on the ground.

c) their placements being working with kids.  There is too much scrambling to find volunteer placements with kids in Cambodia – we often get calls about this for our education programs.  Kids should not be treated as a commodity to be sold by international agencies as a way to keep their volunteer programs going.

We do indeed take volunteers, but they have to have the skills to fit our needs, are unpaid, and work in our offices, not with kids in our programs.

I hope you understand that my strong feelings on this matter come from five years of watching young “volunteers” get drunk and run around scantily dressed on bar street here in Siem Reap as they get paid a “living wage” which is over double the local salaries of people much more qualified than they are.

I am sorry that we are not able to help you at this time and I hope the tone of this message reflects that my attitude towards this situation is not particular to you or to your organization, but this growing trend in general.

- Daniela

Now I can just link people here next time they ask if I will pay for their gap year students to work with us!

Fast Five Profile: PEPY Tours

One of the PEPY riders on her bike for Cambodian based PEPY Tours

1. Who are you?  Brief description of trips you offer

Daniela Papi, Director, PEPY and PEPY Tours.

PEPY Tours offers educational tours where travelers have the chance to learn about development issues and support programs committed to making change even long after the travelers leave.  Our tours of Cambodia and neighboring areas range from bicycle trips and high-end educational adventures to service-learning programs for school groups. The required donation portion of our tour fee supports the ongoing educational programs of our partner non-profit organizations.

2.  How do you define Responsible Travel?

Responsible Travel is a conscious and educated approach to tourism which incorporates learning about and supporting local initiatives and goals in the areas we visit. If we have limited knowledge about an area, it is very difficult to make the most responsible decisions, so the most important aspects of responsible travel are the research stage and the monitoring/follow up sections.  If we want to be responsible, we need to understand the true impacts of the choices we are making.

3.  What does your company do to make sure it travels responsibly?

We are willing to change, transparent about our mistakes and the lessons we are learning, open to suggestions and new ideas, and we work to educate travelers on ways they can improve all aspects of their future travel. Our tours bring travelers to meet with the people and organizations making changes in Cambodia and helps them develop a framework for which to better analyze and understand the issues facing Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and community groups. Our goal is that travelers with PEPY Tours will change the way they give, travel, and live as a result of their trip with us.

4.    Tell us about a successful initiative.  And an unsuccessful one – what did you learn?

We used to bring people to visit a variety of programs in Cambodia, including model orphanages. Our trips were supporting these orphanages through on-going funding, so we felt that the chance to visit the place where their money was going would be a great way to connect travelers to their local impact. This view was too traveler focused, as even if it would increase fundraising potential, the cost of bringing groups of foreigners into a home which is supposed to be a safe-haven for children is not a responsible practice and should be replaced by less voyeuristic fundraising initiatives.  We did not have any direct incidents as a result of bringing travelers to these orphanages, but we felt that we were contributing to a growing trend of orphanage tourism which we believe is, overall, very harmful to both the children and to efforts to reduce corruption in Cambodia.  If donor dollars can be linked to orphanage tourism, then more and more fake orphanages will continue to be created as business, as we see here in Cambodia.

In the first few years of offering tours, we used to indulge the travelers and our own desire to “give back” on our tours through tangible ways.  Most people feel more connected to a project if they can physically “help” – paint something, build something, “see results”.  The problem with this mindset is that most of the actions travelers are contributing involve giving things away to people or building items, not building people.  We have learned that what Cambodia needs most is capacity building among leaders who are looking to improve their own lives and that things like teacher training and skill building will do more to improve education than building schools.  If we continue to only offer travelers ways to give back physically, we will teach them that improvements are equated to developing infrastructure but not a nation of people.

For the last few years we have taken the time to expose our travelers to these ideas and concepts through reading materials, educational activities, and sharing our previously incorrect assumptions and mistakes.  Travelers now leave our trips better able to support sustainable on-going projects designed to leave Cambodia and Cambodians better equipped to improve their own country rather than fostering a continued dependency on outside support.

5.   What’s some advice you can offer to travelers wanting to travel responsibly?

Read up before you travel. Do NOT give money to any organization you do not know and have not researched. To do your research, speak with people working in a similar sector in a nearby area as they will have more honest feedback about a groups work than their own website will offer.

As one of our NGO partners said, “You have to earn the right to leave your money in this country.”  If we all recognize that we, as individuals, DO NOT HAVE THE POWER TO FIX THE PLACES WE VISIT by giving money away, we will have less negative impacts of funding corrupt and ill-planned programs. Sustainable changes take long-term efforts and need to last much longer than a short visit to a new place on vacation.  By finding the people and programs committed to finding ways to make long term change, your money will go much further than giving it to a child-beggar on the street. In fact, perhaps that child would not be begging in the tourist area you are visiting if it was not profitable to do so. By cutting off that funding stream to the “pimp” who possibly rents that child out per day as a beggar and redirecting it to on-going programs supporting the needs of children living on the street, you will likely have a much better impact on the places you visit.

Our focus is really on encouraging travelers to be socially responsible. The media and public relations campaigns from large tourism corporations are full of green travel tips, such as conserving water and energy, recycling, using refillable water bottles, and making sure your hotel is doing everything they can to conserve. These are certainly important things to work on. At that level, though, the entire social aspect of sustainability is just missing.

If you are looking to volunteer abroad, ask a lot of questions about how they choose their partners, monitor their impact, and what mistakes they have made. The most responsible groups will offer you transparent and honest answers to those questions.  Ask about how your specific program was designed.  I have asked English teaching volunteer programs which travelers pay a significant fee for why they have chosen to offer English teaching as their volunteer opportunity when they seem to always be scrapping to find NGO partners as the response has been “That is what travelers are looking to do.”  Do we want our impact to be designed for YOU, or designed to fit actual needs? If we want to fit actual needs, then sometimes we need to be willing to do the less glamorous jobs, have less opportunities to visit orphanages and pet children, and be satisfied that we are indeed doing good rather than “getting a rewarding experience.”  It shouldn’t be about us.  If you want to be comfortable, have fun, and get to play with kids, go to an amusement park.

If you want to know more, visit the PEPY Tours website.

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Sing it, Christopher!

(I wrote to his organization to get approval to re-post this here.  I’d love to read comments!)

Process-driven models of change work better

Every organization dedicated to social change believes it is providing a service in its community. Consequently, there are perhaps as many models of change as there are organizations. All these efforts can be placed loosely into two categories: “product-driven” models of change and “process-driven” models. We at Educate the Children, an Ithaca-based nonprofit that works to provide educational opportunities for women and children in Nepal, employ a process-driven model.

Now, what can be wrong with building a school? Well, nothing. But, what is a school? Is it the building? Or is it the administrators, teachers, parents, students and the relations between them all that make it a functioning educational environment? An excellent teacher can make do with the shade of a tree and a stick to draw in the dust, though a classroom with desks and a blackboard certainly can make the job easier. But a building? A building can’t teach.

There are excellent things that can come from product-driven programs, like well-stocked libraries or low-cost computers. These products can be useful, but without a social structure to support them, they easily become white elephants. The problem with product-driven models is that they are mechanical models: add Product Z and social change follows. If only life were so easy.

By contrast, a process-driven model strives to build the necessary social relations that make products useful and sustainable features of local social life. Rather than build school buildings, we work with the community and local government to plan and execute the refurbishing of existing structures. This is far more cost-effective than starting from scratch, but it also initiates a process of the community working with what they already have, instead of relying on outside agencies. This means we can use resources to train teachers, provide teaching supplies, establish kindergarten classes and provide in-kind scholarships for students who otherwise could not afford to attend school.

However, there is more to succeeding in school than better classrooms or just being able to show up. One of the most important tools for success is breakfast. Children who arrive in class with contented bellies have the energy to exert their minds and bodies and the capacity to relax and concentrate. In order to ensure that kids eat, we must work with their families. This means initiating a process of consciousness-raising through literacy and communal organization in addition to intensive follow-through on subjects as diverse as proper use and maintenance of toilets, child and pre-natal nutrition and improving the productive capacity of farmland for food security and income.

While a product-driven approach starts with a pre-determined solution, the process-driven approach starts with people, works with them to identify needs and then devises solutions. Ultimately, product-driven approaches sell solutions while process-driven approaches help make them happen. So, whatever organizations you support, ask them, “what is your model of change?” You will get many different answers. Just remember: the best models start with people, not products.

Christopher London is the executive director of Educate the Children.

http://voluntourismgal.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/spring-break-in-haiti/

The IBC and PEPY Tours in Cambodia

When running a start-up organization, you are always looking for volunteers, people who are willing to share their time and their knowledge with you to get your work off the ground. At first you are hanging on every word that people share with you as you learn about accounting, business plans, marketing, and all of the pieces that come with starting a new venture.  You are willing to take any volunteer who is willing to give their time and you charge full-speed ahead into your work using their ideas.  Then there comes a day when you start getting have to start saying no to volunteers.

This has been our same story as we developed our hybrid organization, PEPY: an education non-profit organization working in literacy and leadership, as well as an edu-venture tour company which helps to fund the programs. There came a point where we started to be more discerning about the help we were able to take.  Many people contacted us saying that they were willing to volunteer.  We have taken some of those who were not able to come to Cambodia but instead offered their services virtually, but usually there are problems with:

• Finding the exact right match of skills and needs. When volunteers are far away from the problem, it takes a long time to get to understand how their skills can fit with your organization.
• Time. It takes a lot of time to construct that match, to follow up with virtual volunteers, and to share the work that they do with the rest of the team.
• Conflicting ideas. When people are outside of the company, it becomes difficult for them to keep up to date on the daily developments of the organization, so sometimes it can result in the repetition of work of a work product or work which misses the mark.

At PEPY, we have worked with groups of volunteers in the past who have taken more time than the value they have added.  I commend the IBC and the process used to support PEPY Tours this year, as it is a good example of what can be possible using virtual volunteers to assist an organization.

First, I want to comment on past IBC support initiatives. I was involved in the first IBC delegation to go abroad to “help”. There were three of us who went down to visit projects, McKinsey professional Maggie Durant, a current State Senator of New Mexico, and myself. We were probably a smart enough group to work on a feasibility study of the IBC’s impact, but there was one big flaw: we weren’t prepared to help in a way that would make sense for the program. We had not understood how to do the proper research before we left, which would have all pointed to the signs saying: you can’t help if you are only committed to the short term. The issues we were looking to “advise” on were extensive: business development in a multi-culture environment, agricultural cooperatives looking for market analysis. . . in GUATEMALA and HONDURAS, places we knew little about. During our week-long visit, we took a lot of people’s time and set expectations that we quickly realized we were not able to fill.  Tim, Maggie and I all agreed – this was a learning experience, and we needed to find a different way for the IBC to promote its social mission.

The next group I came in contact with through the IBC was a delegation that was sent to Cambodia, the country I have been working in since 2005. This group did extensive research before coming out to Cambodia to work with a microcredit organization. There are many costs associated with traveling abroad, as in both of these projects, and issues related to translation and cultural understanding can often add further set-backs.

So what can we do to move forward? Work hard to find the right match. I was grateful that the IBC reached out to us at PEPY last year and offered virtual support, and I was been even more delighted when we saw the match was a good one. A group of IBC volunteers including Ryan Jochum, Kate McDermott, Matthew O’Connor, and Steve Wierema,  helped PEPY virtually for nearly three months. Weekly conference calls kept everyone on track, and the team was led by Evan Lintz, who kept everyone on track and organized, and Tim Rann, a former PEPY intern. With the system they set up of managing the volunteer team, there was very little time taken away from full-time PEPY staff while also ensuring a strong understanding of the work PEPY does which made their final work product very valuable. 

The group analyzed PEPY’s tour offerings when compared with competitors, gave advice on the marketing and branding strategies of the organization, and analyzed industry trends. Their final project will continue to be very useful for our organization for many years to come, and we thank the team for giving us their time and their knowledge.

If any of you is looking to volunteer your time virtually for an organization, you can learn a lot by following in their footsteps:

• Spend the time to find a good match between your skills and the organization’s needs.
• Be willing to do the “boring” stuff.
• Be organized and give your feedback in a well documented fashion so that the partner not only knows what you did, but how you did it. This builds up the organization’s capacity by helping the staff to continue the process in the future on their own.
• Provide connections to new ideas and new people to gather other interest and support for the work you are now a part of.

The IBC team working with PEPY did all of these things, and for that we are very grateful. Hopefully the fruits of their labor will show as we continue to develop our product offerings at PEPY Tours and now have a well outlined path for further improvements.

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Note: After this process, Tim Rann decided to come back on to the PEPY Team and will become CEO of PEPY Tours from April, 2010.  Congratulations, Tim!

PEPY is a hybrid organization with two parts: PEPY Cambodia, an educational development organization and PEPY Tours, a travel company focusing on educational adventures.

Daniela Papi studied economics at Notre Dame and graduated in the class of 2000. She was a member of the SIBC (then the NDCIBD) and worked in London through the SIBC internship program. She has lived in Asia for nearly 8 years, the first three in Japan and since 2005 in Cambodia. She welcomes any IBC members to visit her at the PEPY office in Siem Reap, Cambodia.  You can read more about her thoughts on development and tourism on her blog: www.lessonsilearned.org

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We get stuck too much on the idea of giving “things” to save the world. People need education? Build them a school! People are getting malaria? Give them a mosquito net! There was a devastating earthquake in Haiti. Send them shoes!

The problem is, THINGS don’t make improvements in our world. PEOPLE do. Schools don’t teach kids. Teachers do. Water pumps don’t provide clean water to people. People treating the water and transporting and storing it hygienically do. THINGS don’t change lives. So why do we keep talking about giving things as the main solution to the world’s problems?

When it comes to emergencies, it’s different. Right now, the short term needs in Haiti revolve around basic needs and access to things like medical equipment, food, clothing, and shelter, (all ranking above shoes!). When we get outside of emergency situations we are often looking to make changes in human actions and need to stop looking to things for a solution.

For example, we look to bednets to solve a malaria problem. We try to rush to get more bednets to more people to solve a problem that isn’t just about things. In many places in the world, malaria-carrying mosquitoes feed at sunset. Most people are not spending the time right at sunset in their beds. Besides that, it isn’t about getting the bednets into people’s hands; the solution is educating people about malaria—ways to prevent it (including bednets), how to treat it. In places where malaria is very prevalent, putting dollars which might have gone to bednet distribution into educating people about the early signs of malaria, connecting people to local or free hospitals, and providing education about the most useful forms of treatment might save more lives and also create a market demand for bednets.  Besides, giving things away can sometimes destroy the development of market-based solutions to product distribution.

One organization I have come across that really understands that educating people is the key to putting technologies to work is the team at Resource Development International Cambodia (RDIC). They make a rope pump which iss made entirely from locally sourced materials including rope and PV tubes. It fits on top of a traditional open well and sells for about $250. Though much cheaper than the deep tube wells installed by many NGOs, the price is still cost prohibitive for most families, so RDIC has a two year repayment plan. At RDIC, they recognize that the core changes they are looking to see don’t have to do with things as, in this case, they are looking to see reductions in the number of people with water born illnesses. With 24 repayment days where an RDIC employee collects the payments, they have a chance to teach 24 lessons to ensure that they reach their goals of improving health. Lessons have to do with in-home water filtration, how to fix and maintain the new rope pump, home dug toilet solutions, hygienic food preparation, and more. They not only have 100% repayment on their rope pumps, but they are making changes in attitudes and actions surrounding health issues.

After learning these lessons in Cambodia, when I give money to an organization, I look for one where the methodology involves community education over a cookie-cutter solution focusing on giving things away.

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I want to leave you with some tools to think about when donating money. When choosing where to give my money, I would look for NGOs where:

• The website seems less focused on the quantitative numbers (10,000 libraries in 50 countries) and more on the methods of how they will build capacity in the local community to create these changes themselves.
• When asked, NGO workers are willing to discuss past failures and current improvements. I would ask “What things are you doing today that you weren’t doing a year ago, and which things have you stopped due to lessons you have learned from your successes and failures?”
• The focus is on putting “things” and ideas to use, not just distribution. If there is a physical item being donated or sold, what are the plans for education and support around repairs, usage ideas, and markets for further local-led distribution.

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Daniela believes that changing attitudes and actions requires an investment of time in people, and that education is the key to the changes she wants to see in the world. Daniela is the director of PEPY, an educational development organization working in rural Cambodia. PEPY focuses on building the capacity of teachers and communities to increase access to quality education. PEPY is funded in part through PEPY Tours, and edu-venture tour company offering cycling trips and service learning experiences in South East Asia. You can connect with Daniela on her blog, Lessons I Learned, or in real life in her office in Siem Reap, Cambodia.