The PEPY Tours team put together a short animated video about the history of PEPY Tours and the ways our work has changed over the years.  Check it out!

Video by the @PEPYTours team with illustrations by the fabulous Wei Peng!

Walking through the Skoll World Forum last week was like watching the ingredients to make a cake get mixed in a bowl. Each had been hand picked and was being mixed together to make something no one part could create on its own. The man mixing the pot is Jeff Skoll, a founder at Ebay who has used his wealth to create The Jeff Skoll Group, his recipe book for social change.

Most social enterprise leaders are only able to directly control the limited actions within their one organization. For example, if they are managing a group selling eco-friendly products, the directors need to use their relationships to influence the system around them to align with their goals: sales channels, media aimed at shifting mindsets towards eco-awareness, financial institutions to provide growth capital, etc. Like a conglomerate company created to control a whole supply change, The Jeff Skoll Group has been designed to support the various inflection points in the eco-system of social change as they work “to live in a sustainable world of peace and prosperity.” This puts Jeff Skoll in a rather unique situation, able to influence a spectrum of social change organizations from a 30,000 foot view of a large portfolio.

Politics is the typical track for those who want to control a whole system of change, but I have a feeling government channels would have seemed too slow for Jeff. Like a benevolent dictator, he channeled his wealth into creating a finance group to fund his world-changing initiatives (Capricorn Investments), a media company to create conversations and salience about social issues (Participant Media), a company designed to turn those movies into social action (Take Part), a social entrepreneurship platform and support system to connect, recognize, and create social change makers (The Skoll Foundation), and a group dedicated to focusing on solutions for the biggest threats to our society (Skoll Global Threats Fund).

How does he manage this network of change? He leaves a lot of the vision and system building to the heads of each of his organizations who are successful and influential system-builders and they appear to each have been given an uncharacteristically high level of autonomy, thereby allowing them the freedom to create the impact they are looking to see. Note that I didn’t say the change Jeff is trying to see. The halls of the Skoll World Forum are flowing with the entrepreneurs he hired who had already proven a dedication and leadership in their field. By giving these thought-leaders autonomy to experiment with the paths to success and by connecting them through a network of co-creation, they are each able to take risks and take on long-term changes that other institutions would struggle to do on their own.

When Jeff Skoll started this work, the word “social entrepreneurship” was rarely used, but now his team is part of a dialogue, network, and group of role models for a movement. The mainstream has embraced his work with Participant Media having been nominated for 22 Oscars and winning 5 through funding films as diverse as Waiting for Superman, The Help, Inconvenient Truth, and Contagion. Participant Media and Take Part’s work has created the dialogues and debates which are needed to generate wider support in areas such as the environment, educational change, and global pandemics. And there are now 39 Skoll Scholars who have been supported by Jeff to get an MBA degree at Oxford and dozens of organizations that have benefited from the funding, recognition and support of the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship.

Billionaires – take note! This social change machine proves that eco-system building does not need to be left to those with political and corporate agendas. Like other philanthropists before him, Jeff has proven that our funding does not need to be limited to investing in a list of disparate organizations but can have far greater impact than the sum of its parts by creating a network, a movement, and a unified system of change focused on investing in people.

I’m grateful for Jeff Skoll’s vision and leadership and I hope many others follow suit by committing to high impact through investing in entrepreneurs and building networks of change. His system of change resonates with me: it’s about investing in people, not just through providing them with money, but with ideas, networks, skills, and inspiration to create the changes they want to see in the world. These lessons in leadership might be some of the most-important things I take away from my year at business school in Oxford.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” says Simon Sinek in his very popular TEDx talk. And he’s right. People buy thy WHY. The thing is… this is a big problem in development work! People buy the WHY – which means they are fueling good intentions, not necessarily good impacts. Here are some thoughts about this that our team at PEPY  & PEPY Tours put together via video (thanks for the animations, Wei!):

Selling the WHY works for companies selling products or services, like in Simon’s example, Apple. If Apple sells their WHY – like “Being Different” – people can get on board with that. They buy into the WHY and then they buy the product. But if the WHAT fails (ie: if the product breaks, isn’t really all that “different” or just doesn’t fit the person’s need), then the person wont buy from that company again, and in today’s world, they’d use social media to let all of their friends know not to buy it either.

But if the WHAT fails in development work (ie: people really weren’t “saved” from XYZ disease, kids didn’t show up to the school, the well as broken, the micro-loans caused more debt than gains in wealth, etc), the donor who was so moved to fund the project because she believed in the WHY sometimes never finds out. And when the annual collection information touting the WHY of the organization ends up in her inbox again, she might send another check, again, and again, and again….

So we need to stop buying WHYs and start buying HOWs. And if donors start buying good HOWs, then NGOs will start selling their HOWs, and we can use our fundraising for more education, rather than emotions fueling good intentions.

Pass this on if too want to be part of a HOW and IMPACT focused movement.

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Pssst – we have some beta info up on www.investingtimeinpeople.org – a loose collection of people (like you?!) who share similar ideas about development work. We are looking to apply for a grant that is coming up in a few months with regards to creating an ad campaign around the HOWs of high impact development work. Want to be involved? Drop a note!

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 )

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 in “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!