This week I offered a class with my friends Kit & Matt through the new group/learning platform SkillShare. It’s a phenomenal concept: anyone can be a teacher and offer up a skill they have and any of us can be student and pay for a class on topics as varied as Knitting for Beginners and [...]
Whenever a group of people visit me in Cambodia and want to learn about responsible development, we usually go visit RDIC, an organization working with a variety of rural applicable technologies in the areas of water, health, agriculture, and more. Whenever we’re there, I’m always struck when one of the managers, John, says one of [...]
Ahh, bednets. NGOs sell the idea of giving things away by equating each thing we give away to “the poor”, like a bednet, as equal to “saving a life”. If only it were that easy…. This week a fascinating group of visiting students told us about a campaign that had happened in their school to [...]
We want to know that our money went to “the right place”. We have been taught to be fearful that our donations might aid corruption or not be used in the way we had intended. As such, it’s easier for us to build buildings than invest time in people through things like trainings & education [...]
Sometimes we need to be able to visualize the changes we want to see in the world or in our own lives in order to figure out how to get there. Other times we can imagine the end goal, but we need help with the development of the process or the discipline to reach a [...]
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 [...]