Lessons I Learned

I called this blog ’Lessons I Learned’, but really it would be better titled ’Lessons I’m Learning’. I believe in sharing what we learn to help others avoid our same mistakes and also exposing ourselves to the criticism and questions which might help us improve. I am skeptical of the popular approaches to both voluntourism and development work, though those are both areas in which I have worked as I’d love to be part of learning how we can do them both better. I think we need to learn before we can help, so I believe “service learning” should be “learning service”. I feel like I am learning more every day about how to help create the world I want to see my future kids and their future kids living in, and sometimes what I learn contradicts what I thought I knew was true. I have learned that good intentions are not enough and that the only person you can “improve” in the world is yourself, so I had better start improving the world by starting there. I hope the dialogue generated through this site will give me more chances to do that and to share the lessons I am learning with others who could benefit from avoiding my mistakes.

26 February 2010 ~ 2 Comments

Working at PEPY

General

We decided to write out our expectations of our foreign volunteers to help potential applicants consider what they are getting into. (FYI: We take volunteer interns to work in our office, typically on donor management, marketing, social media, type projects) The theme: if you are not coming here to learn and to “help” anyone but yourself, or you think you have all the answers already, or you are not working on any personal goals to make yourself a better human as we all need to be doing, no need to apply. You can read up on them here:

http://pepyride.org/support/volunteer-opportunities/working-with-pepy

26 February 2010 ~ 2 Comments

Metric Machines

NGOs Social Entrepreneurship

I just added some thoughts on the Social Edge discussion about about the Fetishization of Metrics. Add yours there as well!

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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 problem with that is, we have to interact with the people or the place to really understand a problem.

We can’t all go and see or touch the places and things we are putting our money into, but it doesn’t mean we need to focus on numbers to know our impact. The internet might be the cause of a lot of de-humanizing problems in our society, but when it comes to monitoring and evaluating where to give money, it can be used to actually make us interact more like humans, if we use it right. We can share videos of the work that we do, interviews with staff and community members, share photos and journal entries and instantly “chat” with the people we would otherwise have had to rely on reported statistics to know about.

So why are we still looking at numbers? When the next generation of donors arrives, the ones who have been social-media-d from birth, they will hopefully not evaluate projects based on numbers which they know can be re-adjusted easily in order to satisfy those of us who have no interactions with that place. They will instead support work that talks to them, that shows them actual failures and successes, through human eyes, not stats. They will invest in people who are honest and speak about the work that they do openly, not through formalized stat-filled reports. And they will hopefully realize that the groups making changes in the world are investing time in people, not just investing times in a certain section of numbers on a census report.

So when they ask you “What’s the impact? How sure are you? Have you measured that? What are the numbers?” – show them, tell them, connect them, and entertain them with the details of the TRUTH, which can only be shown through human senses, not numbers. Because the answer from SOMEONE, even if it’s not you, should be “Because I saw it, and here is the story.”

25 February 2010 ~ 31 Comments

Voluntourism: What could go wrong when trying to do right?

Lessons Learned Voluntourism

I am lucky to have a guest blog post on Saundra’s ever-growing-in-popularity Good Intentions are Not Enough blog. I have been a fan of her writing and her philosophies for some time, so I was delighted for the chance to add some of my thoughts to her work.

Here is the original post and below is the text so that I can keep these thoughts tracked on my blog (as I change my opinions and contradict myself over time I’m sure as I continue to learn). I’d love it if others who work in this area would comment on the Good Intentions page or here and tell us your ideas for what I missed.

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Voluntourism: What could go wrong when trying to do right?

During the past eight years, as I have joined and then lead volunteer programs in Asia, I have seen many of the same mistakes repeated when it comes to international “voluntourism”, I have made many of these mistakes myself. I know how easy it is to offer a trip that is easy to sell, fits in with travelers’ demands, appears to have a plan for a positive impact, but in the end ends up being either a waste of time for the local community partners or, in the worst cases, causes more harm than good. Here are some of the common problems I have seen in the voluntourism market and some tips for travelers on how to choose the right program.

Creating one-off projects which have little long-term impact

Often times the real needs of a project are not things that volunteers can easily support. Language barriers, lack of local knowledge, and lack of skills prevent volunteers from being a good fit for most development project needs, so instead tour companies often create projects for the volunteer.

These projects typically involve little investment of energy and ideas in people. The core needs of the partner might have been teacher training for their school, soil enhancement techniques to improve farming, etc. Because volunteers can’t help with those things, a project is instead created to fill the desire of the traveler to “feel helpful”, and the core needs are overlooked for those where it was simpler to insert unskilled volunteers. These projects might be building a fence or painting a school, and it is likely that the tour company will do little to monitor the project other than stopping by twice a year with their tourists to take a picture of “the school they are helping.”

Real life example: I really did travel with a tour company that decided to allow us to paint the school that was on their bike route. We painted it poorly, I must say, as we rushed to complete it in one day (and most of us felt too tired to put in a big effort). We probably spent $200 on paint (25% of which we dropped on the floor). The project was in rural Thailand, and $200 could have probably bought a lot of educational resources, hired a few teachers for a month, or done a list of other things which would have added more educational value than our patchy blue paint job. If they insisted on painting, if they had instead funded $3000 towards a locally identified educational need (for example, a weekly life-skills training course), plus bought $200 worth of paint, at least then our combined efforts would have been more than just the blue paint on the floor.

How to choose: Ask the tour operator about their relationship with the NGO partner. Have they worked together long? If the answer is yes, that’s a good thing. How do they choose what projects the travelers will engage in? If the local communities or NGO partners are making the decisions and have veto power over ideas they don’t like, that is better than ideas coming from the tour company based on unfounded assumptions of needs. For all of these answers, getting in touch with both someone who had gone on the trip before and someone working in the country where you are visiting to get their perspective on the company and NGO partner will shine a more realistic light on the situation.

Forgetting that volunteers are NOT free

A lot of tour operators will bring their clients to a project and expect an NGO or community program to entertain their guests by speaking to them about their work or organizing a small volunteer project. They put the NGOs or orphanages on their site, sell them to clients as part of a tour, yet keep all of the tour profits themselves. Sometimes the tour company says, “We leave it up to the tourists to see if they want to donate!”, but it should not be the tourists’ responsibility to ensure that the development partner gets value out of the trip in exchange for their time.

Real life example: As an NGO, at PEPY we sometimes get requests from tour companies to come see our projects. They want to include a visit to our programs as a part of their tour, which they will market to their clients. To entertain a group for a few hours and explain our projects would take time away from management staff.

How to choose: If you know that your skills are not precisely matched with the needs of a project, or if the interactions you are having with partner NGOs are taking their time away from their core mission, ask and find out if the tour company is compensating the person or group presenting to or facilitating your community interaction. If they are not, yet the tour company is marking this part of the experience as a selling point of the tour, then they are probably putting the desire for their own profits over a the need to provide real support for these groups.

Giving things away

As Saundra has told us over and over again and as I have learned through seeing the negative effects of an unbridled tourism culture of giving things away “to the poor people”, giving things to people is never going to solve their problems. Instead, it can destroy local markets, create community jealousies, and create a culture of dependency.

Real life example: I wish this WASN’T real… but sadly, this is what a lot of “responsible” tourism has come to. There are tour operators in Cambodia where you can pay $45 for the day to be driven out to a “poor village where you can hand out food or school supplies to the poor family of your choice”. Oh yes, people pay for this. It’s like buying food pellets at the zoo to feed the goats. Except these are people. Not goats.

How to choose: Question any organization that allows you and your tour group to go anywhere to “hand out school supplies” or “deliver a book to a child”. If those items are needed, they should be distributed through local power structures, in ways where those with the highest needs are prioritized, and where capacity building is tied in with the giving away of things.

Monitoring projects poorly or not at all

How can a tour company that comes through an area a few times a year know that they are “improving lives through our wells”? Do they go back and test them? Fix them? Get feedback? Sometimes we think we are helping people, but it is not until we try it and fail that we realize our plan was flawed. What is worse is if we continue to repeat our failures, either from lack of willingness to admit them, or lack of effort to research our impacts.

Real life example: A tour company in India allowed tourists to hand out goats to families on their tours. In the middle of the tour, a person from a nearby village came and told the director that the man who had been put in charge of choosing which poor families should get the goats had been charging the families for the goats for years. The tour company had been making their English speaking tour guide rich, were not helping “the poorest of the poor” that they claimed to be, and had furthered corruption and mistrust in the village.

How to choose: Ask about the NGO’s monitoring plan. If you are building any structures or giving away any technology, find out how those things are being put to use and who will monitor the needs in case of damage or additional ideas for improvements. Is there a responsible NGO partner involved in these projects full-time who can make the changes needed to ensure the program’s success? If you feel that the tour company’s projects are one-off initiatives with little relationship building on their part with the community, find a new operator.

Giving unskilled volunteers jobs that require skills

Even painting requires some skills, and clearly our group in Thailand didn’t have them. Teaching English should not be left to 19 year old gap years, especially in countries where there are plenty of unemployed local English speakers. If we don’t know how to do what we are supposed to be doing as volunteers, we might cause more harm than good, and at minimum, we will waste a lot of people’s time.

Real life example: There are many orphanages in Cambodia which take volunteers to teach English. Some come for a few weeks, others for a few days. When they leave, the classes have no teacher, there is no curriculum to ensure that the students aren’t learning “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” every day, and the school is not better able to solve its own problems in the future because of the volunteer’s visit. If skilled teachers had spent time teaching English teachers English, they would have improved the system at least slightly, but sadly, everyone just wants to pet the cute kids.

How to choose: If you are looking for a long term placement, make sure to pick an operator that does very thorough matching of skills and needs. For short term placements, choose groups focused on educating you as a traveler, and giving you the skills and tools to improve the world when you go home. We have to learn before we can help. Choosing a trip focused on your education, which doesn’t assume that every wealthy traveler has construction skills, will empower you to be better equipped to support responsible initiatives in the future.

Forgetting to make the rest of the time on their trip “responsible”

There is a lot of discussion about the “volunteer time”, but what about the rest of the trip? Where are you being put up? What restaurants are you eating at? Those things matter just as much as the volunteer time, and just like carbon offsetting, if you are trying to do good by giving money to development projects, yet causing harm in all of your day-to-day activities, the two do not balance out.

Real life example: A responsible tourism organization based abroad was planning their trip to Cambodia and had contacted us to learn more about our work. When I met with the trip coordinator at their hotel, I realized that they had chosen to stay at a hotel owned in part by a very well known corrupt politician. Had they spent the time to ask anyone working in responsible travel in Cambodia about their hotel and restaurant choices, they would have found much more well-respected places in which to spend their money.

How to choose: Ask your voluntourism partner about the rest of the trip and how they make their choices. If they outsource their entire trip to a partner or if they are selling trips in tens of countries around the world, they likely do not know the people and places they are visiting well, and are less likely to be offering you a chance to have a positive impact with your tourism dollars.

Fostering moral imperialism

This one is the biggest problem I think, but the least talked about. We assume, because we come from wealthier places with better education systems, that we can come into any new place without knowing much about the culture or the people, and we can fix things. We can’t! THEY, the people who live there and know the place well, can. Our job in the development world can and should be to support them in doing so. So, we can’t assume we can come do it for them and “save the babies” by visiting an orphanage for a few hours on our trip to India. And we sure shouldn’t think that our time is oh so valuable that we should fundraise money to pay for OUR flights to go paint a school poorly. My job, in running a tour operation, is to educate travelers on at least these two points: improvements take time, and the people we are visiting have just as much—if not more—to teach us as we have to teach them.

Real life example: Just search for voluntourism on the web. “Come to XXXXX, Africa and save the world,” followed by instructions on how to fundraise tax free dollars, which include the price of your travel abroad.

How to choose: If we are going to send our students abroad without charging them, we should at least tell them the truth: THEY are the ones benefiting in this situation. Let’s start being realistic and not deciding to go abroad to help, but instead to learn. If you find a company that discusses the trip as “life-changing” for the communities you are visiting, scroll further until you find one that admits that the real selling point is that the experience will be life-changing for YOU. That is OK! That is why we travel, so let’s not try to hide that. If your tour company talks about all of their successes at helping people, but will not give you examples of times they have made mistakes, lessons they have learned, or things they are doing differently now compared with three years ago, don’t trust them. They clearly think that just because they are setting out to do good, that they are. Remind them that Good Intentions are NOT Enough.

It’s time to stop making the same mistakes

Now that enough of us have made these mistakes and learned from them, it is time for others to stop making the same mistakes. To make the overall impact of volunteer travel more positive will take a movement of travelers demanding responsible practices from their operators. Please add comments or tips for travelers which you think might give them additional ideas for picking the best organized voluntourism programs.

25 February 2010 ~ 0 Comments

Why are so many Gen Y’s Social Entrepreneurs?

Lessons Learned Social Entrepreneurship

This is a comment I originally posted on The Suddes Group post about Generation Y and Social Entrepreneurship. Why do YOU think this movement is growing?

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It is exciting to see so many people living their passions and being willing to work towards the changes they want to see in the world.

I agree with Teju that connectivity is a key to this movement, but I also think it is a few generations of “having enough to live”. My mental image of what the 40’s and 50’s was like has a lot of people working hard to improve their lives. Those people were less able to think globally about change as they had the goal of improving the future for their own children in mind. For many of us, our grandparents (or parents) worked hard to send their kids to college and made sacrifices to do so. Many of our parents were raised with enough to eat and a chance to study – perhaps with a mindset of more would always be nice, but we don’t have to worry about how we are going to feed the family. In many cases, they DID make more, and they continued to set their goals higher and higher. A lot more of the next generation which you are writing about, grew up in American or Canadian or British communities surrounded by people who had a lot, but were still fighting for more. Seeing that on TV, in out media, and in our suburbs from a young age makes you wonder if that is really worth growing up for.

I grew up in a suburb, on what my mom refers to as the “teacher street”. My mom is a teacher and so many others on our street are two. “Tiny” houses amongst monstrosities. It’s not until you grow up, go further down the street, or down the continent, into the cities or rural areas or anywhere that does not have a public school which sends a half of its kids to Ivy League schools, that you realize, I’m lucky. Like Teju said, all we have to do is search the internet to realize how much we have and how reliant our lives have become on those who don’t. We realized we don’t NEED to keep fighting for more for US.

Why not make a future for ourselves which allows us to do something we love while fighting that age old battle of making the world a better place for our kids. Lucky for many of us, we have the luxury of knowing we will always be able to find a way to make money to support our own kids, so we can turn outward towards the world and rejoin the fight for the future, this time with all of the worlds’ kids in mind.

22 February 2010 ~ 11 Comments

Our Development Philosophy

Development

You can read more about each of our programs on the PEPY website, but I thought it might be more important to tell you the WHYs and HOWs of the decisions we make in our program design, rather than just talk about numbers of trainings and books we give out.

Our development philosophy is based on these core beliefs. I will expand on each pillar below this week, about how we came to value this development philosophy, and how we are putting each into practice. In order to empower people to make changes in their own lives–to create our vision for a world where everyone has access to quality education, increased health and environmental awareness—we believe we need to:

Build capacity in people.

Partner with other organizations.

Share the lessons we have learned.

Allow flexibility in our programs.

Work with local government systems and power structures.

Overall, we believe that the changes we want to see in the world are only possible if we invest time in people. Changes won’t result from giving things away, they won’t result from throwing more money at a problem, and they won’t happen by rushing to reach more and more places without committing the time to create high quality impacts. We are just as impatient as the rest of the people looking to make change in the world, but what we have learned through our mistakes and our slow and small successes is that investing time in a team of passionate leaders will keep us on the path to reaching our vision.

Check back in over the course of the next week as I talk about the lessons we have learned around each of these pillars, and please add your thoughts, questions, and stories as well if you like!

20 February 2010 ~ 30 Comments

Traveling Responsibly – Learning Trips Over Giving Trips?

Lessons Learned Voluntourism

This is a guest blog post which was originally featured on the Travelanthropist website.

Our trips during our first few years at PEPY were all about service. We were enthusiastic about offering travelers a chance to give back to the places they visited, otherwise known as voluntourism. Tour participants taught classes at local schools, visited orphanages, and repaired educational buildings. Often times, the needs the travelers were filling were not the biggest needs for the projects we were partnering with but were instead the things they were able to physically contribute to. When our guests left, they, and we, would make comments like “I’m so glad we came here to help,” or “I am going to make all of my future travel about volunteering.” I used to smile on this comments, but now I realize we were breeding a backwards approach to responsible travel.

People, myself included, sometimes cringe at the word “tourist”. We spend time trying to distinguish ourselves from “the tourists”, trying to lay claim to a different type of travel attitude, which puts us in a class above the average traveler. There is a tricky problem with that. . . we ARE tourists!Whenever we are exploring a new place, no matter how responsibly or irresponsibly we do it, we are tourists by definition. Encouraging tourists to come to a place to “give” or to “teach” can in some ways be viewed as belittling all of the opportunities we have to learn as WE are ones entering a new place. WE are the tourists. So should we not take our cues for how to act and support the community from the people we learn from rather than bring in our preconceived notions of what a place needs? As responsible tourists, we need to learn about the places we visit, for only through educating ourselves can we understand how to act in a new culture, how to interpret the historical context of what we see, and how to give back to the places we visit.

A lot of voluntourism involves hands-on building projects. Most travelers are not skilled in technical skills, so tasks like painting are left to the travelers, and often times even with those tasks voluntourists create waste and inefficiencies as we did in many of our painting projects. This is a gray area for me since the boundary of ethical voluntourism decision making really falls with the funding. Are travelers paying for the experience? Do people in the community being “served” benefit financially from the travelers’ visit? Was the voluntourism project decided because of actual needs or because of the ease of integrating unskilled foreigners into the tasks? Where is the funding going? Let’s say the real needs at the school are teacher training and the tourists are bringing $3000 of support. Of that, perhaps $2800 is going to those real priorities which will improve education with the remaining $200 going towards the paint of the voluntourism project. I still don’t think the system is efficient, but I think that is much better than the voluntourism projects I have seen where the tourists are paying a company abroad to come “help” a community, and the only money coming in is the $200 for the paint, which doesn’t really help that much at all! As voluntourism operators who put these communities and partners on our websites as part of the marketing for our trips, we need to be honest with ourselves and make sure if those people and projects are making US money, they had better be providing REAL support for the communities being advertised. Having seen many projects in action in Cambodia, I can tell you that many of them are not.

The most important lesson we learned at PEPY in the past five years: we have to learn before we can help. As a result, PEPY’s focus is now on edu-tourism. From our experience, helping before we have learned can sometimes not be any help at all!

When people travel with PEPY nowadays, we remind them that they are not going to change the world in a week, or a month, of however long they are with us. In fact, the only thing in which we can really ensure change is ourselves. We can learn during our travels, go back into our real lives, and THEN we can change the world. At PEPY, our goals are to change the way people give, travel, and live AFTER they are with us. We want to give them tools to ask the right questions, which will help them be responsible donors and identify the best NGO partners. We want to influence the way they travel in the future by helping them think about ways to keep their travel dollars in the countries they visit how their travel impacts these places. Maybe they will be so inspired during their trip that they will bike more, use less plastic, volunteer at a local library, serve as a liaison for refugees in their home country, study something new. . . LIVE differently. We can’t change the world in a week, but we sure can over a lifetime. Our past participants have already proven to us that any impacts we can have on our trips pale in comparison to the good they can go out into the world and ignite through changing their attitudes and actions due to their new insights.

By reminding our trip participants that the people, places, and projects we visit were here before they arrived and will be here long after they leave, they can understand WHY their trips are going to make a difference. All of our trips have a fundraising minimum in addition to the trip costs, and that funding helps our projects continue. Our guests realize that changes in attitudes and actions take time, and that giving things in a short term project is not going to bring the same successes as investing time in PEOPLE.

This is what we have learned at PEPY, and the reason we are changing from “voluntourism” to “educational adventures”. The changes we want to see in the world require an investment of time in people. We look to give people the skills, connections, and support to be great leaders and make the changes they want to see in their own lives and in the world. This applies to our education programs in Cambodia as well as our tours.

People on our trips sometimes say “I want to support development in a developing country” or “I want to start a social venture, what should I do?” and I usually respond with this quote from Harold Whitman:

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes YOU come alive, and then go out and do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

We can invest time in people to help them make the changes they want to see in themselves and in the world, and encourage them to go out and do the things they love. I can think of nothing better for our future than having a world full of global citizens doing what they love to do.

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Daniela Papi is the founder of PEPY, a hybrid organization based in Siem Reap, Cambodia. PEPY’s educational development arm works in teacher training, Khmer literacy, and leadership development programs. PEPY Tours offers responsible travelers a chance to visit Cambodia, meet local changemakers working to improve Cambodia’s future, and learn first-hand about the development issues facing the country today. You can read more about the lessons Daniela and her team are learning by following her blog: Lessons I Learned.

19 February 2010 ~ 0 Comments