Lessons I Learned

This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project.

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In the private sector, picking the right people to work for your business is not only an approach, it is a sacred strategy. Extensive resources go into personality tests, interview questionnaires, highly paid consultants and entire HR departments to deal with attracting, hiring and retaining talent.

Yet after six years working in the development sector in Cambodia, Pari has witnessed many, many organizations make the fatal but depressingly common mistake of blatantly ignoring their team and its development. We’ve spent time in many organizations without job descriptions, performance reviews, or clear recruitment processes. We’ve talked to staff who have never been asked for their feedback, and who don’t know where to take their grievances.

Developing countries struggle enormously to develop and retain talent; there are more African doctors working in America than there are working in Africa. Under these circumstances, you’d think the development organizations tasked with building society would value people above all. But it’s rarely the case.

Why the paradox? Building an empowered, innovative, ambitious and motivated workforce calls for an intensive investment of time in people. Often organizations are not able to, cannot or are unwilling to make this investment in the short-term, and as a result the stability, growth and ‘greatness’ of their organization suffers enormously in the long-term.

Management guru Jim Collins takes it one step further when talking about what it means to go from a ‘good’ organization to a ‘great’ organization: “First get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it. The ‘who’ questions should come before the ‘what’ decisions – before vision, before strategy, before organizational structure, before tactics. First who, then what.”

I often note that HR is the hardest part of my job, and my team is relatively small at 15. Searching for an intangible set of characteristics in a person is never easy, and relentlessly developing, empowering and challenging them once they’re on board is a much greater challenge. But if there is one thing I have observed in ‘great’ organizations, is that they value their team immensely. They involve their team in every big decision, foster lively debate, develop policies as need arises, thoughtfully tie compensation to performance, and engage in a high level of communication with their team.

This list is far from exhaustive, and we’re always learning what it takes to build a great team. Got ideas? Share them below.

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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

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 was recently on a radio show on CBC radio in Canada called “Q with Jian Ghomeshi” in a segment titled “Do gap year volunteer programs do more harm than good?”.

You can listen to it here if you’d like. I agree with the comment regarding animal and conservation projects (trail clean-ups etc) as being examples of volunteer programs which have the potential to add a lot of value. And I agree that it’s not black and white. My main point in speaking on this issue is that we need to consider our impact – collectively and individuals – when we engage in programs claiming social impact as a main purpose. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I wrote a piece for the PEPY Newsletter this month about a failure we had at one of our programs at PEPY and I thought I would share it here as well. I just realized that we should also post it on the Admitting Failures website – a site I have tweeted about before and really appreciate. One of my cohort through the Skoll program at Oxford is David Damberger who helped create the site through Engineers Without Borders (and here is a TEDx talk he did on the subject of failure). I’m excited to have a chance to study with others who believe that admitting failures and lessons learned is a way to improve our global impact!

Failing: A story of forgetting our own lessons at PEPY

Sometimes, even when we know the right thing to do, we fail to do it. We do this with seatbelts, diets, speeding, and love, and as it turns out, we sometimes do this with PEPY programs too.

Recently one of our programs faced a failure which should have been avoidable but which will hopefully help us set better systems in place to avoid similar problems in the future.

You might have read about our “Saw Aw Saw” program, the arm of PEPY which partners with communities to help them create and implement plans to improve their government primary schools.

To build more long-term sustainability into the program (click here to learn how we define “sustainability” at PEPY), SAS includes a small business development component. The idea is that if schools are able to generate additional income on their own, they can use this income to further develop their school beyond what the government or other fundraising efforts provide.

Last year one of the SAS partner schools decided to start a small mushroom growing business. It did quite well, as there was no other local supplier of these nutritious mushrooms, and their first rounds of sales went very well. Eventually, it became too difficult to source mushroom spores and the program stopped.

This year, two schools decided to start a spore-growing program, as spores typically generate a high net profit and in this way they could support local families in improving their nutrient intake by affordably growing their own mushrooms at home. This sounded like a great plan!

BUT we rushed into this program to try to get it started before the end of the school year. We didn’t do enough research, or support the communities with the tools and networks to do this themselves and we also didn’t have the in-house technical expertise to understand the threats to this agriculture program.

Part of the SAS model provides support for the one-off training costs which go into business development. We sent representatives from both schools to a course on mushroom growing. In addition to poor research, we made another big mistake, which goes against the lessons we have learned:

WE paid for this in full. The school support committees did not have to invest funding into this project, only their time. As such, if there was a financial waste, they had very little incentive to point it out or prevent it.

We didn’t send any PEPY staff to the training, which would have helped us to understand the program into the future and might have also prevented us from wasting funds on unnecessary equipment. You see, the key to growing spores, it turns out, is a sterile working environment. We had researched this enough to know the very basics, but when signing community members up for the course, we failed to research what technical tools, apart from the training component, would be required for the success of the program. When the community came to us with a proposal to go to a nearby training on spore growing, we accepted the proposal without doing enough research on how the training would work.

It turns out that part of the training included how to use one of the key tools in spore growing. This sterilization device is, you guessed it, electricity-powered. We had sent two people who live in remote communities with no electricity to a training about how to use an electronic instrument, just because they had asked.

Big oversight.

One of the more important lessons which was reinforced through this process was that when we asked the community members to return these products, they didn’t want to and instead wanted to try to just “put the machines on coals”. Clearly, apart from being dangerous, this would have been a waste of money and a valuable tool. Why didn’t they want to return it? In large part, because they didn’t pay for it. We did. If they had been making decisions with their own funding, it is much more likely that the decisions would have been pushed by impact rather than interest.

Rather than grow spores, the plan now will likely be to search for more affordable and reliable sources of spores so the School Support Committees can go back to growing mushrooms to support their education programs. In the meantime, we’ll be sure to improve our systems of research and decision-making so that this type of problem can be better avoided in the future.

Steve Jobs reminding us to be “unreasonable”.

“Here’s to the crazy ones.. the round pegs in the square holes… they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – Steve Jobs

Yesterday I started my journey from Cambodia to Oxford (via family home in NY) and I made a little video and goodbye note for the PEPY site. I thought I would re-post it here (as I sit in transit for a few more hours waiting for my final flight!)

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Today is my last day in Cambodia, at least for the time being, and I wanted to send out a THANK YOU and a GOODBYE and some LOVE to all of you for helping to create a better PEPY and a better me over the last six years. THANK YOU! I have learned SO much from working with, studying from, and following along with all of you. I already listed “20 Lessons I Learned at PEPY” but there are waaaaay more than 20. Every day I think of another – another thing I learned from one of you that has shaped this organization and will shape how I continue to live in the future.

One major lesson I have learned is that my life is better, and I am better, with PEPY in it. So, I might be heading across the world to study for a bit, but I am not “leaving” PEPY. I will still be a big supporter of this team and this work for a LONG time to come, and I hope you will be too. Check out this video to learn about a change in PEPY’s name (gasp!) and learn more about how you can join the PEPY Sustainers.

It’s not just our acronym that is changing. There have recently been and will continue to be a lot of changes at PEPY, and in this time of transition, we need the support from those of you who have built this family more than ever. We recently had a strategic planning retreat for our managers, board members, and outside consultants who all spent a week thinking REALLY hard about what PEPY’s best impacts could be in the future and what we needed to go do get there. (Read the next newsletter thoroughly for more updates, including a video from our recent planning retreat!). I am SO excited about the ideas this team put together, and I am now even more excited about our future impact than before (those of you who know me might think me having MORE passion for PEPY is impossible – but you are wrong – I do!) Take a sneak peek at our Core Values list if you want to know why I love this team so much!

I am committing to this team that I will make sure they have the support they need to reach our future goals… and I will need your help and commitment in this area as well. We’re looking to build up a team of PEPY Sustainers who are able to commit to being part of this in the long term on an ongoing basis. If you can commit to monthly funding, like $10 per month, GREAT! But it does not need to be through funding that you support us, as you know! There are always a LOT of things we need help with, such as graphic design, board membership, local events and awareness raising, and spreading the word about the educational & philanthropy travel options with PEPY Tours, etc. (For our board, we are specifically looking to replace two board positions of board members who are soon to finish up their tenure with us. We are in need of a treasurer – someone who can help oversee and monitor the monthly financial reports our CFO sends out, and also a board member to help us address governance and legal issues. Spread the word or let us know if you are interested in taking on a bigger role with PEPY!)

So, as you can see, there are many ways to help us sustain PEPY into the future. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see a large number of us who have contributed to and been shaped by our experiences in Cambodia continue to commit to supporting PEPY’s growth in the future.

Come visit me in Oxford if you come through the UK in the next 12 months, or better yet, come visit this amazing team in Cambodia (I know I will be!). If you want to connect to our Cambodian team, reach out to Anna McKeon who recently became our Communications Manager and is one of two foreign staff among our 47 Cambodian staff at PEPY (+ 2 foreign interns who are committing their time to help us grow!) So, drop her a note if you want to give her a high five (she put together this fun video!), offer support, or just check in on how the PEPY team is doing. You can reach her at: contact@pepyride.org

THANK YOU for being a part of the last six years and helping to create an organization I am proud to be associated with. Watch this goodbye video and check out our PEPY Sustainers page if you are interested in joining me in my commitment to make sure PEPY continues, whether we are in Cambodia, or far away. I hope to see you all soon, and am grateful that you are part of this stone soup at PEPY which continues to get tastier each year.

So much love & thanks,
Daniela

Jargon. NGO’s are full of it. Yesterday our EMC had a meeting in CD with the VCD. This is actually a true statement.

We don’t just acronym-ize everything, we also use regular words which once had a commonly defined meaning and use them in so many varieties of ways that in the end you might as well have said “blah”. Your “sustainability index” could be your “blah index” for all I know. What is this sustainability you speak of? I started a different post a few years ago with the same sentence it seems… I guess I’m still unsure!

I was recently asked how I personally define “sustainability” when talking about our work at PEPY, and here is what I had written. Tear it apart, use it, or throw it away. It doesn’t matter because EGBOK and IYQ and all that stuff. TTFN

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We view “sustainability” in two ways at PEPY:

1) Financial sustainability
This is easy to understand. We question if, financially, the program can continue on into the future. Part of the appeal of the Sahakum Apeewat Sala (Communities Developing Schools) program model is that we are working to expand the opportunities for active community members to improve their schools and education systems by connecting them to the tools and knowledge they need to do this on their own. The school development plans are created and enacted by the community, and this part of the system can continue on without PEPY and PEPY’s funding in the future. (That said, this “sustainability” makes the programs take a LOT longer to achieve high levels of impact, though it is more likely that that impact can be “sustained” at that level. This is a debate we are currently having in our strategic planning – higher impact now with lower long term impact in the future, or tiny step by step impact now and long into the future… the right choice we decided, as we often do, is “it depends”.)

2) Investing time in people
We believe that one of the keys to “sustainability” is to invest time in people, rather than buying short-term fixes in the form of material things. In other clichéd words, “Teach a man to fish and he can eat forever.” Yes, some of our programs still “Give a man a fish” in many ways, and we are working to find the right balance that we need for the long-term success of our programs, but we are generally aiming for the “Teach a main to fish” model. Our analysis of the SAS model’s sustainability components rests on the training components of the program. When community members who want to see their local schools improved for their children are empowered with the knowledge of what rights they have to government support for education, how to request support when those commitments are not met, and a system to examine and take action around problems and their root causes, they can continue to use these skills long into the future.

Is this how YOU define sustainability?!