Lessons I Learned

vol⋅un⋅teer  [vol-uhn-teer] –noun

It would probably make a lot more sense if we stopped using the title “volunteer” for positions where people are getting paid.  The result is that I have met Cambodians who say “I want to be a volunteer when I grow up.”  Hmmm… do you think we are spreading the wrong message?  Volunteers in Cambodia are getting paid more than local staff.  I think we need to redefine this word.

Let’s get some misconceptions out in the open before starting to discuss “international volunteering” as there is a lot of confusion and sometimes a negative perception surrounding those words.

Some misconceptions are that: Continue Reading

This is a post I originally put on the PEPY Team Journal.
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What is this “sustainability” you speak of?  I do not think it means what you think it means.  This word is used so often now in development that it seems to have taken on a huge range of meanings.  Are we all spending too much time looking for an imaginary lost city and too little time focusing on other goals that increase the impact of our programs?  Has “sustainability” turned into the Holy Grail of development — promising that once you find it, your program can live forever? And perhaps the most important questions are, how is sustainability even possible and should it always be our goal?

Like any overused word, the answer to these questions depends largely on how we define it.  “Financial sustainability” is something people involved in any type of business can understand.  A business can be financially sustainable if the money coming in is equal to or higher than the money going out, and if the timing of those transactions matches up to allow the group to continue operating.  By this definition, sustainability would be the same for an NGO’s micro-loan program as it would for a Swiss bank.

“Financial sustainability” focuses on one variable — money — so it is easier to measure than sustainability in NGOs.  Merely taking into account financial factors in order to rate an NGO’s overall sustainability is too limiting.  Likewise, rating NGOs only by looking at their overhead to program budget is not a successful way to rank the “best” NGOs.  Both of these disregard the main reason NGOs (should) have been started in the first place: the “impact” of their work. (Note: For further disucssion of financial sustainability and how this relates to social ventures check out this posting).

For our own purposes of understanding the impact of our programs at PEPY and creating future plans of action, we needed to do two things:  1) decide how to measure the “sustainability” of our programs, and 2) decide if/when “sustainability” defined as such should indeed be a main goal for each program we offer.

In order to facilitate this discussion with our staff, Continue Reading

In a post by my friend Paco, who works for Better World Books, he questions what BWB’s role can be as a social venture working to improve literacy globally.

I added some thoughts here as well.

http://donniya.blogspot.com/2009/10/books-for-africa-literacy-in-africa-and.html

I recently went to the BWB office in South Bend, IN and was SO impressed with the team I met there and what they have accomplished in the last 6 years.  Very impressive people with a great idea!

I wrote a guest blog post for Canada’s adventure couple, Dave and Deb about voluntourism, why I work, in part, in this field, and some ideas for how we can improve what we do.

For those who don’t have time to read the whole post, here are the five key areas I would consider when choosing  philanthropic travel provider:

1. Is the travel company transparent about how much of your tour fee is going to the programs you are supporting?  Is there marketing consistent with the itinerary they are offering?  (As with the above, I don’t think length of time nor percentage of funding going to a project is a determinant of if the project is good or not. A tour company can be very responsible if none of your funding is going to support projects, if that is clear from the start, as long as the program is design responsibly.)

2. What interaction with children is included in your itinerary?  Is the interaction described like a visit to the zoo?  Are there child protection policies in place?  If it was YOUR child, would you be ok with the type of itinerary an interaction being offered?

3. How does the travel company choose the programs they support?  Ask questions about how your time and any additional support offered by the company itself is designed and what monitoring they do on the impact of these programs.  How is the community or NGO partner involved in designing the programs?

4. Are you giving things away (school supplies, food, wells, etc) on your tour?  How are the recipients chosen?  Is the program designed to help empower people to be able to improve their own lives, or a small bandaid to a larger problem?  If the item is something that will need repair in the future, how is that being dealt with?  Is there community ownership built into the project plan?

5. What about the REST of the trip?  There is so much focus on volunteer interactions and donations as a key to improving the impact of tourism, but perhaps the best way we can improve the impact of tourism is in the “everything else” category.  How does the travel operator choose their hotel partners/travel operators and how do they work to both support the local economy and improve the overall impact of their tours?

Hopefully thinking about these things will make us all better prepared to pick the best partners for our future travel. To read the complete checklist please, visit Voluntourism101 website.

I added my thoughts to this on-going  debate here, on voluntourismgal’s blog:

http://voluntourismgal.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/tax-deductibility-and-voluntourism-should-it-stay-or-should-it-go/

What do YOU think?!  Add your thoughts too!

I saw this as my friend Jordan’s status on his gmail account today:

“Today, educational funding favors programs that teach kids how to read, rather than why to read.” 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112312561

and i wanted to pass it on because it relates a lot to the work PEPY is doing.  When we decided to partner with a large education NGO here – we took a similar argument line “Why are you only training people how to take care of books and where to put them on a shelf?  Instead – let’s teach a LOVE of reading, and then the books WILL get taken care of!”   We have found, in our library programs, that teaching “reading skills” was less effective at getting students to check out books and read in the library than teaching that “reading is fun and that there is a world of learning available IN books”. It is very sad that in America we too are forgetting this: a love of books and a desire to read will be the biggest incentive to learning to read.  Structured phonics time might be needed too, but I don’t think one should be in place of the other.

My mother is a first grade teacher (the best in the world, in case anyone is wondering), and she has seen a huge decline in the freedom teachers have to create FUN in the classroom.  She is one of the reasons I too believe that the biggest incentive for being a good learner is the DESIRE to learn.  We can’t foster that desire to learn unless we focus on the interesting and fun side of learning equally as much, if not more, than the technical skills taught in schools.

What do you think?! 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112312561

Are there any “scalable” & profitable social ventures?  There is talk of “social ventures” being our saviors from the likes of the non-profit world.  Do they REALLY exist?  Or are they mostly hybrid models which still rely heavily on their non-profit arms in order to succeed at scale?

It is VERY hard to find examples which fit all three of these criteria: social venture, scaled beyond it’s initial area of impact, and profitable.  We have all heard of Kiva and Grameen, Friedman congratulates Digital Divide Data, and we will all soon know about SHE (Sustainable Health Enterprises), but none of these fit the bill entirely.  They are all innovative models, but I think there is a growing misconception that there is a huge social venture movement which is led by groups which are funding their work via markets and are impacting development work without relying on donations. If you subscribe to the newsletters of the above example groups, you know that each rely heavily on donations to improve the social impact of their work or to scale their models.

In essence, many of them start like this:

For Digital Divide Data, that break even entity is one of their data entry company locations in South East Asia.  Each makes enough money to pay employees and cover operational overhead.  But what about R&D for the technology they need to expand their work or funds to cover the school scholarships they offer their employees?  SHE will help factories start which will not only break even but will eventually bring in profits for the women who will become full-owners in their plant.  But here too, R&D as well as health education will likely not be able to be funded to the extent needed via this model.  KIVA is entirely a non-profit with their operations and overhead funded through donations from lenders and other investors.

Most groups expand with a non-profit arm, here called “The Replicator NGO” which relies on donations to scale and support the model:

Each localized venture on its own is at least breaking even, and there might be net profit enough to expand slightly, but often times the idea of “scaling” something to a much larger area requires R&D, systems design, and a larger investment of both time and money than the local project can generate.  Many new social ventures run like any start-up would, constantly in bootstrap and catch-up modes, expending nearly all their time and money resources in the DOING part of their work with little left to allocate towards strategic planning/documenting/scaling.

What does this say to me?  This says we SHOULDN’T hold the false ideal of financial sustainability and completely cutting the strings of non-profit donations as the ultimate goal.  These groups and others have proven that a hybrid model is just as, if not more successful at impacting positive global change while also filling needs in the traditional market economy sense.

Grameen might be the best example of why we shouldn’t set financial sustainability as the ultimate goal.  Check out what Grameen Foundation does.  THAT is the success of their model – building human capacity, investing in improving systems, connecting and educating organizations and people…. not just giving out loans.  Others have copied the loan model, but forgotten to read further into their model which involves vetting projects before investment, creating solidarity groups among borrowers, etc.  It can be argued that taking their model and NOT taking the non-profit side of what they do can be more harmful in the long run.

So, I ask two things of you:

1) contemplate on the fact that maybe complete financial sustainability might not be a feasible or the best solution for the problems facing our world, and then comment on that below

or

2) give some examples of social ventures which fit all three categories: social venture, scaled beyond initial area of impact, and profitable – and add them to the comments below

Thanks for reading and thinking about this!

“Are there any “scalable” & profitable social ventures?”: This question is the main topic of an ongoing conversation I have had with many of my friends and co-workers.  The thoughts and (poor) images I came up with above are mostly based on discussions I have recently had with Tim Rann (of PEPY) and Rafe Furst.

A quick and easy answer would be what I’ll call for now “intellectual scaling” – the sharing of impact through the sharing of ideas.  The emergence of a range of Web 2.0 technology based sites, on-line supported initiatives, and conferences and trainings surrounding information sharing can probably tick all three boxes.  I’d love to learn of and from other examples outside of just information sharing initiatives.