Lessons I Learned

None of this is new, I don’t think. I couldn’t stand to listen to my own voice for that long, so I actually haven’t heard this all…. but this is an audio interview I did this past summer about PEPY and the lessons I have learned through our work. If you want to know more about PEPY, and you feel like hearing me ramble, here you go

http://www.voicesofthecliff.com/?p=853

“Voices of the Cliff” presents interviews hosted by Douglas Scherer about the journeys and transformations of leaders, with an emphasis on authentic, sustainable, and socially conscious leadership.

This is a guest blog post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project. Before I left Cambodia, Allie took over the TEDxPhnomPenh license and recently organized a team to execute Cambodia’s second TEDx event. Below she describes our motives for starting this event in the first place, how doing something “for the local people” only works if it is “with”, and how the juxtaposition of expat and local development workers can lead to interesting personal insights.

I am sad that I missed this second TEDxPhnomPenh event, but I’m proud of the team that put it together and I love learning about the impact it is continuing to make. Read on to learn about Allie’s journey through this process!

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From the start, TEDxPhnomPenh was about bringing the TED brand – ideas worth spreading – to Cambodia, where we thought young people were hungry for the opportunity to share, question, challenge, explore and create. Our version of TEDx was centered around young Cambodians and what the event might mean to them.

Executing the event the first time, we had a room full of 120 people who experienced 12 amazing TEDxTalks. The audience, we estimate, was 70 – 75% Khmer.

We just recently organized the second TEDx in Cambodia. This time we wanted to expand the brand, and include more people in the TEDxPP experience. So we got busy planning a second event – a simulcast event – and set up a team to execute that, while the team for the live event stayed busy coaching speakers, counting tickets, and dressing up the space so it was camera ready.

Two weeks before the event, the MC, Vanna Sann asked me to lunch. Everyone loved having Vanna as the MC. He is well-spoken, articulate, clever and totally in tune with the event and what we were trying to do.

He had seen the ticketing spreadsheets; the entries showed over 75% Western attendees. We had set up a system that required people to electronically submit for a ticket. We thought the system would run itself, as long as we promoted via Khmer media channels. With all of the rest of the planning going on, I had not been carefully monitoring the results.

What I had not expected was that the young Khmer population at whom we were targeting the event would not be as quick to register as their Western counterparts.  Vanna was brutally honest: “I’m not doing this so that I can look out onto that audience and see a bunch of Western faces.”

Sitting at the lunch table, it felt like he was taking my internal conflicts about who I want to be in Cambodia versus who I am comfortable being, and throwing them back. It is easy to be a foreigner working in development in Phnom Penh; it’s a lot harder to push past the immediate comforts of lovely restaurants, great bars, and a lively social life – to create something enduring in a culture that I am still learning about.

I got back to the office, turned a sheet of paper over, and scribbled on the back:

Collaboration & Openness
Empowering People/Providing Opportunities
Creativity
Innovation

Seeing those words in print changed something. Over the next two weeks, we went into the database and reworked the ticketing, bringing us to 60% Khmer attendance by the time the event came around. We lost one MC, but gained another: Thul Rithy. Charismatic, funny, clever and sarcastic: he was amazing. Now he will go on to continue to lead KhmerTalks, which he founded as a way to spread the TED experience in Khmer. KhmerTalks returns to Phnom Penh on February 25^th. His participation in both events brings the ‘ideas worth spreading’ movement forward significantly.

In the end, the event went off without any major glitches. The stage that day hosted 14 talks including speakers came from America, Australia, Cambodia, India, New Zealand, Spain and Singapore.

One of my favorites was Khiev Kosal. Convicted of attempted murder at age 16, he grew up in a prison system in the US that somehow allowed him to find his voice. After being deported to Cambodia upon release, he now shares his poetry via spoken word. As he got off the stage, one of our technicians was in tears. They embraced for a long time; as others crowded around to congratulate him on what had been an enormously commanding 18 minutes, they held close – complete strangers – both sharing something powerful with the other.

I knew leading TEDxPhnomPenh would challenge me. I didn’t expect the challenge to be so personal. Am I changed? I think so. I find myself looking at the hiring process at Pari differently, asking different questions to potential clients, staying longer in certain conversations, migrating to different people in social settings. Will it last? Here’s hoping.

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

I’m starting my first week of classes at the University of Oxford in their MBA program, and I realize that I am not in the minority for having chosen this program because of its connection to the Skoll Center and its focus on “social entrepreneurship.” Many of the people I have met state that some aspect of “better” business is what brought them here…. well, that and the fact that you get to study in an institution with 800+ years of history and where some of the world’s most brilliant minds have gathered. It’s a fascinating place!

During our first week of orientation we had an optional day and a half session on social innovation that opened with Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Center, speaking about how she thinks the word “social” needs to be removed from “entrepreneurship”. I couldn’t agree more, especially given the reception these concepts have received from some of my MBA classmates.

The polarization of “entrepreneurship” and “social entrepreneurship” implies mutual exclusivity. If you are a “social” entrepreneur, do you somehow get to claim moral superiority over your every day entrepreneur? Many of the most mission driven organizations I have seen have never heard of nor benefited from the term “social enterprise”, so why do we make this distinction? Is this naming trend causing us to forget that ALL business has the responsibility to not only increase profits for shareholders, but also respect and support the world around it?

I view “social” enterprises as businesses working towards social changes as their mission above maximizing income. We don’t call Colgate a social enterprise, but if a group said they were starting a business with the explicit mission of getting toothpaste out to people all over the developing world to reduce tooth decay, we might consider them so. If a group with a stated social mission took on the same business as Colgate, would just the motivating factor be enough to note the difference? Or, would there be no difference at all? And towards that end, should programs like mine be working to remove the polarizing “social” from the entrepreneurship to attract more MBA’s who don’t associate at all with the social side of this curriculum. Perhaps through their drive for successful businesses they will be ones who have the largest ability to make changes in the world?

Relying on free market approaches to global development does leave me with some additional concerns many stemming from a lack of a systematic way to define what “social” impact is. If we believe that people will vote with their money for the things they believe in, then we might take the mindset that as long as you had a socially driven society, the market would drive social improvements. The dilemma here is that the social/environmental implications of certain purchases are not readily available to influence consumer decision making. More worrying is that much of this complete impact understanding is also not readily understood or sought out by business leaders themselves. If we don’t know our social impact and can’t measure it, how can we improve it?

It turns out the same dilemmas causing failures in the NGO world are at work in business. An inability or lack of effort to measure impact and tie positive impacts to future decision making, both for donors and consumers, is creating inefficient markets where funding is going to areas which, with full informational clarity would be less desirable options.

How do we mesh all of the good intentions on one side with all of the business drive on another and make all parties realize that we can and are working towards the same goals? I’m so excited to see where this year takes me and all those of us on this course and how this unique MBA program will impact the work we all take on throughout our lives. Let’s hope that in the future the “social” doesn’t need to be listed as a distinction as a better understanding of the complete spectrum of impacts of our work will be available to all business leaders and consumers and we will all prioritize a better world in designing our businesses.

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.