Deciding what not to do is sometimes harder than deciding what to do, when you see many great possibilities for the future. I am surely having this problem with regards to post-gradschool life. And at PEPY, we reached many points where deciding how to move forward meant deciding which ideas NOT to do. Here is […]
This was as lucky week! This past weekend, I was grateful for the opportunity to speak at TEDxOxbridge – the second annual TEDx event being split between the two universities. My talk on voluntourism focused on the need to promote and support our youth in selecting educational travel opportunities over volunteering as my experience has […]
This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project about the impact one NGO has had, and lessons that can be drawn . — In 2008, acid attacks in Cambodia arrived at a tipping point, with daily news coverage, new cases, and gory photos dominating the public discourse. What caused the increase? […]
(I wrote this piece about two weeks ago while in Cambodia but hadn’t gotten around to posting yet….) Today I was in a taxi with seven Cambodian men. Usually a taxi sells out at eight people: four in the back, two in the front passenger seat, and one more paying customer sharing the seat with […]
In business school you are surrounded by people who believe in the power of markets. There are people in my class who are passionate about freeing markets, about scaling enterprises, and about generating profits. Yet some of those SAME people are advocates of giving things away in development work. I have had countless discussions with […]
I was just reminded about a friend, with whom I used to work, who wakes up every morning* and turns to whomever first crosses his path and says: “Good morning! It’s a great day to be alive!” *No really, EVERY morning. And, if you wake up near him at a campsite for a few days […]
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 […]