Lessons I Learned

… when not done right.

And, I know I am probably jaded, but I think that most of the time, it is not done well.

Read up on this: http://voluntourismgal.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/a-tale-of-three-schools/

These schools took money fundraised from around the world and just threw it out away. It’s SUCH a waste! And the people living nearby likely have lots of needs which could have been supported in a much more sustainable way had that money been put to good use.

It is one thing to be wasteful, and another thing to profit off of doing so. I think the most disgusting part of the voluntourism industry is that so many people stand to benefit HUGELY from being wasteful like this and “selling” experiences that people want to an uneducated public who have good intentions but don’t realize how to do more with their time and money.

I have gone on a lot of voluntourism trips – and even organized some in the past – where you could fundraise for YOUR costs.  You could fundraise money to pay for your flight somewhere to “help” someone… but who were you helping?  You were helping YOU!  We just need to call a spade a spade and be ok with that!  There are HUGE benefits from taking young people from wealthy countries abroad to learn and to become better global citizens in the future. I have written about that before in this post called “Is it ok that Voluntourism changed YOUR life?.

If people want to donate to that, knowing their money is going to help the traveler, not the “poor people of XXXX country”, then that is fine!  Aunt Jane might be happy to give money to her nephew to have a great “life experience” and make him less bratty.  But if we market and say “help me raise money to fly to XXX poor country to help the people for a week or two” then most of us who have skills which could be found locally in more sustainable long-term ways, are kidding ourselves about our own self worth.  Let’s go abroad. Let’s send our kids abroad. TO LEARN. And then when we want to help “poor people”, let’s send sustainable, longer-term, locally directed, and managed support which is a lot more valuable than sending ourselves.

Join the discussion on Social Edge about voluntourism and how to “do it right”.

I argue, that “doing it right” means not coming into a place to “volunteer” in the first place, but to learn and to share mutually.  “Learning service” rather than “service learning” is what we should teach our students to seek out when they visit a new place.

In this post, Saul Garlick starts out by asking, “What would you say if I told you that all of the work that Westerners do in the developing world for less than 6 months amounts to nothing more than poverty tourism?”

I am pasting my comments below, but click here to read the whole chain of the debate!

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Thanks for starting this discussion, Saul. I disagree with the premise of the question though: it is not the timeline that we should be focusing on. To establish more effective cross cultural understanding, we need to go somewhere to LEARN first, not to SERVE a people and a place we know little about.

Trying to give a timeline to when voluntourism becomes “effective” is like saying “You will gain more muscles if you work out for 60 minutes than 10 minutes”. If your goal is gaining more muscles, it’s not about the time, but about WHAT you are doing for that time period – are you lifting weights or doing jumping jacks?

I have lived in Cambodia for five years and I have seen way too many people who have stayed for 6 months or longer to “volunteer” but who would have had a better impact on the world had they gone home after a week. It is NOT the time that matters. What matters is what you are doing, how what you are able to contribute matches with needs, and how your time is structured so that you are not leaving a hole but rather building a bridge for when you do leave.

Cambodia, and other countries like it, do not need more rich tourists who want to (and I quote from many an email request that I get from teachers or parents) “paint something, spend time with kids, or build something so that they can really feel a sense of accomplishment for their time there.” If you are coming to paint or pet kids (I was thinking, “painting kids” tours might work very well given the high demand for both), it does not matter if you are here for a week or 6 months: you might be helping YOU, but your main impact is not helping others.

As you note Saul, a two-way dialogue is important, and that is why we have a problem implicit in the world voluntourism. What you are talking about – a two-way chance to learn – is not about “service”, it is about “learning”. Schools these days are removing the word “volunteering” from their international itineraries and replacing it with “Service Learning” as they are starting to realize it needs to be about learning. I think we need to take it a step further and flip the words to “Learning Service.”

We have to learn before we can help. As I’m sure you would agree, that advice is just as true for the budding “social entrepreneurs” heading off for 6 months to “teach” people from a foreign culture about something they decided would be a good solution for “their needs”. I know, because I have done this myself. 6 months or 2 days, it’s about listening, learning, and knowing our place – as at the end of the day, it IS tourism. You are visiting a new place for the first time, and you should be there to receive an education about a new place, new people, and new culture. We are the ones being served via new knowledge. With this new knowledge we can then move on to get angry, get interested, and take action, starting most likely with changes to our own lives.

I come from this from two perspectives: running an educational development organization working in 10 rural schools which constantly get requests from those looking to volunteer, and from running an educational tour company designed to offer travelers a chance to learn about development issues. We don’t take volunteers to come work in our school programs – those programs are managed by our Khmer staff – but we do take short-term travelers on learning adventures which fund our educational program work.

We have made changes at PEPY Tours as we went from offering people one-off voluntourism trips designed to “help people” to edu-tourism trips designed to change the way travelers give, travel, and live after they join us. Here is a piece I wrote about that transition: http://travelanthropist.com[…]rips-over-giving-trips.html

As we had gotten so fed up with the negative impact of voluntourism work here in Cambodia, through both our own mistakes and those of others, we decided to create a Voluntourism101 self-check guide for operators (though there is still more work to do on this to make it more effective and spread its use further – and I’d love your thoughts on this Saul).

http://voluntourism101.com/guide

Conversely though, I do think I think there is a need for a way to accelerate the understanding of needs to be matched with short-term travelers’ skills. For example, at PEPY, if someone was an expert at Joomla!, or Salesforce, or was willing to do a short training on US tax accounting, we could use their skills for even just a half of a day and be better able to solve our problems in the future. Some friends and I have been talking about creating a program where a select number of local social-entrepreneurs would be selected for a fellowship period and they could self-identify skills they want to learn (business plan writing, etc) and these could be listed for travelers to then “apply” to fill during their short-term stay. In exchange, they would get a chance to learn about a new culture from a socially conscious leader who might offer a cultural tour, a language lesson, etc. It’s like Couchsurfing meets Kiva/Kickstarter – but with a human time investment focus and cultural exchange rather than start up funding or loans. (If you are interested in this, be in touch.)

Finally, I’d like to point out that when we say “A two-way dialogue is essential between the social entrepreneur and the poor” we are implying that the social entrepreneur ISN’T “the poor” and herein lies another problem. The most effective leaders for a cause will be those whose problem is their own. We should be focused on helping local social entrepreneurs solve their own problems, as they are the ones who have already done the “learning” – they know what the needs are and are going to be the most passionate about making changes. Travelers who go and spend 2 days or 2 years learning from a local leader who is passionate about taking action to improve their own country will be better for it and can then find ways to contribute to that social entrepreneur’s needs. It’s not about time. It’s about the how and what, and as always, no matter how fun painting kids seems to some, it’s about investing time in people.

Over the course of the last five years we have jotted down many rules and given presentations internally at PEPY about our writing guidelines.  I spent the better part of the day today locating them and compiling them, and they have a lot of the same themes. Here are a selection of the Do’s and Don’ts we have listed.  I’d love other thoughts on what you have added in your own internal writing guidelines for your organizations – or other thoughts you have on the topic!

Here are some of the things we are focusing on:

We should avoid: “villagers”, “the locals”

Instead we might use: members of Chanleas Dai community, the people from xxxxx village, etc

Why? Most of us are from a “village” somewhere, but wouldn’t describe people from our own areas as “villagers”

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We should avoid: “our schools”, PEPY Schools

Instead we might use: schools in Chanleas Dai, our partner schools, PEPY partners

Why? These are government schools (not “our” schools), and we should use vocabulary that recognizes our partnership

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We should avoid: “poor people”

Instead we might use: people living in areas without XXXX, or other adjectives which might apply as a more fitting generalization for the specific place such as “rural communities” or “a community which is Xkm away from a high school” etc

Why? Not only is “poverty” subjective, it also doesn’t always apply to everyone in the areas we work in.  Use more concrete descriptions relating to specific cases.

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We should avoid: heartbreaking photos of “poor people”

Instead we might use: honest photos of our work which highlight our programs successes and failures

Why? We are not a magazine for 17 year olds showing “before and after” shots. No one would want to be the “before” shot – or the “poor person” photo. Avoid using any photos which you would not want to put up if it were YOU in the photo.

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We should avoid: our egos, excessive praise, constant focus on successes

Instead we might use: honest appraisals of our successes as well as our failures

Why? We believe that NGOs need to admit mistakes and that donors should not be trained to expect constant success. By being open about our progress, we engage our donors in a learning process which will hopefully benefit the NGO community at large.

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What would you add to this list?

I have not found the time to write on my blog or to tweet much recently as, with new leadership transitions at PEPY, the act of living the busyness of life is presently a priority over reflecting on it… but I have lots of lessons I am learning.

Since I am not doing a great job sharing those lessons, I thought I would connect you with two people who have taught me a lot and who continue to inspire me.

My friend Soe is SOE impressive. Reading his posts and watching his strength, conviction for what he believes in, and commitment to the cause of his fellow countrymen living in Burma inspires me daily.

Mickey Sampson is someone who inspired me each and every time I met him. His passing has made the lessons he shared with me stronger and continues to motivate me to connect people to his work and philosophies.

Click on those links about Soe and Mickey, be inspired, and then share links in the comments about other people who inspire you… we’d all always love to be connected to more inspirational people!

I am looking forward to the day that the BBC and all of the world’s networks are featuring Cambodia for a very positive story. Yesterday’s tragedy, a human stampede which left around 350 people dead in the nation’s capital, is yet another heart-breaking story from this place I have been living in and learning about for the past 5 years. Cambodia gets featured for ongoing tragedies, like last week’s article on the Guardian’s site about orphanages which are turning profits for “owners” who give little to no care to the children living there. It gets featured around the world for judicial remnants of the tragedies of the Khmer Rouge. And yesterday, the Bon Om Touk festival, which should have been a celebration for the nation, brought worldwide attention to Cambodia about yet another great loss of lives.

I got emails today from friends around the world, some I had not heard from in a number of years, checking to see if I am ok.

I am ok.

So are all of our staff at PEPY.

(I am thankful that so many people care about us and our families.)

It seems that many of the deaths were of people from the provinces surrounding Phnom Penh who had traveled great distances to see the city and enjoy the festival. They had left families behind to celebrate their free and growing nation. They came to see the King who waves to the oarsmen as they paddle by in the boat races. They came all the way to the city, many for the first time, so these were the ones who stayed to the end – to see the final ceremony, on a newly created island built on “contested” land.

The people of Phnom Penh are lighting incense throughout the streets tonight as the nation mourns. May they all live to see stories of joy, success, innovation, and prosperity reach the worlds ears from their country.

We want to know that our money went to “the right place”. We have been taught to be fearful that our donations might aid corruption or not be used in the way we had intended. As such, it’s easier for us to build buildings than invest time in people through things like trainings & education programs.

If we fund a building, we can see it and touch it and know that our money went where we had intended it to go.

But, what are we missing when we invest only in things we can put our name on?

We are missing out on investing in real change.

The changes we say that we want to see in the world—in health, education, the environment, and in all of the social ills plaguing our schools, families, and our planet—cannot be fixed by investing in things. More schools, more bednets, more health centers, more books, and more school uniforms are not going to solve these problems, no matter how many we give away.

We can’t emblazon our name on a person’s forehead the way we can on a hospital building: Funded by the Smith Family. Investing in people isn’t as rewarding in the short term – you don’t see a space turn from empty to full, a building go up brick by brick, or books lining shelves. But, as we fill people with knowledge and skills, connect them to the ideas and resources they need to make the changes they want to see in the world, and create opportunities that didn’t exist before, we start to fill the real voids we have in the world: people with the skills and passion to go out and make the changes they believe in.

We made this mistake at PEPY. We came to Cambodia and built a school, thinking that a new building would improve education, not realizing that a safe space is only the tip of the iceberg of what is needed to improve the quality of education in a place. The rest has to do with human beings. We need a revolution of philanthropy. We need fewer people donating to build a well with their name on it or to build empty schools and health centers with beautiful plaques hanging on the walls, and more people supporting educational opportunities for people to learn the skills and bring in the income to solve their problems on their own. I’ve invested in the wrong things many times and I’ve seen what it takes to make changes. I know now: buildings don’t change lives. PEOPLE do. So rather than writing our names on more buildings, let’s get out our tattoo pens and start investing in people to change the world.

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Disclaimer: The author does not REALLY think that we should write on people. She does though really think that we should INVEST in people, even though we can’t put a name plate on them. Please note that no people were harmed in the taking of these photos and that all investment in all of us in the images was in the form of opportunities to connect and learn, not tattoo ink.

On October 21^st Wild Asia held its annual Responsible Tourism Awards ceremony at the International Travel Bureau conference in Singapore. PEPY Tours, a finalist for the RT award, was invited to speak to an audience of peers—that is, folks in the tourism industry who likewise work in the growing field of RT. The PEPY Tours talk, delivered by Chief Tourmaster Eric Lewis, was slated under a segment called “Successful RT Case Studies from Tour Providers around Asia.” The following is a transcript of that talk.

As a prelude I’ll give you the elevator-version of what PEPY is. PEPY is one organization that comprises two separate legal entities: a development nonprofit, and a for-profit tours company. The nonprofit aims to empower Cambodians to improve their quality of life, with a focus on increased access to quality education. The for-profit arm, PEPY Tours, operates adventure travel in Cambodia that emphasizes social action and accountability, while also raising awareness and funding for our ongoing non-profit programs.

So that’s where I’m coming from—PEPY Tours has a triple bottom line.

The subtitle of this segment is “Successful Responsible Tourism Case Studies,” and I’d like to dissect that title, because the word ‘successful’ carries some implications that I’d like to address before we really get underway here.

By definition, an organization that is successful has either

a) achieved its goals,

or

b) turned a profit.

And these two are often the same, where the goal is profit.

Now Wild Asia has decided that PEPY Tours represents success in our industry, and ostensibly I’m here to share the secrets of our success. And that’s very flattering. But the nomination presents a bit of a paradox. What I mean is that if we are successful by traditional standards then we may actually be unsuccessful according to our own.

This sounds strange, I know. Let me explain. Continue Reading