I called this blog ’Lessons I Learned’, but really it would be better titled ’Lessons I’m Learning’. I believe in sharing what we learn to help others avoid our same mistakes and also exposing ourselves to the criticism and questions which might help us improve. I am skeptical of the popular approaches to both voluntourism and development work, though those are both areas in which I have worked as I’d love to be part of learning how we can do them both better. I think we need to learn before we can help, so I believe “service learning” should be “learning service”. I feel like I am learning more every day about how to help create the world I want to see my future kids and their future kids living in, and sometimes what I learn contradicts what I thought I knew was true. I have learned that good intentions are not enough and that the only person you can “improve” in the world is yourself, so I had better start improving the world by starting there. I hope the dialogue generated through this site will give me more chances to do that and to share the lessons I am learning with others who could benefit from avoiding my mistakes.
A week or so ago someone from CNN contacted us to ask about our opinions on voluntourism, and today we’re on the front page of cnn.com! Exciting that we get to share our message about our transition from traditional “voluntourism” to an education-focused approach.
Full story here: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/05/31/voluntourism.tips/index.html
I don’t.
I want to clarify. My piece in Beyond Profit called “Much Ado About Scale” was intended to be anti-scale. If we can scale a quality solution: fabulous! It was intended to encourage other ways of looking at reaching more people with our ideas, rather than just trying to encourage organizations to “scale up” when their might be more successful options. Here are my comments/thoughts to clarify:
—-
“Scalability” is a great quality of a project, don’t get me wrong! Of course we should aim to get more quality solutions out to more people. What I am talking about are the cases where quality and quantity are mutually exclusive in a way that makes “scaling” dilute the efficacy of a solution.
All too often I think we jump to the conclusion that the way to get ABC successful solution to more people is to get ABC organization to “scale up”. This blog post http://ow.ly/1Fg0e highlights some of the other solutions I think we need to consider more quickly when we find a quality project, such as getting that organization to train what others might view as “competitors”. We shouldn’t look to these options as exceptions to the “always try to scale-up” rule, but rather look at how to preserve quality while maximizing our scope and then pick the appropriate solution. Why are we not aiming more often for scaling a process rather than scaling a solution, when we know from years of NGO lessons learned that the thought processes are what can be spread from place to place, not the solution housed within an organizational framework which was designed for success in a smaller scale project formed from local knowledge?
I used the examples of Skoll and Unreasonable Institute, two organizations I respect, not to say they are picking the wrong people and ideas to invest in, but to say that I think they, and perhaps our whole sector, should alter the writing on our doors. Both organizations, one a well-respected industry leader and the other a new support mechanism for our field, have funded groups which are not profitable (ones which rely on grants to sustain themselves) and solutions which were not “scalable” to the degree they claim to be looking for. Why? Probably because they too, get that quality should be the trump card which clears scale and profit when all three aren’t in one hand. Yes, you are more likely to win the game if you have all three, but if your solution is only going to get dealt one, I’d bet on quality any day.
So, when our top supporters are making many “exceptions to the rules” my question is, why do we all keep trying to push scalability as a requirement for entry into the social entrepreneurship circles? People talking to me about our educational programs ask me all the time how we are going to “scale up our impact” as if focusing on quality in one area is not a high enough goal. For the educational program side of our work, as the founder, I would be disappointed if we were aiming to be in every province in Cambodia, in every school, or in every neighboring country. Why? Because I know that the solutions with which we have found success are the ones based most strongly in local knowledge, leadership, and collaboration, and that to scale to the levels others would define as success would not be possible in my lifetime given the quality I would like us to aim for. Rather, I want us to “scale” outside of our current shell by spreading our lessons to others rather than spreading our organization around the world: do trainings for other organizations, make all of our ideas and solutions open source, and give away our ideas for free to anyone out there who wants to repeat the processes we have used. That is counter to OUR ORGANIZATION reaching “scale and higher profits”, but in my opinion that is the only way to help more people have quality solutions in this specific field.
Here in Cambodia, I was just approached by a social investment fund looking to invest in one of our profit generating ideas. They wanted to fund our project but said they needed to sell this to their board and management team as something we were aiming to do in 10 cities all around South East Asia in order to get them on-board. They approached us, eager to invest… why? Because they, like so many other social investment funds, are struggling to find these “profitable and scalable” models. The local-based team wanted to push to invest in us, knowing full-well that we had no intention of being the biggest and most profitable solution, but they were going to need to adjust our story to get the board on-board. Isn’t that silly! Why do we keep profit-driven and scale as our gatekeepers, when so many of us are investing in “exceptions to the rules”?
We turned down the money from the investment fund, largely because I’d rather have us focus on quality in one place, until we get it right than be judged through the lens of scale as our finish-line. If and when we do create a successful model, if we can “scale up” and keep our quality, then we might look to do that. If we can’t, then I’m happy to kick scalable and profit-driven off of our cards and teach others how we reached the quality we were aiming for in the first place because for me, that’s the one gatekeeper I’m looking to please.
A few months ago I was involved in a long discussion about hybrid organizations on Social Edge. From that conversation, I ended up writing a post called “Dear Social Entrepreneurship Thought Leaders” about my views on the metrics and definitions we are using for social enterprises.
Recently, I was lucky enough to be asked to synthesize these thoughts for the latest addition of Beyond Profit magazine where this piece is now featured: Much Ado about Scale.
If you have not been to Beyond Profit’s website before, please do! They have a blog featuring interesting social ventures and ideas from around the world and from their site you can subscribe to their social enterprise magazine. I am a big fan of what they are doing and am delighted for the chance to write for them!
The text from the article is below but click on the link to see it laid out: Much Ado about Scale
—
The social venture movement grew out of a rebellion against big business and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We shook our sticks at self-indulgent big businesses and turned up our noses at the waste and inefficiencies in the traditional non-profit world believing we had a better way to do things. We claim to be the outliers, looking to make an impact on the people and problems the traditional sectors have left in their wake, but have we really chosen a different path?
Like a middle child, stuck between businesses and NGOs, the social venture movement clamors for attention. We are quick to point out flaws but, like our sibling sectors, social entrepreneurship has drawbacks, too. Although we try to distance ourselves from our siblings, we continue to hold profit and scale as our markers of success. Groups supporting our sector, like The Skoll Foundation or the new Unreasonable Institute, choose projects that “expand to a new country within three years” or “reach over 1 million people.” Have we forgotten the value in knowing the place of origin and its people? Often, that is precisely what makes a program successful. By limiting the conversation—as Skoll and Unreasonable and many others do—to for-profit, scaleable, sustainable enterprises, we are ignoring the good work of many entrepreneurs and organizations.
Some things can be scaled easily, the processes can be repeated, and the results in one place might be similar to another. Take, for example, Colgate. The company reaches millions of people with their products, encourages good dental hygiene, and makes a nice profit while doing so. Is this what we aspire to be? No, most of us are not seeking a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid; we’re trying to create lasting change.
We need to speak differently about the realities of improving lives, whether it is through for-profit or non-profit means. But we limit the conversation when we only value one or the other. Changing lives involves working closely with communities and the men, women and children within them. Lest we forget, people don’t change their habits overnight, nor can we move them out of poverty overnight. By demanding that all “social enterprises” in need of investment be card-carrying members of the “scale up” train, we are going to miss out on groups that have quality, lasting, bottom-up impact.
The fact is, scale can often dilute impact. Practitioners are often forced to choose between improving the quality of a product/service, or offering a more affordable product or service. For example, take microcredit. It can be profitable by itself. But, a microfinance institution that sinks time and money into education, vetting, and training, resulting in an improved product, does so at the expense of profit and scale. Or, take the case of water. Which would you support? A water filtration company with the most sophisticated techniques, which ensures clean water? Or a less effective product which is profitable and can scale?
We should take lessons from those large-scale international NGOs implementing projects which have lost touch with the people and communities they are claiming to support by “scaling up.” We can also learn from some of their solutions: partnering with small community-based projects which have the understanding and flexibility to tailor offerings to local needs. When working with people, it’s not always the solution which can be scaled but rather the process which led to success. Rather than providing incentives for initiatives to scale, perhaps we should start looking for successful localized initiatives and incentivize them to train “competitors” in other areas to spread their impact while keeping localized solutions.
We need to find ways to reward those who choose impact over income and success over scale, as they will be faced with those dichotomies with more frequency. As a sector, we should create new and previously unimagined possibilities. In order to do that, we need to support people who are not satisfied with providing just enough, but instead are focused on the quality of what they are doing.
Investing in groups that have a commitment to quality and impact is harder to track and measure than focusing on scale and profit margins. That requires a thorough understanding of the project and issues they are facing, but that is the point! We need to do the research to know if the impact and their commitment to quality is there, not just the easy task of looking at profits and size. Let’s take “Supporters of Scale and Profit” off our doors and get to the core of what we want to be: “For quality and impact.”
This is a guest post by Eric Lewis:
“Take lots of pictures!” It’s something we hear just about every time we leave for someplace exotic. Family and friends want to experience our adventures vicariously, and who can blame them? Photographs preserve certain moments—priceless scenes and scenarios that evade verbal description. But every action has an opportunity cost. What is the price of photographically cataloguing our travels?
Cost one: disconnect
We look for or are struck by opportunity: a picture that frames well and tells a story. The story can be anything. The story of glistening sushi, the story of a flat tire in the middle of the Bolaven Plateau, the story of haggling with a pregnant Cantonese fishmonger. Something that we must never forget, and that we want to share with others.
Next we try to capture the story. Ambient light, camera settings, timing, an eye for composition. The process of composing a picture pulls us out of the reality that we’re trying to capture. There is plenty to say in favor of this creative process, of course, but Facebook, loved ones, and our own vanity argue strongly enough in favor of photography. My aim is to discuss its drawbacks—and the act’s creative nature is drawback number one.
We cannot listen while talking, and likewise we cannot experience a moment while trying to communicate it to others.
I was once strolling through Prague at dusk with a friend. As we neared the Charles Bridge, a fireworks display went off, pitching swaths of orange and blue over the city’s gothic landmark. We had no idea this was coming. My friend, Katie, dropped to her knees and tore through her backpack, fumbling to locate and assemble her Pentax. I, having recently been gassed and robbed on an overnight train and therefore camera-less, just stood with my mouth open, looking into the sky. Then came a crescendo, then the finale. Katie shrieked in frustration. The show ended before she could snap a single shot. And I will never forget what the Charles Bridge looks like under the glare of fireworks on a clear winter night.
Had I not been freshly robbed, I probably would have flipped into snapshot mode. Sometimes life gives you free lessons.
Cost two: intrusion
Another story: During a tour of Cambodia’s Angkorian temples, my group visited Ta Prohm, famous for its appearance in the Angelina Jolie movie Tomb Raider. Naturally, the site is always thronged with tourists. Near the entrance a backpacker had asked a passerby to take his photo. Standing as far from the crowd as possible, the backpacker instructed his photographer: “Make sure there’s no tourists in the picture!”
A participant from my group advised, “You’d better get out of the shot then.” So true.
It’s easy, when taking photos, to see and think of our surroundings only as we want to. In framing the perfect shot, we often block out the bigger picture. This myopia is especially prevalent—and egregious—in the developing world, where well-meaning visitors transform into misery voyeurs, scanning for shots that pack at-home shock value.
Disregarding the context of our photography may be harmless at the entrance of a temple, but it can be downright intrusive when people are the subject matter. There’s a reason why rock bands and Marine platoons are notoriously distrustful of the press: they’re skeptical about how they will be portrayed. Approaching people with a camera is a good way to put them on guard, especially in developing parts of the world, where no scenario is off-limits in the minds of snap-happy tourists. The association between visitors with cameras and invasion of privacy is not lost on locals, who are showcased without consent on countless blogs and Flickr accounts.
Cutting cost
Try going camera-free. By removing this distractive crutch, you will truly engage your surroundings. Enhanced memory is just one benefit of being mentally present. Because memory is a multi-sensory capacity, tuning in to the scene around you will enhance your ability to recall it. Taking photos creates a cycle: we need pictures to jog our memory because we depend on them to do our remembering for us.
Even more rewarding are the interactions you’ll have, with locals and fellow travelers alike. People act more naturally off-record, so ditch the camera for unfettered authenticity. Photo-fasting is especially useful in cultural exchange situations, such as home stays. The aim is to connect with people who are ostensibly quite different from us, and we can facilitate interaction by removing the mental and physical barrier that photography imposes.
Making it work
While it may be unrealistic to stop taking photos completely, you can reap the benefits of intermittent photo-fasting. I recommend a ‘one day with, one day without’ routine. (If you’re the journaling type, note the differences between these days.) Another option is to nominate one person in your group to photograph each day—the Internet makes photo sharing easier than ever.
As photographer Adam Vaught puts it, “Anyone can shove a camera in someone’s face and bring home unique photographs, but at what cost? I’ve discovered that honest interaction, exchange and interest in your subject leads to more interesting photography.” Photo-fasting will help you find this balance between observation and interaction, which will improve both your photography and your ability to connect with those around you.
—
Eric Lewis recently returned to his home state of Virginia after spending the better part of a year in Cambodia with PEPY. He believes personal happiness is positively correlated with one’s use of passport and library card.
We decided to write out our expectations of our foreign volunteers to help potential applicants consider what they are getting into. (FYI: We take volunteer interns to work in our office, typically on donor management, marketing, social media, type projects) The theme: if you are not coming here to learn and to “help” anyone but yourself, or you think you have all the answers already, or you are not working on any personal goals to make yourself a better human as we all need to be doing, no need to apply. You can read up on them here:
http://pepyride.org/support/volunteer-opportunities/working-with-pepy
We can’t all go and see or touch the places and things we are putting our money into, but it doesn’t mean we need to focus on numbers to know our impact. The internet might be the cause of a lot of de-humanizing problems in our society, but when it comes to monitoring and evaluating where to give money, it can be used to actually make us interact more like humans, if we use it right. We can share videos of the work that we do, interviews with staff and community members, share photos and journal entries and instantly “chat” with the people we would otherwise have had to rely on reported statistics to know about.
So why are we still looking at numbers? When the next generation of donors arrives, the ones who have been social-media-d from birth, they will hopefully not evaluate projects based on numbers which they know can be re-adjusted easily in order to satisfy those of us who have no interactions with that place. They will instead support work that talks to them, that shows them actual failures and successes, through human eyes, not stats. They will invest in people who are honest and speak about the work that they do openly, not through formalized stat-filled reports. And they will hopefully realize that the groups making changes in the world are investing time in people, not just investing times in a certain section of numbers on a census report.
So when they ask you “What’s the impact? How sure are you? Have you measured that? What are the numbers?” – show them, tell them, connect them, and entertain them with the details of the TRUTH, which can only be shown through human senses, not numbers. Because the answer from SOMEONE, even if it’s not you, should be “Because I saw it, and here is the story.”
I am lucky to have a guest blog post on Saundra’s ever-growing-in-popularity Good Intentions are Not Enough blog. I have been a fan of her writing and her philosophies for some time, so I was delighted for the chance to add some of my thoughts to her work.
Here is the original post and below is the text so that I can keep these thoughts tracked on my blog (as I change my opinions and contradict myself over time I’m sure as I continue to learn). I’d love it if others who work in this area would comment on the Good Intentions page or here and tell us your ideas for what I missed.
—
Voluntourism: What could go wrong when trying to do right?
During the past eight years, as I have joined and then lead volunteer programs in Asia, I have seen many of the same mistakes repeated when it comes to international “voluntourism”, I have made many of these mistakes myself. I know how easy it is to offer a trip that is easy to sell, fits in with travelers’ demands, appears to have a plan for a positive impact, but in the end ends up being either a waste of time for the local community partners or, in the worst cases, causes more harm than good. Here are some of the common problems I have seen in the voluntourism market and some tips for travelers on how to choose the right program.
Creating one-off projects which have little long-term impact
Often times the real needs of a project are not things that volunteers can easily support. Language barriers, lack of local knowledge, and lack of skills prevent volunteers from being a good fit for most development project needs, so instead tour companies often create projects for the volunteer.
These projects typically involve little investment of energy and ideas in people. The core needs of the partner might have been teacher training for their school, soil enhancement techniques to improve farming, etc. Because volunteers can’t help with those things, a project is instead created to fill the desire of the traveler to “feel helpful”, and the core needs are overlooked for those where it was simpler to insert unskilled volunteers. These projects might be building a fence or painting a school, and it is likely that the tour company will do little to monitor the project other than stopping by twice a year with their tourists to take a picture of “the school they are helping.”
Real life example: I really did travel with a tour company that decided to allow us to paint the school that was on their bike route. We painted it poorly, I must say, as we rushed to complete it in one day (and most of us felt too tired to put in a big effort). We probably spent $200 on paint (25% of which we dropped on the floor). The project was in rural Thailand, and $200 could have probably bought a lot of educational resources, hired a few teachers for a month, or done a list of other things which would have added more educational value than our patchy blue paint job. If they insisted on painting, if they had instead funded $3000 towards a locally identified educational need (for example, a weekly life-skills training course), plus bought $200 worth of paint, at least then our combined efforts would have been more than just the blue paint on the floor.
How to choose: Ask the tour operator about their relationship with the NGO partner. Have they worked together long? If the answer is yes, that’s a good thing. How do they choose what projects the travelers will engage in? If the local communities or NGO partners are making the decisions and have veto power over ideas they don’t like, that is better than ideas coming from the tour company based on unfounded assumptions of needs. For all of these answers, getting in touch with both someone who had gone on the trip before and someone working in the country where you are visiting to get their perspective on the company and NGO partner will shine a more realistic light on the situation.
Forgetting that volunteers are NOT free
A lot of tour operators will bring their clients to a project and expect an NGO or community program to entertain their guests by speaking to them about their work or organizing a small volunteer project. They put the NGOs or orphanages on their site, sell them to clients as part of a tour, yet keep all of the tour profits themselves. Sometimes the tour company says, “We leave it up to the tourists to see if they want to donate!”, but it should not be the tourists’ responsibility to ensure that the development partner gets value out of the trip in exchange for their time.
Real life example: As an NGO, at PEPY we sometimes get requests from tour companies to come see our projects. They want to include a visit to our programs as a part of their tour, which they will market to their clients. To entertain a group for a few hours and explain our projects would take time away from management staff.
How to choose: If you know that your skills are not precisely matched with the needs of a project, or if the interactions you are having with partner NGOs are taking their time away from their core mission, ask and find out if the tour company is compensating the person or group presenting to or facilitating your community interaction. If they are not, yet the tour company is marking this part of the experience as a selling point of the tour, then they are probably putting the desire for their own profits over a the need to provide real support for these groups.
Giving things away
As Saundra has told us over and over again and as I have learned through seeing the negative effects of an unbridled tourism culture of giving things away “to the poor people”, giving things to people is never going to solve their problems. Instead, it can destroy local markets, create community jealousies, and create a culture of dependency.
Real life example: I wish this WASN’T real… but sadly, this is what a lot of “responsible” tourism has come to. There are tour operators in Cambodia where you can pay $45 for the day to be driven out to a “poor village where you can hand out food or school supplies to the poor family of your choice”. Oh yes, people pay for this. It’s like buying food pellets at the zoo to feed the goats. Except these are people. Not goats.
How to choose: Question any organization that allows you and your tour group to go anywhere to “hand out school supplies” or “deliver a book to a child”. If those items are needed, they should be distributed through local power structures, in ways where those with the highest needs are prioritized, and where capacity building is tied in with the giving away of things.
Monitoring projects poorly or not at all
How can a tour company that comes through an area a few times a year know that they are “improving lives through our wells”? Do they go back and test them? Fix them? Get feedback? Sometimes we think we are helping people, but it is not until we try it and fail that we realize our plan was flawed. What is worse is if we continue to repeat our failures, either from lack of willingness to admit them, or lack of effort to research our impacts.
Real life example: A tour company in India allowed tourists to hand out goats to families on their tours. In the middle of the tour, a person from a nearby village came and told the director that the man who had been put in charge of choosing which poor families should get the goats had been charging the families for the goats for years. The tour company had been making their English speaking tour guide rich, were not helping “the poorest of the poor” that they claimed to be, and had furthered corruption and mistrust in the village.
How to choose: Ask about the NGO’s monitoring plan. If you are building any structures or giving away any technology, find out how those things are being put to use and who will monitor the needs in case of damage or additional ideas for improvements. Is there a responsible NGO partner involved in these projects full-time who can make the changes needed to ensure the program’s success? If you feel that the tour company’s projects are one-off initiatives with little relationship building on their part with the community, find a new operator.
Giving unskilled volunteers jobs that require skills
Even painting requires some skills, and clearly our group in Thailand didn’t have them. Teaching English should not be left to 19 year old gap years, especially in countries where there are plenty of unemployed local English speakers. If we don’t know how to do what we are supposed to be doing as volunteers, we might cause more harm than good, and at minimum, we will waste a lot of people’s time.
Real life example: There are many orphanages in Cambodia which take volunteers to teach English. Some come for a few weeks, others for a few days. When they leave, the classes have no teacher, there is no curriculum to ensure that the students aren’t learning “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” every day, and the school is not better able to solve its own problems in the future because of the volunteer’s visit. If skilled teachers had spent time teaching English teachers English, they would have improved the system at least slightly, but sadly, everyone just wants to pet the cute kids.
How to choose: If you are looking for a long term placement, make sure to pick an operator that does very thorough matching of skills and needs. For short term placements, choose groups focused on educating you as a traveler, and giving you the skills and tools to improve the world when you go home. We have to learn before we can help. Choosing a trip focused on your education, which doesn’t assume that every wealthy traveler has construction skills, will empower you to be better equipped to support responsible initiatives in the future.
Forgetting to make the rest of the time on their trip “responsible”
There is a lot of discussion about the “volunteer time”, but what about the rest of the trip? Where are you being put up? What restaurants are you eating at? Those things matter just as much as the volunteer time, and just like carbon offsetting, if you are trying to do good by giving money to development projects, yet causing harm in all of your day-to-day activities, the two do not balance out.
Real life example: A responsible tourism organization based abroad was planning their trip to Cambodia and had contacted us to learn more about our work. When I met with the trip coordinator at their hotel, I realized that they had chosen to stay at a hotel owned in part by a very well known corrupt politician. Had they spent the time to ask anyone working in responsible travel in Cambodia about their hotel and restaurant choices, they would have found much more well-respected places in which to spend their money.
How to choose: Ask your voluntourism partner about the rest of the trip and how they make their choices. If they outsource their entire trip to a partner or if they are selling trips in tens of countries around the world, they likely do not know the people and places they are visiting well, and are less likely to be offering you a chance to have a positive impact with your tourism dollars.
Fostering moral imperialism
This one is the biggest problem I think, but the least talked about. We assume, because we come from wealthier places with better education systems, that we can come into any new place without knowing much about the culture or the people, and we can fix things. We can’t! THEY, the people who live there and know the place well, can. Our job in the development world can and should be to support them in doing so. So, we can’t assume we can come do it for them and “save the babies” by visiting an orphanage for a few hours on our trip to India. And we sure shouldn’t think that our time is oh so valuable that we should fundraise money to pay for OUR flights to go paint a school poorly. My job, in running a tour operation, is to educate travelers on at least these two points: improvements take time, and the people we are visiting have just as much—if not more—to teach us as we have to teach them.
Real life example: Just search for voluntourism on the web. “Come to XXXXX, Africa and save the world,” followed by instructions on how to fundraise tax free dollars, which include the price of your travel abroad.
How to choose: If we are going to send our students abroad without charging them, we should at least tell them the truth: THEY are the ones benefiting in this situation. Let’s start being realistic and not deciding to go abroad to help, but instead to learn. If you find a company that discusses the trip as “life-changing” for the communities you are visiting, scroll further until you find one that admits that the real selling point is that the experience will be life-changing for YOU. That is OK! That is why we travel, so let’s not try to hide that. If your tour company talks about all of their successes at helping people, but will not give you examples of times they have made mistakes, lessons they have learned, or things they are doing differently now compared with three years ago, don’t trust them. They clearly think that just because they are setting out to do good, that they are. Remind them that Good Intentions are NOT Enough.
It’s time to stop making the same mistakes
Now that enough of us have made these mistakes and learned from them, it is time for others to stop making the same mistakes. To make the overall impact of volunteer travel more positive will take a movement of travelers demanding responsible practices from their operators. Please add comments or tips for travelers which you think might give them additional ideas for picking the best organized voluntourism programs.
