Lessons I Learned

This is a comment I originally posted on The Suddes Group post about Generation Y and Social Entrepreneurship.  Why do YOU think this movement is growing?

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It is exciting to see so many people living their passions and being willing to work towards the changes they want to see in the world.

I agree with Teju that connectivity is a key to this movement, but I also think it is a few generations of “having enough to live”. My mental image of what the 40’s and 50’s was like has a lot of people working hard to improve their lives. Those people were less able to think globally about change as they had the goal of improving the future for their own children in mind. For many of us, our grandparents (or parents) worked hard to send their kids to college and made sacrifices to do so. Many of our parents were raised with enough to eat and a chance to study – perhaps with a mindset of more would always be nice, but we don’t have to worry about how we are going to feed the family. In many cases, they DID make more, and they continued to set their goals higher and higher. A lot more of the next generation which you are writing about, grew up in American or Canadian or British communities surrounded by people who had a lot, but were still fighting for more. Seeing that on TV, in out media, and in our suburbs from a young age makes you wonder if that is really worth growing up for.

I grew up in a suburb, on what my mom refers to as the “teacher street”. My mom is a teacher and so many others on our street are two. “Tiny” houses amongst monstrosities. It’s not until you grow up, go further down the street, or down the continent, into the cities or rural areas or anywhere that does not have a public school which sends a half of its kids to Ivy League schools, that you realize, I’m lucky. Like Teju said, all we have to do is search the internet to realize how much we have and how reliant our lives have become on those who don’t. We realized we don’t NEED to keep fighting for more for US.

Why not make a future for ourselves which allows us to do something we love while fighting that age old battle of making the world a better place for our kids. Lucky for many of us, we have the luxury of knowing we will always be able to find a way to make money to support our own kids, so we can turn outward towards the world and rejoin the fight for the future, this time with all of the worlds’ kids in mind.

You can read more about each of our programs on the PEPY website, but I thought it might be more important to tell you the WHYs and HOWs of the decisions we make in our program design, rather than just talk about numbers of trainings and books we give out.

Our development philosophy is based on these core beliefs.  I will expand on each pillar below this week, about how we came to value this development philosophy, and how we are putting each into practice. In order to empower people to make changes in their own lives–to create our vision for a world where everyone has access to quality education, increased health and environmental awareness—we believe we need to:

Build capacity in people.

Partner with other organizations.

Share the lessons we have learned.

Allow flexibility in our programs.

Work with local government systems and power structures.

Overall, we believe that the changes we want to see in the world are only possible if we invest time in people.  Changes won’t result from giving things away, they won’t result from throwing more money at a problem, and they won’t happen by rushing to reach more and more places without committing the time to create high quality impacts.  We are just as impatient as the rest of the people looking to make change in the world, but what we have learned through our mistakes and our slow and small successes is that investing time in a team of passionate leaders will keep us on the path to reaching our vision.

Check back in over the course of the next week as I talk about the lessons we have learned around each of these pillars, and please add your thoughts, questions, and stories as well if you like!

This is a guest blog post which was originally featured on the Travelanthropist website.

Our trips during our first few years at PEPY were all about service. We were enthusiastic about offering travelers a chance to give back to the places they visited, otherwise known as voluntourism. Tour participants taught classes at local schools, visited orphanages, and repaired educational buildings. Often times, the needs the travelers were filling were not the biggest needs for the projects we were partnering with but were instead the things they were able to physically contribute to. When our guests left, they, and we, would make comments like “I’m so glad we came here to help,” or “I am going to make all of my future travel about volunteering.” I used to smile on this comments, but now I realize we were breeding a backwards approach to responsible travel.

People, myself included, sometimes cringe at the word “tourist”. We spend time trying to distinguish ourselves from “the tourists”, trying to lay claim to a different type of travel attitude, which puts us in a class above the average traveler. There is a tricky problem with that. . . we ARE tourists!Whenever we are exploring a new place, no matter how responsibly or irresponsibly we do it, we are tourists by definition. Encouraging tourists to come to a place to “give” or to “teach” can in some ways be viewed as belittling all of the opportunities we have to learn as WE are ones entering a new place.  WE are the tourists.  So should we not take our cues for how to act and support the community from the people we learn from rather than bring in our preconceived notions of what a place needs? As responsible tourists, we need to learn about the places we visit, for only through educating ourselves can we understand how to act in a new culture, how to interpret the historical context of what we see, and how to give back to the places we visit.

A lot of voluntourism involves hands-on building projects. Most travelers are not skilled in technical skills, so tasks like painting are left to the travelers, and often times even with those tasks voluntourists create waste and inefficiencies as we did in many of our painting projects. This is a gray area for me since the boundary of ethical voluntourism decision making really falls with the funding. Are travelers paying for the experience? Do people in the community being “served” benefit financially from the travelers’ visit? Was the voluntourism project decided because of actual needs or because of the ease of integrating unskilled foreigners into the tasks? Where is the funding going? Let’s say the real needs at the school are teacher training and the tourists are bringing $3000 of support. Of that, perhaps $2800 is going to those real priorities which will improve education with the remaining $200 going towards the paint of the voluntourism project.  I still don’t think the system is efficient, but I think that is much better than the voluntourism projects I have seen where the tourists are paying a company abroad to come “help” a community, and the only money coming in is the $200 for the paint, which doesn’t really help that much at all!  As voluntourism operators who put these communities and partners on our websites as part of the marketing for our trips, we need to be honest with ourselves and make sure if those people and projects are making US money, they had better be providing REAL support for the communities being advertised.  Having seen many projects in action in Cambodia, I can tell you that many of them are not.

The most important lesson we learned at PEPY in the past five years: we have to learn before we can help. As a result, PEPY’s focus is now on edu-tourism.  From our experience, helping before we have learned can sometimes not be any help at all!

When people travel with PEPY nowadays, we remind them that they are not going to change the world in a week, or a month, of however long they are with us. In fact, the only thing in which we can really ensure change is ourselves. We can learn during our travels, go back into our real lives, and THEN we can change the world.  At PEPY, our goals are to change the way people give, travel, and live AFTER they are with us. We want to give them tools to ask the right questions, which will help them be responsible donors and identify the best NGO partners. We want to influence the way they travel in the future by helping them think about ways to keep their travel dollars in the countries they visit how their travel impacts these places. Maybe they will be so inspired during their trip that they will bike more, use less plastic, volunteer at a local library, serve as a liaison for refugees in their home country, study something new. . . LIVE differently. We can’t change the world in a week, but we sure can over a lifetime. Our past participants have already proven to us that any impacts we can have on our trips pale in comparison to the good they can go out into the world and ignite through changing their attitudes and actions due to their new insights.

By reminding our trip participants that the people, places, and projects we visit were here before they arrived and will be here long after they leave, they can understand WHY their trips are going to make a difference. All of our trips have a fundraising minimum in addition to the trip costs, and that funding helps our projects continue. Our guests realize that changes in attitudes and actions take time, and that giving things in a short term project is not going to bring the same successes as investing time in PEOPLE.

This is what we have learned at PEPY, and the reason we are changing from “voluntourism” to “educational adventures”. The changes we want to see in the world require an investment of time in people. We look to give people the skills, connections, and support to be great leaders and make the changes they want to see in their own lives and in the world.  This applies to our education programs in Cambodia as well as our tours.

People on our trips sometimes say “I want to support development in a developing country” or “I want to start a social venture, what should I do?” and I usually respond with this quote from Harold Whitman:

“Don’t ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes YOU come alive, and then go out and do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

We can invest time in people to help them make the changes they want to see in themselves and in the world, and encourage them to go out and do the things they love.  I can think of nothing better for our future than having a world full of global citizens doing what they love to do.

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Daniela Papi is the founder of PEPY, a hybrid organization based in Siem Reap, Cambodia. PEPY’s educational development arm works in teacher training, Khmer literacy, and leadership development programs. PEPY Tours offers responsible travelers a chance to visit Cambodia, meet local changemakers working to improve Cambodia’s future, and learn first-hand about the development issues facing the country today.  You can read more about the lessons Daniela and her team are learning by following her blog: Lessons I Learned.

Join in our conversation on VoluntourismGal’s website about volunteering in Haiti:

http://voluntourismgal.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/spring-break-in-haiti/

I have been blogging elsewhere recently, so I wanted to link some of them here. This blog post was written for The International Business Council (IBC) blog and can be found in it’s original form here.

The IBC and PEPY Tours in Cambodia

When running a start-up organization, you are always looking for volunteers, people who are willing to share their time and their knowledge with you to get your work off the ground. At first you are hanging on every word that people share with you as you learn about accounting, business plans, marketing, and all of the pieces that come with starting a new venture.  You are willing to take any volunteer who is willing to give their time and you charge full-speed ahead into your work using their ideas.  Then there comes a day when you start getting have to start saying no to volunteers.

This has been our same story as we developed our hybrid organization, PEPY: an education non-profit organization working in literacy and leadership, as well as an edu-venture tour company which helps to fund the programs. There came a point where we started to be more discerning about the help we were able to take.  Many people contacted us saying that they were willing to volunteer.  We have taken some of those who were not able to come to Cambodia but instead offered their services virtually, but usually there are problems with:

• Finding the exact right match of skills and needs. When volunteers are far away from the problem, it takes a long time to get to understand how their skills can fit with your organization.
• Time. It takes a lot of time to construct that match, to follow up with virtual volunteers, and to share the work that they do with the rest of the team.
• Conflicting ideas. When people are outside of the company, it becomes difficult for them to keep up to date on the daily developments of the organization, so sometimes it can result in the repetition of work of a work product or work which misses the mark.

At PEPY, we have worked with groups of volunteers in the past who have taken more time than the value they have added.  I commend the IBC and the process used to support PEPY Tours this year, as it is a good example of what can be possible using virtual volunteers to assist an organization.

First, I want to comment on past IBC support initiatives. I was involved in the first IBC delegation to go abroad to “help”. There were three of us who went down to visit projects, McKinsey professional Maggie Durant, a current State Senator of New Mexico, and myself. We were probably a smart enough group to work on a feasibility study of the IBC’s impact, but there was one big flaw: we weren’t prepared to help in a way that would make sense for the program. We had not understood how to do the proper research before we left, which would have all pointed to the signs saying: you can’t help if you are only committed to the short term. The issues we were looking to “advise” on were extensive: business development in a multi-culture environment, agricultural cooperatives looking for market analysis. . . in GUATEMALA and HONDURAS, places we knew little about. During our week-long visit, we took a lot of people’s time and set expectations that we quickly realized we were not able to fill.  Tim, Maggie and I all agreed – this was a learning experience, and we needed to find a different way for the IBC to promote its social mission.

The next group I came in contact with through the IBC was a delegation that was sent to Cambodia, the country I have been working in since 2005. This group did extensive research before coming out to Cambodia to work with a microcredit organization. There are many costs associated with traveling abroad, as in both of these projects, and issues related to translation and cultural understanding can often add further set-backs.

So what can we do to move forward? Work hard to find the right match. I was grateful that the IBC reached out to us at PEPY last year and offered virtual support, and I was been even more delighted when we saw the match was a good one. A group of IBC volunteers including Ryan Jochum, Kate McDermott, Matthew O’Connor, and Steve Wierema,  helped PEPY virtually for nearly three months. Weekly conference calls kept everyone on track, and the team was led by Evan Lintz, who kept everyone on track and organized, and Tim Rann, a former PEPY intern. With the system they set up of managing the volunteer team, there was very little time taken away from full-time PEPY staff while also ensuring a strong understanding of the work PEPY does which made their final work product very valuable. 

The group analyzed PEPY’s tour offerings when compared with competitors, gave advice on the marketing and branding strategies of the organization, and analyzed industry trends. Their final project will continue to be very useful for our organization for many years to come, and we thank the team for giving us their time and their knowledge.

If any of you is looking to volunteer your time virtually for an organization, you can learn a lot by following in their footsteps:

• Spend the time to find a good match between your skills and the organization’s needs.
• Be willing to do the “boring” stuff.
• Be organized and give your feedback in a well documented fashion so that the partner not only knows what you did, but how you did it. This builds up the organization’s capacity by helping the staff to continue the process in the future on their own.
• Provide connections to new ideas and new people to gather other interest and support for the work you are now a part of.

The IBC team working with PEPY did all of these things, and for that we are very grateful. Hopefully the fruits of their labor will show as we continue to develop our product offerings at PEPY Tours and now have a well outlined path for further improvements.

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Note: After this process, Tim Rann decided to come back on to the PEPY Team and will become CEO of PEPY Tours from April, 2010.  Congratulations, Tim!

PEPY is a hybrid organization with two parts: PEPY Cambodia, an educational development organization and PEPY Tours, a travel company focusing on educational adventures.

Daniela Papi studied economics at Notre Dame and graduated in the class of 2000. She was a member of the SIBC (then the NDCIBD) and worked in London through the SIBC internship program. She has lived in Asia for nearly 8 years, the first three in Japan and since 2005 in Cambodia. She welcomes any IBC members to visit her at the PEPY office in Siem Reap, Cambodia.  You can read more about her thoughts on development and tourism on her blog: www.lessonsilearned.org

Maryann Fernandez of Philanthropy Indaba invited me to be a guest blogger on her site this week, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to share some more thoughts on “giving things”. You can see the post can see on the Philanthropy Indaba blog, and I have copied it below as well. Please comment if you want to share other ideas or stories as I know that both Maryann and I are looking to learn more from others in the field and to get more examples which explain the potential impacts of “giving things”.

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We get stuck too much on the idea of giving “things” to save the world. People need education? Build them a school! People are getting malaria? Give them a mosquito net! There was a devastating earthquake in Haiti. Send them shoes!

The problem is, THINGS don’t make improvements in our world. PEOPLE do. Schools don’t teach kids. Teachers do. Water pumps don’t provide clean water to people. People treating the water and transporting and storing it hygienically do. THINGS don’t change lives. So why do we keep talking about giving things as the main solution to the world’s problems?

When it comes to emergencies, it’s different. Right now, the short term needs in Haiti revolve around basic needs and access to things like medical equipment, food, clothing, and shelter, (all ranking above shoes!). When we get outside of emergency situations we are often looking to make changes in human actions and need to stop looking to things for a solution.

For example, we look to bednets to solve a malaria problem. We try to rush to get more bednets to more people to solve a problem that isn’t just about things. In many places in the world, malaria-carrying mosquitoes feed at sunset. Most people are not spending the time right at sunset in their beds. Besides that, it isn’t about getting the bednets into people’s hands; the solution is educating people about malaria—ways to prevent it (including bednets), how to treat it. In places where malaria is very prevalent, putting dollars which might have gone to bednet distribution into educating people about the early signs of malaria, connecting people to local or free hospitals, and providing education about the most useful forms of treatment might save more lives and also create a market demand for bednets.  Besides, giving things away can sometimes destroy the development of market-based solutions to product distribution.

One organization I have come across that really understands that educating people is the key to putting technologies to work is the team at Resource Development International Cambodia (RDIC). They make a rope pump which iss made entirely from locally sourced materials including rope and PV tubes. It fits on top of a traditional open well and sells for about $250. Though much cheaper than the deep tube wells installed by many NGOs, the price is still cost prohibitive for most families, so RDIC has a two year repayment plan. At RDIC, they recognize that the core changes they are looking to see don’t have to do with things as, in this case, they are looking to see reductions in the number of people with water born illnesses. With 24 repayment days where an RDIC employee collects the payments, they have a chance to teach 24 lessons to ensure that they reach their goals of improving health. Lessons have to do with in-home water filtration, how to fix and maintain the new rope pump, home dug toilet solutions, hygienic food preparation, and more. They not only have 100% repayment on their rope pumps, but they are making changes in attitudes and actions surrounding health issues.

After learning these lessons in Cambodia, when I give money to an organization, I look for one where the methodology involves community education over a cookie-cutter solution focusing on giving things away.

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I want to leave you with some tools to think about when donating money. When choosing where to give my money, I would look for NGOs where:

• The website seems less focused on the quantitative numbers (10,000 libraries in 50 countries) and more on the methods of how they will build capacity in the local community to create these changes themselves.
• When asked, NGO workers are willing to discuss past failures and current improvements. I would ask “What things are you doing today that you weren’t doing a year ago, and which things have you stopped due to lessons you have learned from your successes and failures?”
• The focus is on putting “things” and ideas to use, not just distribution. If there is a physical item being donated or sold, what are the plans for education and support around repairs, usage ideas, and markets for further local-led distribution.

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Daniela believes that changing attitudes and actions requires an investment of time in people, and that education is the key to the changes she wants to see in the world. Daniela is the director of PEPY, an educational development organization working in rural Cambodia. PEPY focuses on building the capacity of teachers and communities to increase access to quality education. PEPY is funded in part through PEPY Tours, and edu-venture tour company offering cycling trips and service learning experiences in South East Asia. You can connect with Daniela on her blog, Lessons I Learned, or in real life in her office in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

In the social venture world, there seems to to two types of prizes, money and/or a chance to learn from and connect with experts about their work.  Many prizes are designed to reward people by supporting their ideas of how to “scale” or “become financially sustainable”, but I wonder….. are there prizes or support out there for people who DON’T know how to do that?  Maybe there is something to the idea of giving support to people who DON’T know how to take their project to scale.

As discussed here (mostly in the comment section), I think that sometimes the organizations who are the first to jump at money being offered to support scale are not necessarily the ones who are focused the most on QUALITY.  Rather than focusing on the people in the front row waving their hands at money, maybe we need to start looking in the back at people who are diligently working away, too busy “getting it right” to think about getting it bigger.

What if there was an organization supporting only the social ventures who could prove that they have very high quality offerings in their area: the best water filters, locally developed and highly successful leadership training courses, the most fuel efficient generator, etc.  The winners, based on commitment to quality, get a prize of not just money or mentorship designed to support the “social entrepreneur” at the helm, but instead crafted specifically for that organization to determine a way to scale their impact without loosing quality.

Imagine the prize was a “Quality Expansion Team” – who came OUT to the project – for a period of time – say 1-2 months.  They are experts in their fields: a business professor, an engineer, a top designer from Free Range Graphics, etc. These people would be hand picked to fit the specific needs of the organization and ideally the sponsors of the project would be those people’s employees who give them a paid sabbatical from work, perhaps as a prize or incentive for senior staff.

If you took a small organization doing great work and brought in a dedicated and highly skilled team of mentors, not just for a few weekly hour-long phone calls, but for a few weeks or months of intense entrepreneurial fury IN the place where the work is being done, I’m willing to bet you could take a project which had been designed for quality, and also bring in the quantity.

Who else is willing to bet on this with me?  Do YOU want to sponsor or be a part of this kind of prize?