Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some

A still from John Ford's film, "Grapes of Wrath" (1940)

worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, the Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. You’ve scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.

~From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

***

Have some poems you treasure that you’d like to share with fellow aid workers and do-gooders? Please send them my way at email.howmatters@gmail.com!

***

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1. Altruism: proportion and degree to which individuals are ready to sacrifice benefits to themselves for the benefit of the organization as a whole – reflected in the degrees of generosity, individual humility, communal pride, mutual supportiveness, loyalty, concern and camaraderie.
2. Values: degree to which individuals share values, especially the idea that they belong to a common entity that supersedes the interests of individuals.
3. Services: the more that individuals have access to communal or shared facilities, the greater the capacity of the organization.
4. Communications: willingness and ability – which implies tact, diplomacy, listening.
5. Confidence: belief that the organization can achieve whatever it sets out to do – positive attitudes, optimism, self-reliant rather than dependent, avoidance of apathy and fatalism, vision of what is possible.
6. Context: leaders enabling rather than patronizing, operating on a self-managed basis.
7. Information: ability to process and analyze information, level of awareness, knowledge and wisdom found within individuals and the group as a whole.
8. Intervention: not afraid to confront hard issues, preventative rather than reactive.
9. Leadership: about power, ability and influence to move the organization forward, enabling and facilitating role to operate the organization in support of its goals, leaders must have skills, willingness and charisma.
10. Networking: extent to which leaders know individuals an other organizations who can provide useful resources to strengthen the organization as a whole.
11. Organization: degree to which individuals see themselves as having a role that contributes to the whole, in contrast to being a mere collection of separate individuals – organizational integrity, structure, procedures, decision-making processes.
12. Power: political.
13. Skills: ability to get things done – managerial, technical, organizational, mobilizing.
14. Trust: degree to which members of the organization trust each other and their leaders – which is, in turn, a reflection of the degree of integrity – honesty, dependability, openness, transparency, trustworthiness.
15. Unity: sense of belonging to a known entity, the degree to which individuals are willing to tolerate differences and variations among each other, willingness to cooperate and work together.
16. Wealth: degree to which organization has control over its actual and potential resources.

What do you see changing for the better in your organization these days? Please share in the comments section.

***

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What do you think? Could it work?

And if the answer is no, you’d better be ready to offer your own new idea. Let’s hear it.

***

Large scale aid intervention in large scale disaster has shown its slowness and its inability to cooperate and effectively intervene in the Haiti 2010 earthquake.

The lesson learnt in Haiti and other places would be prevention before intervention. This has been realized by some international organizations, but not all. And to approach the “big” philanthropists is virtually impossible for a small, albeit genuine, association in need of help.

Capillaries are the tiny blood vessels that connect the arterioles (the smallest divisions of the arteries) and the venules (the smallest divisions of the veins). We have around 10 billion of these capillaries mapped throughout the body, forming a fine network. The largest capillary is only about as wide as the head of a pin. Despite being microscopic, capillaries have an enormous task—to facilitate the transport of blood (with its oxygen and nutrients) to all parts of the body.

I advocate for a small, but capillary, prevention scale.

Philanthropy could put in place a “one-to-one” support system whereby businesses select a “sister” local NGO to help on a 5-10 year plan. Tax deductibility must be streamlined and be transparent in this case, perhaps with a mini-Inc. or mini 501(c)3 registration. Tax departments should be happy to ensure more work for themselves and donors would have their tax deductions ensured, with the bonus of no additional administrative expenses and the money could go directly to the recipient. This would create a direct relationship and personal involvement between the business and the non-profit.

Recipients’ organizations, as small as they can be, should be locally registered and police-checked (like teachers are). Personally I prefer local associations that ensure their commitment is to all, not to “some” or with a “water-for-prayers” philosophy (yes it happens).

All monies should be allocated giving priority to income-generating activities (with embedded mandatory training), education and health, again locally implemented as much as possible. Donors’ organizations can send foreign volunteers to set up as a temporary interventions/training and their activities should be monitored by the recipients and reported on a regular basis.

Prevention includes all areas that need improvement: schools (small, sound buildings rather than large ones, and reconstruction training) agriculture (water sheds, structural plantations, plots fragmentation), evenly distributed and trained health workers (training locals) and services throughout districts, and water wells (training in maintenance and repair), etc.

Such prevention also implies a cooperation system in case of disaster, whereby neighbouring recipients and neighbouring donors aid each other in a disaster situation. This type of system would minimize damages (smaller scale is easier and less expensive to repair) and would empower local reconstruction and medical operations, as well as lessen international aid/government expenditures after disaster.

A variation could be a philanthropy network of businesses, each contributing to a part of a whole, for example whereby say 10 businesses work together towards improving 10 villages in the same area. Ten businesses could even choose to partly pay one person to organize the program.

In our very small scale, Association Amis des Enfants (AAE) Australia Inc. has been supporting Association Amis des Enfants de l’ile de la Gonâve for more than a decade. This one-to one relationship has ensured a coordinated decision-making process, direct financing, and accountability. Sure not everything has gone smoothly. Much time and money (the former being exceedingly more than the latter) has been donated to liaise and organize, but it has worked well to the benefit of the entire community around AAE.

Sure, we had a personal involvement, as we adopted from Haiti in the 1980s, but many disheartened donors would welcome a direct, transparent, and, yes, tax-deductible way to help. Of this I am sure.

In Middle Ages Europe, such a system was in place, whereby it was mandatory for each member of the trading corporations to select a charity of choice and devote to it a fixed percentage of earnings.

Why have we lost it?

And why not to resurrect it on a scale that is today technologically very possible?

***

Orietta L’Abbate can be reached at oriettala (at) gmail (dot) com.

***

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Are you building your capacity to prepare for what Dennis Whittle, co-founder of GlobalGiving.org, terms the pending “democratization of aid”?  It’s time for the ability and penchant to work with organizations of any size or type to become a core capacity of donors, governments, and all key stakeholders working on behalf of people’s well-being.

***

Capacity Gap

You see only what is not,
within your per view,
your limited world view.
A great mind,
but ideas insulated
from true change.
Challenge not.
Ask not.
Criticize not.
As a beneficiary of status quo,
you resist
the shifts
that are necessary.
Yet we gain
with each push,
against the power within.

Have some poems you treasure that you’d like to share with fellow aid workers and do-gooders? Please send them my way at email.howmatters@gmail.com!

***

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An aid worker’s poetic journey

Shout out to the folks at The Displaced Nation, Expat Backup, and Gypsy Girl’s Guide – this might really resonate with their readers as well.

***

On the evening of my third day in the city I found myself swapping stories with the mix of Swedes, Italians, and Australians in the ryokan’s tiny kitchenette. It quickly became apparent that we were all collecting a similar set of odd, ironic encounters. I told them my noodle-soup-ticket story; they told me theirs.

“Dude,” said an American who’d been standing by the tea machine, eavesdropping, “they just don’t want to touch the money. Not all Japanese restaurants are set up that way.”

“Actually, I figured out that one myself,” I said. “That’s half the point of the story.”

“But you say it like it’s some kind of great revelation.”

His name was Troy. Tall, mildly handsome, late twenties. He was wearing the same Swatch-brand watch I’d seen most Japanese men his age wearing. He’d been living in Japan for a few years, one of the Swedes had told me, and seemed to harbor a special resentment for American visitors like me.

“Did someone get up on the wrong side of the tatama mat this morning?” I asked.

“It’s a tatami,” he shot back, “and I hope you slept on the futon on top of the tatami.”

The guy had gotten my New York hackles up. “Dude-san, if you know everything already, why are you staying in the ryokan with the rest of us newbies?”

“Look, you’re an American, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ve been here, what? Two days?”

“Three.”

“Three days. I’ve been here three years. I’m not saying I know everything, but I know enough to know that there’s a lot I don’t know.”

“That’s very Donald Rumsfeld of you.”

That got a chuckle out of him, and we both eased up a little. He’d been living far to the south in Kobe and was visiting Tokyo like the rest of us. He’d taught English for a year, then stayed on for another two. His Japanese was good. I couldn’t tell what his current job was or if he even had one, but, despite his pretensions, he seemed quite homesick.

“If you’re here for ten days,” he went on, a bit despairingly, “you think you understand the place. If you’re here for ten years, you might actually begin to understand it. Anything in between and you’re lost.” By his own metric he was lost, and so was I—but, crucially, I didn’t know it yet.

“So you’re saying I’m too happy?” I asked. “Or just clueless?”

“Yes.”

“Well, bully for me.”

But, as I walked away, I knew he was right. It took Eugen Herrigel, a German studying Zen archery in Japan in the 1930s a full five years simply to learn how to release his bowstring “unintentionally.” I was a voyeur, a dilettante, a drive-by gleaner. I was passing through Japan without enough time to learn the language or properly settle in. And I was making up for it by jumping to conclusions and turning ordinary encounters into defining moments.

***

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Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles”
“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” ~Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
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Leslie Dodson – Don’t Misrepresent Africa
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Joan Halifax: Compassion and the true meaning of empathy
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Chip Conley: Measuring what makes life worthwhile
There are many thing we do and that we don’t measure in the “misplaced metric” of GDP. Hotelier Chip Conley tells us why the things that are most intangible are actually the most valuable things to measure.

***

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“The grassroots [organizations] that I have worked with have been excellent in seeing development as a process rather than a large checkbox… but many aid workers (sorry sorry sorry for the generalisation) seem to misunderstand this, and project their own ambitions and understanding of what development ‘should’ look like unto grassroots… the cool thing is: most of the grassroots I have worked with in Kenya seem to find a way to maneuver in all this frenzy and still continue their good work!”

***

When Jennifer invited me to write a guest post for how-matters.org, my first response to her was this: How could I possibly turn all these strong (often angry) feelings and thoughts about how development aid is being run into something sober and rational?

After our email correspondence I though: Am I even interested in sober and rational? I have been so frustrated reading heaps of sober and rational how-to-guides, tools, policy papers, frameworks, white papers… I realised that what I had missed the most in my work as a development professional was… people! Not participants, not target groups, not beneficiaries… just people. And ‘people’ in every aspect, with all their non-sober, irrational human emotions, feelings, thoughts and reactions. I had felt that development work had become more about systems and structures than the actual lived realities of people.

The department in the global NGO for which I worked was new and so we mainly worked with small grants, partnering with small and young grassroots groups living and working in Nairobi’s informal settlements. We did everything together, from research and data collection, to defining the goals of the project and which activities and processes were needed to reach these goals. We drew up budgets together and decided on how to evaluate and monitor the projects.

Doing everything together of course meant that full ownership of the project was being ensured (which should really be a given in any project). However, what I found the most important was that we actually got to know each other very well. And this made the biggest difference to our projects! I and the local facilitators and coordinators understood our partners. We understood why they might be delayed with a report, why spending was slower in certain times of the year and so forth. And even more importantly, we understood the personal sacrifice and struggle that many of the grassroots volunteers were making to actually create a better community.

But as our department grew and as income became even more important in order to sustain our programs, my work became more a matter of income targets and how to motivate (read: force) local southern-based partners to implement faster and spend more. To me, development aid had become yet another production machine – a conveyor belt mechanism, where effectiveness meant speed, production and income, rather than the well-being and growth of those involved.

As the grants became bigger, it became more and more difficult to focus solely and intensely on the small grassroot sgroups, and they seemed to get lost in the frenzy of income targets, reporting, spending, and ‘effectiveness’.

I was burnt out. I lost sight of the task at hand. I did not feel we were changing the world. On the contrary, most of the time I felt that we were doing more harm than good. I felt that we were causing more burnout and stress amongst the grassroots volunteers, loading more and more projects, involving more and more training, onto them. I didn’t feel that they were getting the quality support and help they needed in order to lift the heavy task of improving their own community.

We were training volunteers to become counsellors for families to children with disabilities and to literally knock on the doors of strangers to talk to them about their children, who are heavily discriminated by the rest of the community. Would I be able to do that without adequate support, understanding, guidance, mentoring, coaching, counselling or healing? NO!

I have never had more respect for other people than I have for those community volunteers who dedicate more than half of their daily lives to supporting other people who are in more difficult situations than them! But where was the understanding, and where was the support?

After I left my full-time programme coordinator job, I returned to Nairobi to visit my old friends working and volunteering at the grassroots. I realised that what I had been feeling was in fact true. Many of the volunteers are stressed. They do not feel that they are able to fully lift their weight. They are frustrated, and thus they sometimes forget all the good they are actually doing. They do an amazing job, but they feel a lot of struggle… and wouldn’t you, if you had to save the world, at the same time as constantly being told what to do, being told to make activities more effective, that you are too slow and therefore have to speed up the work you are doing, to write detailed reports for everything you do, and AT THE SAME TIME not being given an appropriate space to at least voice your complaints, frustrations, worries, feelings, thoughts and fears?

So, whatever happened to humanity?

What happened to the person, the human being and their lived reality in all the systems and structures that we now call ‘development aid’? It seems that empathy, compassion and understanding towards those people who are getting their hands dirty in the communities is rarely seen as a vital element of a good project. But what would happen if ‘empathy’, ‘understanding’ and ‘compassion’ became equally important buzzwords as ‘capacity,’ ‘ownership’ and ‘participation’ within aid effectiveness? Are these words too soft and irrational for the toughness and rationality of the development world – or could they be the missing piece in the puzzle?

***

If you want to meet some of these amazing volunteers, check out these videos:

http://www.bestselfexperience.com/2011/10/18/meet-waimatha-a-counselor-for-commercial-sex-workers-in-kenya/

http://www.bestselfexperience.com/2011/10/18/meet-karis-a-youth-leader-in-kenya/

***

Mette Müller is an intuitive healer (and ex-development professional) working with social change agents, aid workers, counsellors, and helpers, who are struggling or on the edge of burnout and stress. Mette has worked for more than ten years in the aid sector. She grew up in Tanzania, has lived in several other countries in eastern and southern Africa. You can learn more about her work at: http://www.bestselfexperience.com.

***

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Isn’t it time for a morale boost?

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk;
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life gets lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

By William Stafford from “The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems”

***

Have some poems you treasure that you’d like to share with fellow aid workers and do-gooders? Please send them my way at email.howmatters@gmail.com!

***

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Check out their latest comic on sanitation in India below. There may be some hidden assumptions about “development” embedded within (“What happens in big cities Dada ji?”) and I wonder how the watsan technical folks would view it. Where I find the value is in who is portrayed as the solution seekers and the agents of change, that is, not us aid workers, philanthropists or do-gooders.

Now that’s definitely a better story…

***

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Discrimination is rife in the aid industry. I don’t think that many people would refute the lack of local staff in positions of decision-making power in international NGOs, nor the grantmaker/grantseeker power imbalance in philanthropy.

But is this a problem or is it just the inevitable? To serve the poor is an endeavor of the privileged. Sasha’s experience at the conference demonstrates how aid workers, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and do-gooders have the opportunity much too often to act in ways that are completely oblivious to racism and their participation in it. As a donor, her honesty is refreshing and a call to all of us involved in international assistance.

***

I attended the conference with two grantees, both African women engaged in grassroots work for adolescent girls. I was excited to be able to introduce them to potential funders and collaborators—after all they’re doing superb work on a critical issue. Yes, their financials checked out, their impact assessments looked good, their stories were compelling. But for me it was about the work they were doing. Both women are deeply thoughtful and respectful of the community they serve, critical qualities of successful leaders. So I was looking forward to validating their efforts. That is exactly what did not happen.

For most of the conference I was on an emotional roller coaster as I watched both women come up against the subtle, yet unmistakable signs of white power and privilege in the world of donors and grantees. I squirmed when the light bulb of donor’s unintended condescension turned on. I felt terrible as one grantee said to me, “I don’t know why I came. I would have learned more doing my work at home.”

I started to wonder if I am as guilty as any other donor. Aren’t I in a position of power and privilege in regards to my grantees? Is the support the How Fund offers more about me blowing my own horn for having this great grantee, rather than about the girls being served or the work being done? What about the language I use to describe our grantees or speak to them?

We, with power and privilege, want to appear to be polite and respectful. But how often do we end up sounding condescending, as if we are talking to a child, putting grantees in a position of having to be grateful?

I don’t believe the intention of any donor at the conference was to hurt or run roughshod. But here it was—my grantees sharing with me the evidence of donors’ paternalistic attitudes. And here I was—aware of how discouragingly easy it is for donors to adopt these attitudes. It starts when the conference participants are encourage to say, “What can I do for you?” Asking this question implies a power imbalance between donor and grantee. When I started to work in philanthropy, I considered this question to deferential. What I’ve come to understand from my grantees, though, is that the question actually elicits a sense of the “Other.”

So how do we shift the conversation, right the imbalance? As donors we need to have the humility and honesty to be clear about our contextual and cultural lens, the “default assumptions” we use when we interact with grantees. This is an uncomfortable exercise because it forces us to face our whiteness, our privilege, and all the less-than-pristine laundry that comes with these labels. However, I want to be able to have an open conversation with grantees that allows me to be who I am. That is the only way I know how to use my power and privilege to support others, to carry philanthropy out in a way that knocks down the hierarchy and promotes teamwork.

Why do I do this work? Let me be frank. It’s because it makes me feel good. But I can’t feel good if I am behaving in a way that’s anything but collaborative. Yes, I want my grantees to make me look good by doing stellar work, but I can’t tell them how to do that, so my half of the partnership is to be supportive. To me that means providing funds, but also establishing a relationship that assumes I will listen, learn and do my damndest not to make a fool of myself.

For all of us to be the best we can be, we first have to look deeply at ourselves and where we come from. When I started The HOW Fund, I began my journey as a white woman of privilege. I am still a white woman of privilege. What I know now is that to create a true partnership with those two powerful African women means that we must walk the journey together. The right question is not “What can I do for you?” It is, “What can I do with you?”

***

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