Category Archives: Around the web

Game mechanics for causes – Catalysts for Change

Nothing is more captivating than a well-thought out game. That’s why more and more initiatives are building games (or using game mechanics) to create positive social change. Here’s a new one that launched today – it’s called Catalysts for Change, and it gives players a game-like competition for sharing and responding to ideas about solving the world’s social problems. It’s a bit like Quora meets Twitter meets Trivial Pursuit. Here’s a video they put together that provides a brief overview:

One you sign up, you’re asked to submit “cards”, which are basically suggestions or responses to specific issues. From there, you can browse individual cards and “chains” of cards composed of a string of responses from various players. A scoring system gives you points based on your submissions and the responses the’ve received, and there’s even an achievements system for those who really commit to playing. Here’s what the game’s dashboard looks like once you start playing:

The challenge with any game-like initiative is that if the game itself isn’t fun and engaging, then it’s a missed opportunity to really connect with people. Traditional game developers will readily admit that it’s not easy to create captivating titles, and socially-oriented games have an even bigger hurdle with the added goal of educating or empowering their players. Can Catalysts for Change pull it off and accomplish something really meaningful? Give it a try and find out for yourself! The game ends in less than two days, at 12:00 EST on Wednesday, April 5, so hurry.

WeTopia around the interwebs

In case you missed some of the press that WeTopia has received this week, here are some of the highlights. Happy reading!

  • Huffington Post - Facebook Game ‘WeTopia’ Allows Players To Donate To Charity By Building Virtual Village
  • TechCrunch - Backed By Ellen DeGeneres And Others, Sojo Studios Launches Facebook Game ‘WeTopia’
  • Fast Company - WeTopia: What Would Happen If Zynga Made Games For Good?
  • Good.is - WeTopia Transforms Online Gaming Addiction Into Social Good
  • Gamasutra - Wetopia, The Social Impact Social Game
  • Venture Beat - Sojo Studios’ WeTopia social game lets players do good in the real world
  • Games Blog – WeTopia on Facebook: Spreading joy to the globe that you can see
  • The Telegraph - Ellen DeGeneres backs new ‘Facebook’ game WeTopia
  • Business Insider - You’ve Never Heard Of SoJo, But Ellen DeGeneres Invested In Its $8 Million Pre-Launch Round
  • Kentucky.com - Lexington-based firm to launch charitable social-media game
  • Portfolio.com - Ellen DeGeneres Puts on Her Tech Pajama Jeans
Oh, and of course Ellen!

Evolution of the Online Donor (via Network for Good)

Network for Good recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and they created this iconographic to help illustrate some of the changes in online giving that have happened during the past decade.

Courtesy Network for Good.

From “Tales from the Hood” – Aid cannot and will not fix anything

There is no shortage of arguments to be found for or against humanitarian aid. Occasionally one comes across a perspective that is both well-articulated and grounded in reality. A recent post from the blog “Tales from the Hood” is such an example, so I chose to include it here. The original posting can be found at the “Tales from the Hood” site.

If I was to ever teach a course in humanitarian principles and action, it would go something like this:

Lesson #1. Aid cannot and will not fix anything.

One of the most important lessons that we’ve never really learned is that, in fact, aid does not fix anything. This is most likely a difficult one for you to wrap your head around. It certainly was for me, and I only managed it after of several years in the humanitarian aid world. Aid cannot and will not fix anything.

You wouldn’t know this from reading NGO promotional material. Actually, I would say that in general it is probably not a good idea to try to learn about or understand humanitarian work by reading stuff published by NGOs, because NGOs, for a long list of complicated reasons that I won’t go into right now, have very little (basically zero) motivation for telling anyone this particular truth. This particular truth being, specifically, that they cannot fix poverty. NGOs cannot eradicate hunger. NGOs cannot stop human trafficking. NGOs cannot and will not transform communities, empower the marginalized, stop climate change, or educate the global illiterate…

It is important to understand that this is true whether we’re talking about socially conscious grad students starting causes on Facebook, a small new-kid-on-the-aid-block NGO whose marketing shtick is that they “cut through the red tape and get it done”, or a huge global household charity with a gazillion dollars in annual revenue, massive programs and a long list of impressively titled publications. Aid cannot and will not fix anything.

We (inside the industry) have allowed ourselves believe and then sold to our constituents (our donors, those outside the industry…) a fiction about what we can actually do. Although we rarely say it directly in so many words, the implication is clear: To hear us tell it, you would think that we can fix anything.  And we’ve sold this fiction so well that now when we fail to fix things, it comes back to bite us. The media gets mad. Ordinary citizens get mad. We get cynical and disillusioned.

We’ve drunk our own Kool-Aid, we believe our own propaganda, and then when the harsh reality sets in and it’s disconcerting. We’ve allowed ourselves to believe that our structures and our systems, our warehouses and our team houses, our fleets of white SUVs and our armies of volunteers will “fix” Tsunamiland or post-Katrina Louisiana or Port-au-Prince. We look at our own annual reports and those numbers look really big. Our annual budget number, the numbers of “beneficiaries”, the numbers of NFI kits distributed or MT of food handed out, the number of mothers who give birth with the help of a trained midwife or the number of pairs of shoes sent overseas feel really… well, significant. We begin to feel as if we can do more than we actually can, and we believe that we have done more than we actually have.

But despite the best efforts of an aid industry that grows daily, despite more and more effort by more and more people, and despite the ever better application of even better science – be that social, environmental, political or economic science – poverty, hunger, abuse, disenfranchisement… all the ills of the world also grow at even faster rates.

Aid cannot and will not fix anything.

I don’t mean any of this to sound like I think that aid doesn’t matter. It does.

But over the past two decades I have become convinced that we come to the aid enterprise with too great a sense of self-assurance, with a quantity and quality of confidence not yet rightly earned. Aid cannot and will not fix anything. As humanitarian aid and development workers, we are struggling against forces – economic forces, political forces, social forces – more vast and deep and far reaching than the vast majority of us are aware.

It is hard and uncomfortable, but we have to keep in realistic perspective what we actually can and do bring, and scale our rhetoric – both internal and external – to match. We bring drops of relief in oceans of human suffering. Far too often we simply put band-aids on malignant tumors. And no amount of passion or “getting back to the basics” or being accountable will change that.

And so, while on one hand I understand and even applaud the energetic, entrepreneurial, Obama-innagural-address-esque “Yes we can!” sentiments of both passionate apologetics, and also the  strident, scathing critics of the aid industry alike, it is important to have realistic expectations of what aid can actually accomplish.

Aid is a good thing to do. I fervently believe that. Aid matters. Aid makes a difference. But if you have delusions of grandeur or even delusions of something less than grandeur, understand this: Aid will not fix anything. Aid is “a measure of humanity, always insufficient…” Aid makes incremental, fragile progress, often at great expense. This is not a call for self-flagellation or self-deprecation, but rather a call for confident humility.

Aid chips away at the stone.

Weekend Reading – May 29

Since you might have an extra day off this weekend, here are a few posts worth exploring:

 

Some thoughts from Kristof on Greg and the CAI

There is no shortage of articles and blog posts about Greg Mortenson this week. In fact, the Good Intentions Are Not Enough Blog has collected 113 of them at this time of this writing. I wanted to share just one perspective here, though – from Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times, a journalist I thoroughly respect and who thoughts on development are certainly far more mature than my own. He writes,

My inclination is to reserve judgment until we know more, for disorganization may explain more faults than dishonesty. I am deeply troubled that only 41 percent of the money raised in 2009 went to build schools, and Greg, by nature, is more of a founding visionary than the disciplined C.E.O. necessary to run a $20 million-a-year charity. On the other hand, I’m willing to give some benefit of the doubt to a man who has risked his life on behalf of some of the world’s most voiceless people.

I’ve visited some of Greg’s schools in Afghanistan, and what I saw worked. Girls in his schools were thrilled to be getting an education. Women were learning vocational skills, such as sewing. Those schools felt like some of the happiest places in Afghanistan.

I also believe that Greg was profoundly right about some big things.

He was right about the need for American outreach in the Muslim world. He was right that building schools tends to promote stability more than dropping bombs. He was right about the transformative power of education, especially girls’ education. He was right about the need to listen to local people — yes, over cup after cup after cup of tea — rather than just issue instructions.

I worry that scandals like this — or like the disputes about microfinance in India and Bangladesh — will leave Americans disillusioned and cynical. And it’s true that in their struggle to raise money, aid groups sometimes oversell how easy it is to get results. Helping people is more difficult than it seems, and no group of people bicker among themselves more viciously than humanitarians.

In my last post, I had written about how disappointed I was at the possibility that the allegations against Greg’s Central Asia Institute were true. I still retain that disappointment. But Nicholas makes a good point: despite the shortcomings of Greg Mortenson and the CAI, he’s done some tremendous things. Let’s not forget that.

The full post, highly recommended, is available here.

History over space and time – via Wikipedia

If you plotted Wikipedia articles over location and time, what would that look like? This video shows us exactly. Each dot that pulses is a Wikipedia article related to that specific location, for that year. Wait until about 1600 or 1700 for the “map” to become apparent.

It’s interesting at how many articles focus on Europe, while so few are centered on Africa, South America, and Asia for much of history. Certainly begs the question of what “history” is if it’s written primarily by a concentrated group of people about themselves. Draw your own conclusions.

A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.

Resources from World Water Day

In case you missed it, yesterday, March 22, was World Water Day. The United Nations designated this day in 1993 to raise awareness of water issues around globe. A different theme is focused on each year, and in 2011, it’s Water for cities, responding to the urban challenge. The goal is ”… to spotlight and encourage governments, organizations, communities, and individuals to actively engage in addressing the challenges of urban water management.”

While the official World Water Day site can be found here, I put together five resources for more learning about water issues. Happy learning:

- The Freakonomics blog discusses a simple “nudge” that can dramatically increase the frequency in which people in Ghana treat their water.

- Forbes magazine blogs on the need for innovative water technology, particularly in heading off water shortages in urban areas.

- Joseph Bergen put together an amazing interactive map that allows you to compare water statistics between any two countries around the world.

- Don’t have much time? Take a look at charity: water’s brief interactive on how water changes everything. When you’re done there, have fun playing with their projects page.

- Decided that you want to get involved? Huffington Post has some great suggestions on organizations that promote clean, safe water to support.

Is the US prepared for a disaster at home?

Two leaders in supporting the needs of children in the United States posted an article yesterday on the Huffington Post, titled “Japan: What if It Happened Here?”. Irwin Redlener, M.D. is the President and Co-Founder of the Children’s Health Fund, while Mark Shriver is Vice President and Managing Director of US Programs for Save the Children.

The authors point out two issues. First, the National Commission on Children and Disasters has found some significant shortcomings in how well our federal and state governments are prepared to respond to a disaster at home. Secondly, since the Commission is about to wind down, it’s likely that the attention paid to this issue will only wane. Poor timing; if the government’s response to Katrina was any indicator, I doubt our country is as prepared as we might like to believe.

Not only does a lack of government preparedness mean that children and their families will suffer needlessly in the event of another domestic tragedy, it also means that an increased burden will fall on charities to fill the gap. And since donations to U.S.-based non-profits dropped by a staggering 11% between 2009 and 2010, the organizations we’ll rely on to as a backstop may not have the resources they need to come through.

Excerpts from the article are below, and the full text can be found here:

In a strange turn of events, a mind-numbing humanitarian crisis caused by this month’s massive 9.0 earthquake, an enormous tsunami and hundreds of aftershocks has been nearly overshadowed by a growing crisis from damaged nuclear power plants along Japan’s northeast coast…

At the end of the day, if it is ever possible to determine precisely how many people perished in this cascading disaster, the fatality count will surely exceed 10,000. And victims from the most vulnerable populations will be disproportionately affected: the elderly, the hospitalized, the homebound and, of course, children…

Whether or not Japanese authorities planned sufficiently to care for its children caught up in such horrific events is not yet clear. But it is at our own peril that we, in the United States, will fail to grasp the importance of making sure that children in this country are protected during and following disasters.

Unfortunately, in a case of particularly bad timing, the National Commission on Children and Disasters, chartered by Congress following Katrina, is about to fold up shop — just when it is most needed…

The Commission has uncovered glaring problems, including the shocking fact that 80 percent of ambulances don’t carry equipment specifically designed to protect children. Only 12 states require minimal preparedness for child care facilities and schools. And, in relation to Japan and radiation, the Commission has found that our nation doesn’t have the capacity to adequately stockpile and rapidly distribute iodine in proper doses for children.

After a decade of unrelenting and unprecedented natural disasters and terrorist attacks in the United States and around the world, the question of whether or not another tragedy will eventually strike the United States is clearly a matter of when, not if. That said, we have an opportunity to make sure that, whatever happens, the nation’s children will be maximally protected. Reauthorizing the National Commission on Children and Disasters should be a Congressional priority.

Dr. Irwin Redlener and Mark Shriver are members of the National Commission on Children and Disasters.

 

A Japanese girl looks for a new shelter following the earthquake. (Courtesy surfwithberserk.com)

How the absence of pity changes perspectives

One of my colleagues shared this video with our team today. I was so taken with it’s fresh perspective I had to post it here:

The message here is clear: children in Africa (or any third world country, for that matter) shouldn’t be seen as objects of pity; they’re kids not unlike the ones you might see in your own community. How would this change your attitude about giving if you saw everyone this way?

If want to learn more about the organization behind the video, head over to Mama Hope’s website.

The sweet spot of inequality

Income inequality is an increasingly common topic on the web these past few days. The discussion is worth reading about. Not only are there some moral issues at hand related to the poor’s access to wealth and opportunity, but there is also a practical debate related to where the “sweet spot” of income inequality lies in terms of allowing for global economic growth. The point is illustrated by Mark Thoma on HBR’s blog post: “Why Business is Stuck on Income Equality“:

There is an equivalent of a Laffer curve for inequality, but the variable of interest is economic growth rather than tax revenue. We know that a society with perfect equality does not grow at the fastest possible rate. When everyone gets an equal share of income, people lose the incentive to try and get ahead of others. We also know that a society where one person has almost everything while everyone else struggles to survive — the most unequal distribution of income imaginable — will not grow at the fastest possible rate either. Thus, the growth-maximizing level of inequality must lie somewhere between these two extremes.

So while too much income inequality is unwanted, perfect income equality isn’t a great situation either. But what’s it like for the impoverished to make the transition into the middle (or lower) classes? AidWatch has a great analogy, using a situation we are all familiar with: being stuck in a slow lane of traffic while the lane next to us passes us by:

At first, movement in the other lane may seem like a good sign: you hope that your turn to move will come soon, and indeed that might happen. You might contemplate an orderly move into the moving lane, looking for suitable gaps in the traffic. However, if the other lane keeps whizzing by, with no gaps to enter and with no change on your lane, your reactions may well become quite negative. Unevenness without corresponding redistribution can be tolerated or even welcomed if it raises expectations everywhere, but it will be tolerated for only so long.  Thus, uneven growth will set forces in motion to restore a greater degree of balance, even (in some cases) actions that may thwart the growth process itself.

The Economist chimes in regarding tactics for adjusting inequality itself, pointing out that the best way to move towards a more equitable distribution of wealth is to bolster the resources of the lower and middle classes, and not bring down the wealthy:

[T]he right way to combat inequality and increase mobility is clear. First, governments need to keep their focus on pushing up the bottom and middle rather than dragging down the top: investing in (and removing barriers to) education, abolishing rules that prevent the able from getting ahead and refocusing government spending on those that need it most. Oddly, the urgency of these kinds of reform is greatest in rich countries, where prospects for the less-skilled are stagnant or falling. Second, governments should get rid of rigged rules and subsidies that favour specific industries or insiders. Forcing banks to hold more capital and pay for their implicit government safety-net is the best way to slim Wall Street’s chubbier felines. In the emerging world there should be a far more vigorous assault on monopolies and a renewed commitment to reducing global trade barriers—for nothing boosts competition and loosens social barriers better than freer commerce.

The good news is that more people than ever are moving out of poverty, at least according to Heifer International’s recent post on the topic:

“A lot has changed in the past six years. The economies of the developing world have expanded 50 percent in real terms, despite the Great Recession. Moreover, growth has been particularly high in countries with large numbers of poor people. India and China, of course, but also Bangladesh, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Uganda, Mozambique and Uzbekistan – nine countries that were collectively home to nearly two-thirds of the world’s poor in 2005 – are all experiencing phenomenal economic advances.”

The new Brookings Institution report, available to download here, updates the World Bank’s official figures to show how the global poverty landscape has changed. The editorial says “we estimate that between 2005 and 2010, nearly half a billion people escaped extreme hardship. Never before in history have so many people been lifted out of poverty in such a short period.”

Happy MLK day + some reading for January 17

Hats of to you, sir.

Where is investment headed in Africa?

Ndubuisi Ekekwe, the founder of the African Institution of Technology, posted a recent article in Harvard Business Review titled “Before Your Next African Investment”. In it, he discusses the current investment boom in harvesting natural resources in many African countries, but highlights a contrasting lack of resources dedicated to education and knowledge on the continent. The full article is available here, and an excerpt is below:

Though the traditional media continue to report wars, famine, and HIV, most business media showcase Africa as a continent with opportunities. There’s a growing middle class, expanded GDP, and general optimism in the region. Multinational companies are opening offices and investing in the continent. Africa has become a place where financial institutions are financing real estate projects.

Yet, is it possible to create a modern Africa without investing in knowledge? Is this growth sustainable, after the minerals are depleted? The educational institutions remain underfunded, so it’s difficult to to create knowledge and diversify the economies beyond minerals. Strikes in universities are common and quality remains very low, especially in technical education. Little shows that Africa is prepared for the post-mineral era. The current foreign investment model focuses on accelerating consumption and exploration of minerals. Few investors focus on building capacity. While the tech giants build factories and research centers in Asia, they open offices to sell products in Africa. The most common excuse for this is that African talents are not ready for research; yet, those talents are good enough when new mines are discovered.

 

How Haitian Youth Use Humor to Cope

The Savage Minds blog had a recent post titled “Something to Laugh About: A Few Thoughts on Humor in Post-Earthquake Haiti”. The piece provides some insight on how jokes and humor weave themselves into the coping process, even a year after the catastrophe.

Haitians are very funny. (How’s that for anthropological nuance?) They like to tease. They like jokes—silly, raunchy, or political. The observation that hardship and humor go hand-in-hand is hardly novel or original; it borders on cliché. Yet humor is something that doesn’t come through in most mainstream media and humanitarian depictions of Haiti, which largely focus on those details of life that are deemed most immediate and newsworthy: the earthquake; the spread of cholera; the ongoing plight of people living in the camps, coping with loss and deprivation and faced with eviction; unfolding political upheaval. All those things are important to know and to act upon, to be sad and enraged about. At the same time, collectively these kinds of news have a flattening effect, rendering individual Haitians exemplary victims who can represent the majority of victimized Haitians, but erasing the kinds of details that make them recognizable, relatable and…human.

The first earthquake joke I heard goes like this:

Jesus and Satan run into each other on the street. Satan says to Jesus, “Look at that country there, Haiti. That’s mine. All the evil, the violence, the suffering – Haiti is my country.” Jesus looks at Satan and says, “Oh, really? Let’s see about that.” Then he picks up Haiti and begins to shake it and shake it, and everyone cries out, “Oh, Jezi, Jezi, sove m Jezi! Save me, Jesus!” Jesus puts Haiti down, turns to Satan and says, “You see? Haiti is mine.”

While Haitians find this joke hilarious (doubled-over laughing, gasping for breath), foreigners never do. I tried telling it to my mother, who found it, in her words, “creepy.” This joke shows the country wedged in a game of one-upmanship between cosmic “good” and “evil,” although the role of the “good” seems awfully tenuous. This humor is dark, absurd, and context-specific – but everyone gets it.

The full post (highly recommended) can be found here.

City of Dust

A touching article from the New York Times about a Haitian police officer’s loss of his two daughters during the earthquake in Haiti nearly a year ago. Excerpt below, find the full article here:

The police chief pressed his hands against the wall to hold himself in place, even as the walls crumbled and calved, trying to avoid being thrown off the back of whatever large creature had come for vengeance. And when the building stopped spasming, and he knew himself to be alive, Termilus reflexively shouted, “Praise God.” He fell to his knees and crawled until he was free of the rubble, a regal man humbled by the overwhelming force of nature. Like the others who were caught out — at their offices or schools, in their cars or the market or returning to their families — like everyone who couldn’t know what was waiting for them beyond what they’d just survived, Frantz Termilus instinctively started walking home, his uniform powdered in a white chalk.

A Lesson on Giving from Billionaires

Harvard Business School has a wonderful post titled “How to Give Your Money Away More Effectively”. The text is below, or feel free to access the original article.

“No one gives away money as intelligently as they made it,” declared Andrew Tisch at a recent meeting of the Board of Advisers to the Harvard Business School Social Enterprise Initiative. That observation neatly encapsulates the biggest challenge facing the non-profit sector in the decade ahead.

FORTUNE magazine’s July 5, 2010, cover article describes how Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates are recruiting billionaires to take the Giving Pledge, a promise to give away at least half their net worth. If, however, too many of these donations are directed so that the donors and their family members can join prestigious Boards of Trustees or if the money gets widely dispersed to a myriad of under-performing local nonprofits, then society will not enjoy the full benefits from the funds expended and the sad truth of Andrew Tisch’s observation will be re-affirmed.

But if all the billionaires’ bequests were to be effectively deployed through charitable organizations committed to performance measurement and accountability for outcomes, this huge wave of philanthropy could transform large segments of society.

It’s not an impossible challenge. As we’ve described in a recent HBR article the Gates Foundation, for example, conducts due diligence and subsequent monitoring of the performance of the charitable organizations it supports just as any good investment manager would. That is why Warren Buffet directed that his own enormous bequest be deployed and administered through the strong processes already existing at the Gates Foundation.

Beyond the likes of the Gates Foundation, we see an emerging type of charitable organization modeled on venture capital funds, such as New Profit Inc. of Cambridge, Tipping Point Community and NewSchools Venture Fund in the San Francisco Bay Area, Venture Philanthropy Partners in Washington D.C., and Sea Change Capital in New York City. These funds pool large donations from contributors (tellingly referred to as “investors”) and distribute them to a relatively few nonprofits selected through a rigorous due diligence process that identifies organizations capable of delivering outstanding social outcomes on a wide scale. The funds offer their grantees large, multi-year commitments complemented with strong governance and active support for the nonprofit’s executive leadership team, board of directors, and operational management.

Thanks to these Venture Funds, several nonprofits are attracting sustainable funding for programs that have clearly demonstrated an ability to effectively address social problems long considered intractable. Take Youth Villages whose programs help young people, previously mired in bureaucratic state social service systems, achieve a productive life. Its programs have a success rate three times greater than those of state-run programs, achieved at one-third of the cost. It delivers this nine-fold advantage consistently across the seven states in which it operates.

But even with a recent $40 million grant from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, Growth Capital Aggregation Fund, Youth Villages receives substantially less than 1% of the $20 billion dispersed annually by philanthropists and governments on youth services despite offering demonstrably superior results than hundreds of similar but less effective deliverers of services to the same populations.

Youth Villages is not unique. Citizen Schools, an after-school program, Nurse Family Partnership, a health program for pregnant women, and Jumpstart, a program that raises the performance of kids in Head Start by an average of 30%, are but a few of the nonprofit organizations that could effectively deploy a great deal more money to extend the impact of their innovative programs.

As things stand, the CEOs of these high-performing nonprofits spend much of their time going cap-in-hand to raise money each year. Why aren’t the donors seeking these winners out? Society would surely be better served if the exemplary CEOs of these effective programs could spend much more of their time leading their organizations to deliver better services to more recipients.

Some people from the non-profit sector object to the financial market-inspired approaches that we espouse in our article on the grounds that the “spirit” of the capital markets somehow runs counter to the spirit of the nonprofit sector. But although the private sector is not perfect, as the global financial crisis has painfully revealed, many of its practices can be productively deployed to produce a far more effective and efficient voluntary sector.

The voluntary sector continually pleads for more funding to solve the nation’s long-standing social problems. Their case would be far stronger if the large sums of money already deployed to this sector year were better directed to organizations, such as Youth Villages, that consistently delivered the most value for the money.

A Positive Spin on Haiti

Great video from Aid Watch, which shows us that Haiti is “not always and all the time earthquakes, hurricanes, deforestation, misery, rape, corruption, kidnappings, poverty, garbage, violence, gangs, wasted aid, cholera, election fraud, dirty water, orphans and amputees.”

Thinking about abundance

I strongly suggest reading the ext337 blog about a different paradigm in how non-profits should view the resources they have. Here is an excerpt:

As I think more about nonprofits-as-venues, as places where projects are performed (to push a metaphor just a tad too far), I think that thinking in terms of abundance rather than scarcity is one of the big changes that is necessary. We have to think not just in terms of what we can do, as individuals, within our organization, but we have to believe that the necessary skills are out there — we just need to find them.

Beth Kanter has some insightful responses at her own blog, under the post Why Should Nonprofits Choose Abundance (and Breathe).

Paul Farmer: 5 Lessons From Haiti’s Disaster

I liked Paul Farmer’s (of Partners in Health) recent blog post so much that I reposted it in its entirety here. Someone with much more credibility than myself has done a great job of outlining some key points to keep in mind in helping Haiti.

The original post is located at the ForeignPolicy.com.

1. Jobs are everything.

All humans need money — they need it to buy food and water every day. And no matter how hard the government or the aid industry tries, people will want for all three things until they are employed.

The world pledged some $10.2 billion in recovery aid to Haiti after Jan. 12′s devastating earthquake. Imagine how many people that money could employ, putting them to work on tasks like removing rubble (only 2 percent of which has been cleared to date), rebuilding key government buildings, and planting trees in a country that is almost entirely deforested. And yet so far, just 116,000 people have been employed in this way. Haiti has 9.8 million people, and at least half were unemployed even before the earthquake. If we focused our efforts on the singular task of getting them jobs — even if we did nothing else — Haiti’s reconstruction could be a success.

2. Don’t starve the government.

The international community doesn’t know best. Local people do. NGOs like the one that I am lucky to work with cannot replace the state — nor can the United Nations or anyone else. We don’t have the expertise, and we won’t stay forever. We don’t have the same stake in building a community that the locals themselves have. And if aid is to work, it can’t fall apart when the expats leave.

On this, almost everyone agrees. But the opposite approach has characterized Haiti relief. The dollar figures tell the real story: A mere 0.3 percent of the more than $2 billion in humanitarian aid pledged by major donors has ended up with local authorities. That money will hardly compensate for the 20 percent of civil servants who died in the quake.

Some donors argue that the Haitian government is rife with corruption and mismanagement — and that infusing it with money will only make matters worse. But we need to strengthen the public sector, not weaken it. And that will take a working budget. It’s impossible to be transparent and track your budgets when you lack computers, electricity, and even the personnel to do so. Until the government has the resources it needs, Haiti will remain the republic of NGOs.

3. Give them something to go home to.

Today, some 1.3 million Haitians live in tent camps amid often squalid conditions — yet no one has been able to convince them to resettle. Why don’t they want to leave? Because there is nothing to draw them back. Many of these displaced men and women didn’t own the houses that collapsed around then; they rented them — often under very unfavorable conditions. They were in debt to bad landlords. They had no schools or clinics.

Enticing them to return home will mean providing exactly what they lacked before: housing, education, and health care. Ironically, Haitians are getting some of those things now in the camps. They have shelter in the 69,700 tents distributed by donors; they have the food and hygiene kits that NGOs offer. The tent camps may well become semipermanent homes if those services don’t also exist in the cities, villages, and towns.

4. Waste not, want not.

At least half of aid money probably never reaches its recipients, eaten up by overhead; often it’s even more. I know of no other business or enterprise in which this would be an acceptable operational strategy. Equally frustrating, sometimes the money doesn’t show up at all. Of the donor dollars promised for 2010, Haiti has so far received a mere 38 percent, or $732.5 million, excluding debt relief. Nine months after the disaster, not a cent of the U.S. donation for Haiti’s reconstruction has been disbursed; it’s tied up in appropriations. Imagine trying to re-engineer a devastated country when your budget is at the mercy of political whims in foreign lands.

5. Relief is the easy part.

Disaster relief is not reconstruction. We haven’t rebuilt Haiti despite giving 1.1 million people access to drinking water; we didn’t remake the country with the 11,000 latrines that have been installed. “Building Haiti back better” means sustaining those temporary gains and adding education, health care, services, and good governance.

What’s most important in getting started? Economic growth. Yet it is a challenge hardly mentioned in aid documents or strategies — coming up only twice in the United Nations’ most recent 44-page report. Poverty of the kind that was so acutely revealed this January can’t be defeated until there is a brighter economic future for the millions of Haitians who are ready to seize it.