Today, in International Development, advocates for the world’s poorest are being hammered with a plethora of obstacles in the fight for universal access to clean water. Not only must we deal with the natural phenomena that accompany Climate Change such as drought, tsunamis, hurricanes and hellacious flooding, but we must consider the consequences of human action (or lack thereof).

When I heard that ThinkImpact was looking for advisers to support their students during the program I immediately applied. I was accepted as an advisor for the South Africa side and started my journey with a training in Washington D.C. After that I met my student team in Chicago at Northwestern University. This year ThinkImpact collaborated with Northwestern and their Global Engagement Studies Institute.

We were all very excited to finally arrive in our new home the village of Clare in the Mpumalanga district in South Africa. After settling in with in our fantastic home stays we started working with the people in Clare. The Innovation Institute is divided in four phases: Immersion, Identity, Inspiration, and Innovation. We used a variety of approaches such as asset-based community development and IDEO’s human-centered design. The most important part of our work was to find community partners who help us develop a social enterprise and eventually take over the business.

My team met many women in Clare who have already small businesses but who can’t find enough clients or customers since they usually work from home and just serve neighbors or friends. Together with these women we developed the idea of a consignment shop in the middle of Clare. By working together the women can pool resources, better advertise their products and learn from each other.

We called our group Ti Akeni (which means ‘Build Yourself’ in the local language Shangaan) and helped the women to identify a list of products they want to sell, developed a membership and management system, empowered the women for leadership roles and provided them with financial literacy skills. The students also wrote a long-term plan for Ti Akeni and connected the women with nearby safari lodges to sell their hand-made products to tourists. Finally, we established an advisory board and secured a physical space for the shop!

After seven weeks in Clare we had to say goodbye and celebrated with the village and a lot of singing and dancing one last time!

This post was written by Kathrin Jansen co-founder of Do Good Lab. If you have questions about her internship in South Africa you can reach her under kathrin@do-good-lab.org.

Do Good Lab is made up entirely of volunteers in the Bay area who donate their time to various DGL projects in addition to their hectic everyday lives.  In the midst of  brainstorming new projects and fundraising ideas, we find that not only are we inspired by leaders in the non-profit world, but we are also inspired by other DGL volunteers.  The following was written by one of those wonderful volunteers who helps to make it all happen.

When you first hear about a project, a way that you can help someone who desperately needs it, you’re excited.  You realize that you have the time, resources, and energy to help improve someone’s life.  And you realize that you want to do that – make the world a better place – because you have been blessed to be born into such privilege.  And you sign up!

Here’s the thing – signing up is only the first step.  There is a lot of hard work that goes into completing a project.  There is a lot of energy that goes into making the world a better place.  Once the initial excitement wears off, there has to be some sort of reason to keep going – some sort of purpose behind the long hours and seemingly constant “no” that you’re hearing from potential donors.

As part of a team, there is someone to remind you that there is a reason.  There is someone to say “Let me help for a while, and you can remember what we’re doing this for”.  There is someone to encourage you.

If that doesn’t happen, if your team gets discouraged, the frustration is ten times worse.  The discouragement is multiplied.  And the energy level decreases exponentially.

This happens.  It happened to me recently.  Our team got discouraged and we wanted to give up.  There wasn’t any point to what we were doing – we were asking the same people for money over and over, and people didn’t want to give any more.  We felt like we had set an unattainable goal, and we were ready to throw in the towel.

Without a single person remembering that what we were doing had greater implications than fun events, we were floundering.  We needed a reason.  We needed an inspired team.  We needed to remember our purpose: to DO GOOD in the world.

This is the importance of not working alone.  This is the importance of having someone next to you to help and remind you.  This is the importance of a team with purpose.

Thank you for having purpose and reminding those around you what the bigger picture is.  Thank you for helping me when I was discouraged and needed a hand.  Thank you for the leadership you’ve shown and the kindness you’ve shown it with.

You have inspired me to remember what the bigger picture is.

This post was written by Do Good Lab volunteer Elizabeth Pochop, she is working on a project with Grapesyard. Find out more here!

If you would like to participate/volunteer at Do Good Lab please send an Email to team@do-good-lab.org.

Doing good while having fun.

Having fun while doing good.

The difference in the two statements above may seem inconsequential – we just flipped a few words around.  But as we’ve discovered recently, the difference has a whole lot more significance than just semantics.

Imagine an event you’ve been invited to – it’s been advertised as an amazing evening of phenomenal music with FREE alcohol.  You already have a price in your head that you’re willing to pay.  Add in a few friends, or a bit more value, and the dollar amount in your head goes up a little bit.  But on that night, you go to the ATM, get just that much cash, and you’re done spending when that’s gone, right?

Now let’s imagine an event that you’re invited to – this event has been talked about quite differently.  You hear about a time where YOU can make a difference in the life of someone who desperately needs it – a child in Kenya or India, an earthquake victim in Haiti, or a victim of some other sort, somewhere else in the world.  The advertisement goes on to mention that the person that you would be helping exists on less in a year than you spend in any given month.  You think about how lucky you are.  You consider your good fortune.  You realize how thankful you are (rightly so) for what you have.

And you give generously in response.

This is the difference between attending an event with the purpose of doing good while having fun and attending an event where you are having fun – and happen to do good as a side product.

At Do Good Lab, we love having fun together.  We enjoy each and every one of our fundraisers.  However, we don’t want to lose sight of the fact that our primary purpose is doing good for someone in need.  So next time we talk to you about an event, we’ll be sure to talk about why.

If you would like to participate/volunteer at Do Good Lab please send an Email to team@do-good-lab.org.

This post was written by Do Good Lab volunteer Elizabeth Pochop, she is working on a project with Grapesyard. Find out more here!

Hoy en Día (Today)

Following an impactful day visiting the Transitions projects, one of our visitors wrote to me:

“In my journey I have always encountered wisdom and deep grace by my proximity to suffering BUT also by the undoing of it. In and through Transitions you will inhabit the undoing of suffering and by proximity you will discover your deepest humanity and if you pause for a moment and lean into the silence, recognize within you the power of God.”

Today, I recognized both my proximity to suffering and how Transitions—and by association, myself—work to undo it.

–

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and I couldn’t let my favourite holiday slip by without sharing turkey and pumpkin pie with my newfound Guatemalan family. Last week, my boss, Alex, and I planned a trip into Guatemala City to buy some Thanksgiving necessities, since I hadn’t been able to find cranberry sauce in our local tienda.

After lunch, Alex, Edgar (the manager of the Transitions Independent Living Center), and myself hopped into the Transitions van, ready to embark on the search for pumpkin pie fixings. Just we pulled away from the curb, a very short young man, my age probably, came around the corner, slowly walking with crutches

Before I realized what was happening, he was in the car with us, and we were on our way to the capital.

A theme of my stay here, and I think every foreigner’s time here, is that I’m never exactly sure what is going on. It wasn’t until we brought this young man, Gonzalo, to Alex’s doctor-friend, that I realized how much we were trying to help. As Gonzalo was getting x-rays, Alex explained that Transitions has served Gonzalo since he was 4 years old, when he arrived at Transitions tied into a small wooden chair strapped to his father’s back.

A rod put in Gonzalo’s leg years ago, had recently become extraordinarily painful. Gonzalo had to leave home at dawn to make it to Transitions before the workday ended, hoping the entire journey that we would have the time and resources to help.

Because my experience with people with disabilities has been mostly through sports, I’ve had the tendency to focus on the awesome parts of having a disability (i.e. wheelchair basketball is a bad-ass sport), rather than the mobility limitations our world maintains.

But today, sitting in the doctor’s office, with Alex, Edgar, hearing the doctor tell Gonzalo that his bones will only get more brittle, and he’ll one day have to use a wheelchair…I saw in Gonzalo’s face how much this all hurt. And although we left the hospital with good news (our doctor-friend will take out the rod in Gonzalo’s leg free of charge), my new friend was noticeably distracted with thoughts of his future.

Then, as planned, we went to the Guatemalan version of Costco. Gonzalo rode in our shopping cart as we tried to cheer him up. I joked about how many pies I would make him with the humongous can of pumpkin pie mix we found, and we all ate pizza together after the check-out line.

But Guatemalan Costco, while very exciting (especially for a gringa preparing for massive Thanksgiving dinner), doesn’t alleviate the physical, social, and emotional hardship of living with a disability.

There were many times today when I couldn’t keep from smiling/laughing—our jokes in the car, the doctor’s willingness to help, and deciding to buy the biggest turkey Guatemala had to offer. But there were also moments today that I was close to tears.

What was moving about my day today was that that these two feelings came hand-in-hand.

Soon after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Brittany found herself on a plane to Guatemala. Thanks to a reference from a common friend, the Transitions Association of Guatemala agreed to take Brittany on as a volunteer. Soon after her arrival Brittany became Transitions’ Director of Development.

In addition to her love of travel and Spanish, Brittany is passionate about adaptive sports, the US National Park system, and baked goods.

Brittany is currently working in London for World Emergency Relief.

The Facts

Last week, Drs. William and Karen Froming came to Do Good Lab to address our group on the state of global mental health services, and specifically the mental health climate in Rwanda. Many are aware of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which 800,000 people were killed in only 100 days. A little over 15 years later, the effects of this trauma are still alive in the minds of the survivors. In a 1995 UNICEF study of children:

• 80% had a family member killed
• 70% witnessed someone being injured or killed
• 90% believed they would die

Additionally, in a 2004 study on trauma and PTSD symptoms in Rwanda:

• 25% met the criteria for post traumatic stress disorder
• 73% had a close family member killed.

The Problem

Unfortunately, there is one global issue that makes reaching these traumatized individuals challenging: the lack of trained mental health professionals. China, for example, averages 1 psychiatrist for every 83,000 people (that’s 1/12 the ratio of the US, to put it in perspective). In Rwanda, there was no mental health “field” prior to the genocide. That means no training centers, no masters programs, no clinics, no mental health professionals.

The Solution: Collaborative, Culturally-Relevant Training

When Dr. Karen Froming first visited Rwanda in 2004, the need for training was evident. Those she spoke with were hungry for information on how to begin healing and coping with their pain. Over the next year she and her husband began implementing a plan to provide culturally-relevant, immediately-useful techniques and trainings to students in Rwanda. In 2005 the first short courses were taught and in 2007, 25 individuals and a number of genocide and AIDS-related nonprofits such as We-ActX and IBUKA came together to learn.

The courses have not been perfect. In 2007, for example, course instructors realized that the Rwandan language did not have an adequate set of words for physical sensations such as tingling or numbness (common during anxiety or panic). Additionally, there was controversy around discussing personal trauma during course time. But the doctors have learned from these challenges, and are able to design even more successful mental health training programs.

The Future: Global Training

The successes of the programs in Rwanda have inspired the doctors to continue their mental health training programs in other countries. They have decided on an education strategy that combines online distance learning with clinical work in the culture. The hope with this method is that students of varying income levels will learn then practice within their own communities, providing relevant, valuable support to those in need.

Dr. William Froming is the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Palo Alto University (formerly the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology). Dr. Karen Froming is a member of the faculty with the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and has a private practice in San Francisco.

If you would like to know more about the work Drs. William and Karen Froming are doing to advance the field of mental health around the world, please email team@do-good-lab.org and we will put you in touch.

But the incidents around Mortenson (and Yunus who recently got fired from the Grameen Bank due to alleged legal violations) made me think of the so-called halo effect. Wikipedia describes the effect as follows:

“The halo effect is a cognitive bias whereby the perception of one trait (i.e. a characteristic of a person or object) is influenced by the perception of another trait (or several traits) of that person or object. An example would be judging a good-looking person as more intelligent.”

I’m wondering if this is what happened to us and Greg Mortenson: We were so inspired by his culturally sensitive approach to development, his ability to build hundreds of schools and give thousands of girls an education that we assumed everything he is doing or saying must be right. And we throw any caution or critical fact checking over board when even President Obama donates a part of his Nobel Peace Prize money to Mortenson’s organization.

Kent Annan (co-director of Haiti Partners) gives another explanation and says that Mortenson made himself the hero of his own story and he warns us that “we do well to check our anointing of saints.” And though the halo effect brings (financial) benefits to an organization, if the leader comes under scrutiny the entire organization comes under scrutiny and maybe even the entire field. Some, such as Kevin Starr from the Mulago Foundation, fear that these events will scare donors away from international giving.

I can not judge if Mortenson is guilty, but I think as sad as the discussion is, it is a reminder that we should make the people we work with the centerpiece of our story and avoid hero worship. A good example of a leader and an organization who did exactly that is Paul Farmer and Partners in Health. Although there is a fantastic book about Farmer (Mountains beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder) it avoids hero worshipping and focuses on the work that needs to be done!

This example brings to mind TOMS, the footwear company that is the poster child for B1G1.  B1G1 is a specific case under the umbrella category of cause marketing or social marketing.  The latter term is not to be confused with social media marketing, although social media can be an effective channel to market products or brands that are involved with social marketing.  Cause marketing has made partners of fashion and AIDS charities (Gap and BONO’s Project RED), fashion and water donations (Giorgio Armani’s Acqua for Life & the UNICEF Tap Project), beverage industry and water donations (ETHOS Water by Starbucks), and cosmetics and cancer (Avon Crusade “pink ribbon” products to support cure for cancer research) to name just a few.

As a consumer, I feel pretty virtuous when I purchase a product that allows me to indirectly have a positive impact elsewhere.  It might even motivate me to shop more if my indulgence could save/help someone.  This sentiment is captured in TOMS’ mission –“Using the purchasing power of individuals to benefit the greater good is what we’re all about.”   As Martha Stewart would say, “It’s a good thing!”

But is it really? A recent study conducted by Aradhna Krishna at the University of Michigan examines the “cause marketing paradox” which relates cause marketing to reduced donations, overall.   The author differentiates between egoistic giving, where the purchaser derives the primary benefit and altruistic giving where the charitable donation accrues no tangible benefit to the donor.  The study says that the altruistic giving not only provides the donor with a higher level of happiness, but also generates a greater amount in charitable donations than the egoistic giving that occurs with cause marketing.

There seems to be higher potential for a diversity of causes being supported when individuals do the giving as opposed to a corporation that aggregates funds and diverts to a chosen cause.  So, why do we succumb to the B1G1 virus?  We are, in effect, simply sub-contracting the corporation to conduct the philanthropy instead of contributing directly to a cause.  Ultimately, the spread of B1G1 could be ascribed to convenience for the customer and a successful business model for the company.  In macroeconomic terms, cause marketing could just be termed as bundling with a “feel-good” name that works for the shopper and the company!

This post was originally published on Triple Pundit and has been re-posted here with the agreement of the author, Gomathi Sadhasivan (Do Good Lab supporter and MBA student at Presidio Graduate School).

The field of international development is filled with both success and failure. For example, 100% of alumnae from our partner Akili Dada have earned full scholarships to universities around the world. The multiplier effect this will have on society is huge, and the hard work and dedication of both the scholars and Akili Dada should be deemed a success.

However, failures exist as well. The online giving platform GlobalGiving, which connects donors with development projects, recently shared one of theirs. In 2009, GlobalGiving donors gave over $8,000 to a Kenyan nonprofit working with disadvantaged youth. GlobalGiving leadership found out soon after, through community outreach in Kenya, that the nonprofit was corrupt and mismanaged.

Now GlobalGiving could do one of two things. First, they could quietly remove the nonprofit from their site and issue a statement to its donors. Or, they could embrace the situation and devise a creative solution. Which do you think they chose? They connected the nonprofit with two US graduate students, who worked with the nonprofit’s leadership to resolve tensions and ultimately create a new organization to take its place.

I was able to find this story because of a new website, Admitting Failure. It serves as a platform for disclosing struggles in the realm of international development. As Do Good Lab continues adding grantees to our roster, we will learn more, we will take risks, and we may fail. When this happens, I hope we too will embrace the opportunity.

Tonya Newstetter is a project leader with Do Good Lab. The inspiration for this post came from an article in OnlyUp, a collaborative bimonthly journal about young adults in the nonprofit sector.

He shared some of projects that he and his Peace Corps colleagues initiated, and provided insights into the pitfalls and successes that accompanied their implementation. Below you can find a brief description and pictures of two of those projects.

His presentation demonstrated the best solutions come from the bottom-up and there is more to development than throwing aid money at the poor. More importantly, he stressed that development succeeds when individuals realize they are agents in their self-determination.

Projects

Moringa Plantation: Through fundraising contributions from family and friends, a Moringa tree nursery and plantation with a women’s association in the village of Nassiegou was constructed to help alleviate the malnutrition that is prevalent in the northern Savannah region. Moringa is a “miracle” tree in that it is indigenous to West Africa, does not require much water, and whose leaves are extremely high in nutritional value.

Business Skills Workshop and Summer Vacation Enterprise Project for Female Students: With a grant from Friends of Togo, a 4-week business skills workshop and 10-week summer program for female students at the high school in the village of Nano was initiated, with the objective of helping them pay their school fees. Scholarships were offered to 15 girls who presented the most compelling and innovative business proposals. With profits from their enterprises, all girls were able to pay for their school fees.