1) Good Intentions Are Not Enough draws a crisp parallel between business and non-profits, rejecting the donor mantra that paying for overhead is bad. The keys:
Imagine walking into Wendy’s or Burger King (or whatever fast food restaurant you frequent) and insisting that you will only pay for whatever is actually on your hamburger . . . you refuse to pay for staff wages, building rental, electricity, the iconic golden arches . . . In aid it’s the aid recipients that have to deal with the lousy service, bad location, or restrictive business hours because donors only want to pay for what’s on the burger.“
Solution? fund orgs you trust and then, you know . . . trust them.
2) MIT Open Courseware. I just think it’s lovely to have a chance to learn or review without the cost of a course. Requires self-motivation and fast internet, but still . . . My particular poison this week is the Poverty Action Lab’s course on evaluating social programs. But there may be something else for you. Mmm. Knowledge.
3) Jina Moore for change.org with a lovely, brief summary of what it means to be a lesser-known country, in the case of Guinea Bissau.
4) Conflict Health on why the deaths of aid workers mean so much in strategic terms.
Attacks on health workers are not random. The provision of health services, whether by governments or NGOs is a physical manifestation of legitimate governance.
Filed under: Development, Global Health Corps, Leadership, Public Health, Words of Wisdom
God bless the GHC staff for providing a tiny notebook at the start of training; mine was my constant companion for most of the two weeks . . . paging through it, here were the thoughts that moved me enough to take note – if not to always write down who said them. Quotes have a high rate of human error – I haven’t learned shorthand yet – but the gist is hopefully captured.
Deogratias, founder of Village Health Works: Where people are dehumanized by misery, they are dehumanized and can act like animals . . . you need to address the root causes of misery, not the consequences.
Deo also quoted FDR: . . . the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abudance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Ed Cardoza urged us have a “hermeneutic of generosity” for one another, that is to trust that “every human is trying to be a good person doing a good thing.”
“Be aware of how people survive.” Unattributed – I’m not even sure what session it’s from – but lovely to me.
Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey & Co told us to be “tri-sector athletes” – to be fluent in private, public, and non-profit sectors to work well in any one of them.
Rebecca Onje, Founder of Project Health: Nothing drives me crazier than people elbowing each other out of the way to serve poor families . . . like we’re running out? Like there’s a short supply?
Condoleezza Rice: It is an enriching experience to consider why you have so much, rather than why someone else has so little.
James March, Professor Emeritus at Stanford GSB, on the message of War and Peace: Heroes only imagine that they accomplish things. History is created by millions of little people doing their jobs (well).
In wandering through development blogs, I ended up at this one, and scrolling through found a missive from the blogger’s last day in Goma, DRC. I felt like it captured perfectly the wierdly rooted rootlessness of those who make new homes periodically thousands of miles from their old ones . . .
I rode the three hours to the Kigali airport with B and V, and V bought me a croissant and a water.
But then they left. And I was alone.
Sitting all alone in the coffee shop at the Kigali airport, crying quietly to myself, I pulled out my computer and opened up Skype. An old friend’s name popped up, a wonderful woman I haven’t talked to in months. I double-clicked on her name. And I began typing to her. I asked for stories about her life in Spain to take my mind off of my loneliness. And she told me about love, love, love. We talked about friend love, lover love, and family love. We talked about how damn DIFFICULT love is. And how impossible it is. But how difficult and impossible it is for everyone in the world – every single person. And so I stopped crying. Because I wasn’t sitting all alone in a coffee shop anymore. I looked around. I was sitting next to an old man who kept having to get up out of his chair to chase down his little granddaughter, who kept running hither and thither. I was sitting next to the waitresses, one of whom rolled her eyes and whispered something to the other, just at that moment, and laughed. I was sitting next to a young biracial couple, two tables down, and next to another woman jiggling a screaming baby on her knee. I was sitting in Rwanda beside my friend in Spain.
I do not make life easy for myself. My heart gets broken all the time. Sometimes somethings that would not hurt someone else very much will hurt me a great deal. But I think that this is okay. It is okay to be sad sometimes. I get sad because I love, I love, I love.
Me, too
Filed under: Words of Wisdom
“I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We are a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd.”
Anne Lamott (in Bird by Bird)
For non-baseball lovers I would venture to say you can substitute anything that you love that you have ever found a group of people who love it as you do. I am not a vast lover of sports myself but feel something of what she means whenever I go to a well-attended sporting event, but also, thank God, at a well-attended concert or rally, or even at a smaller group that suddenly discovers a real shared love of task or idea. Yay! People!
Filed under: Words of Wisdom
“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”
-C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
I’m cleaning out old boxes to make room for new boxes, and found my application to the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership program in 1998.
Q: In your school and community, what is the most rewarding and challenging aspect of being a leader for you (75-100 words)?
A: The most challenging aspect of being a leader is that between all the activities of leading, you have to keep in the front of your mind who you are and where you want to go. If you go out walking, chances are people will follow you, but you have to remember that the primary goal of walking is getting somewhere, and that if you don’t know the way, then the people behind you are lost as well. I think the most rewarding feeling would be to take a look around you and know you’ve arrived where you want to be, and then take another look and know you’ve helped other people get there too. That’s what leading is.
Filed under: Words of Wisdom
“The great novelist E.L. Doctorow once said that writing a novel is like driving at night with the headlights on: You can only see a little ways in front of you, but you can make the whole journey this way. It is the truest of all things; the only way to write a book, raise a child, save the world.”
- Anne Lamott
The salvation of this human world, lies nowhere else but in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.
