Commonalities

• Finding the right global/local balance, customizing what needs to be ‘core’ and what can vary locally is a challenge faced by all entities that operate internationally no matter what sector they may be in.
• All sectors are grappling with the challenges of how to deal with and analyze increasingly large amounts of data.
• Although the regulations they pass can either help or hinder different goals, government tends to be an important focal point of the other sectors.
• The growth of ‘the middle class’ around the world (with more education as well as spending capacity) is increasing expectations from both the perspective of consumers and civil society participation.
• There is a wider range of countries – both in the governmental and business sectors – looking to provide aid, investment and/or develop partnerships.

Some Variations

• Business seems to have more of an orientation towards ‘transformation’, often now referred to under the catch-all phrase of ‘innovation’ and receiving attention in all sectors.
• The business sector is particularly good at ‘taking risk’.  Risk is often seen as multi-faceted and business people will look to diversify it and learn from failure, rather than being afraid of risk.
• Entrepreneurs who cannot initially find capital will ‘bootstrap’ their initial operations rather than waiting to get more significant backers.
• Business is the more proprietary sector, often being concerned about sharing many types of learnings that they feel they can either charge for and/or want to keep from potential competitors.

We often hear talk about “what NGOs can learn from business.”  As a demonstration that when we have more opportunities to converse cross-sectorally that learning goes in all directions, one representative of a large international bank noted to me that he thought we should also acknowledge what business can learn from NGOs. In our conversation about engaging internationally his example was the time that NGOs put into nurturing local relationships.

In my various roles with Goodwill Industries International over the past 10 years, I’ve supported and led Goodwill’s international growth and have also played a leadership role in other international associations, such as Workability Americas/Workability International. Those of us working in the international development field all face different challenges based on our mission statements, structure and governance, etc. but I have learned that we all must address issues related to funding, sustainability and how to create and measure impact.

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately on the theme of capacity-building, local ownership and effective practices related to this topic. Capacity-building has been a buzz word for some time now, with a host of different connotations. I am referring to working with local organizations to enhance their own ability to meet the needs of their communities – in this case I’m especially interested in those relationships that cross borders.

The question I find we are facing time and time again in our capacity-building work is in determining that fine line of how many resources to offer in order to successfully meet both our own objectives as well as our local partner’s without compromising the local partner’s ability to truly own the project. We have a system for vetting local partners to identify competencies important to us, such as solid financials, transparency, and entrepreneurialism. What we have found is that even the organizations we identify to be most capable and healthy do not have the ability to find the capital/matching resources needed to launch our project.

One of our principles has been the use of local capital in our international projects – whether it comes from our local implementing partner or through local donors. What effective practices have been discovered related to financial “skin in the game” for local implementing partners? In other words, does the local partner need to incur some risk – financial or otherwise – for the project to succeed? What other factors are critical to ownership and sustainability of the project at the local level?

In a preparatory survey for this session, here are some of the attributes participants identified in facilitators they’ve admired:

• Relationships/confidence which allows you to ‘interrupt’ and transition the group
• Keeping to schedule
• Calm, authoritative, respectful presence
• Flexibility
• Energetic/dynamic/engaging
• Humorous/easy going
• Humble/approachable
• Quick-thinking

This list underscored to me the importance of developing one’s own style and being genuine.  For example, not all of us are at ease telling jokes/being humorous, and humor doesn’t always translate well from culture to culture so it may not be appropriate for all facilitators in all settings. I also added in ‘observation’ skills.  Being sensitive to the nonverbal (as well as verbal) messages that the group is sending you can help you tailor your approaches to the group’s needs.

Facilitating meetings with participants from different geographic locations and cultures adds another level of complexity….Here are a few of the approaches I have found useful:

• Language – You can increase the potential for all to follow the discussion by encouraging speakers to minimize the use of acronyms or expressions and speak slowly and clearly. (You may also want to allow “whisper translations” by one bilingual participant more comfortable with the meeting’s main language to another participant sitting next to them). Repeating and/or paraphrasing on a regular basis throughout the session can help those who may not be as comfortable in the main meeting language.

• Participation – Do not assume that silence is agreement.  You may want to try some different approaches to encouraging participation.  For example going around the group and asking everyone for comments may encourage those not as comfortable in the language or with a participatory format of the meeting to participate.

•  Graphics – Using images (even basic ones) to help transmit ideas can help to facilitate the conversation among those of varying language abilities.

•  Attitude – Never underestimate the importance of attitude.  Recognizing that there are different cultural approaches to viewing situations or solving a problem, and being open to new perspectives, will go a long way to creating a comfortable space for meeting attendees to participate. Convey respect for those with different approaches, and be willing to go in different directions than you may have originally envisioned.

What tips would you share from your experiences?

Some Resources

1. Knowledge Sharing Toolkits / Meetings
2. Creative Facilitation
3. International Association of Facilitators publications store
4. Shared Learning Guide
5. World café
6. This Meeting Sux: 12 Acts of Courage to Change Meetings for Good
7. Facilitating between on and offline

1.      An acceleration of the integration of issues (now including for example the role of climate change in health; and a focus on health clinics/systems more than any one disease)

The awareness that challenges are linked and solutions must be integrated as well that started in the 2000’s is accelerating. As a report from this year’s World Economic Forum acknowledges: “Health is created beyond the confines of hospital walls and doctors’ offices. It is being created in the places we work, the products we buy and (increasingly) the cities we live in.”

And further evidence of this trend: “They Need Other Medicine, too”

2.      Training the trainers

Paralleling other types of changes in global aid where we are seeing movement towards empowering local communities, there has also been an increasing trend of medical professionals training other medical professionals, rather than just providing one time clinics or other type of aid.

U.S. National Public Radio story “U.S. Doctors Head Overseas to Train, Not Just to Treat”

And one of my projects Helping Babies Breathe works on a training the trainers model.

3.      Growth of mobile health

From smaller workshops and conferences to those with increasingly large attendance such as the mhealth summit started earlier this decade.

4.      Increasing awareness of what needs to be done and how to do it, but less funding to do it

This is correlated over the past few years with a global economic crisis and may be cyclical.  This cyclical nature of funding seems to be leading towards some ideas for more sustainable funding mechanisms such as a Global Social Protection Fund

5.     Increasing focus on decentralization of health policy discussions

The re-creation of the Global Health Council  as the Global Health Coalition and  as a ‘network’ structure may be an acknowledgement (such as we see with the ‘train the trainers’ trend) that global health policy is being developed and implemented in a much wider array of locations around the globe.

What trends are you seeing?

My name is Kate Otto, and I manage a website called “Everyday Ambassador”, where we discuss the dynamics of crossing boundaries of geography, culture, and socio-economic status in our efforts to make the world a better place.

When I recently met Bonnie, and we bonded over how many goals we have in common, I realized a boundary I so rarely cross on my site:

 What about the boundary of age?

So often, my generation sets out into the world believing our solutions are more innovative, tech-savvy, and creative than our predecessors past.  In our race to transform formerly intractable issues into new opportunities for impact, we so often overlook reaching out to our elders for advice, guidance, or support.

Perhaps equally as often, I assume but have also observed, older generations of change-makers lament that young people’s multitasking nature means we are somehow missing important points. That we are moving too fast, or not acknowledging the context in which we’re operating, and thus that our solutions may be as temporary as our attention spans.

When I met Bonnie, and was introduced to this incredible website, we discussed in depth this persistent age ‘boundary’, which can exist as tangibly as an international country border.  As an exercise in being ‘everyday ambassadors’ and bridging the ‘gap’, Bonnie and I decided to guest post on each other’s sites, women from two separate generations demonstrating their appreciation for the others’.

To celebrate all my generation has to learn from our ‘baby boomer’ mentors, I have selected a few heroes to highlight; people whose decades of contributions and efforts have paved the path we now walk on, the giants on whose shoulders today’s social change agents try to stand.

People like Bill Drayton, the father of the global social entrepreneurship movement Ashoka, whose work has laid the foundation for any youth in involved in social enterprise today.  Though many young people feel part of the ‘new’ movement of social entrepreneurship, Drayton founded Ashoka in 1981, and built the organization to operate in over 70 countries worldwide.  His motto is now established thinking among millennial change makers: “Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.”

Another higher-generation hero of many Everyday Ambassadors is Dr. Paul Farmer, who began his organization Partners in Health in 1987 while a student in medical school.  The decades that Dr. Farmer has invested into creating a model of ‘preferential option’ in healthcare for the world’s poorest people should be a powerful reminder to young change makers: we live in a world where value is placed on scaling quickly, yet without a long time horizon in our plans, we can end up only superficially affecting change, instead of transforming entire sectors.  And in a world where we are expected to be innovative and cutting-edge at all times, it is important to keep Dr. Farmer’s reminder in mind, “For me, an area of moral clarity is: you’re in front of someone who’s suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.”

Lastly, the late Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winning environmental and political activist, is another voice of inspiration that reminds us where our service instincts are rooted.  In the early 1980’s she founded the Green Belt Movement, which not only worked to end desertification, deforestation, water crises, and rural hunger, but in doing so tackled women’s’ rights and democracy-building in the process.  Her tactics and perspective are especially helpful for a generation with endless outlets to talk about social change without ever actually engaging.  “Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive,” she once said, “you haven’t done a thing. You are just talking.”

Taking industry reforming approaches, acting with the tools we have instead of trying to build snazzier ones, and walking our talk – these are just a few incredibly important lessons that emanate from the experience of our predecessors.

Crossing the age border can be an incredible experience.  Who are your heroes in public service from another generation?  To myself and to my peers, who live in a world where it is so easy to become self-absorbed instead of self-reflective, may honoring the legacies of our heroes help us to see ourselves as one part of a much bigger picture, and not the picture itself.

It seems to me that there are a variety of useful roles to be played including:

1. For citizens in countries where there are donor governments [like the U.S.], advocating for government to support development programs that are effective in bringing about significant outcomes by working with local partners (‘aid’).
2. For citizens of recipient countries, to advocate to their governments to use aid more effectively and to play effective roles themselves with whatever they can do locally, working in a variety of partnerships.
3. Working with partners to develop and implement programs that are locally sustainable.

It’s not always the roles we play that are the problem, it’s how we play them.  Decision-makers can help develop organizational cultures that encourage those in their organizations to keep asking the tough questions:

1. Why are we doing what we’re doing?
2. Are we (currently) the best ones to do it? If so, can we do what we’re doing differently/better? If not, should we continue to do it?
3. Who else should we be talking with? Working with? (Who else holds the pieces of the puzzle most connected to our work)?
4.  How can we open up conversations with a range of potential partners (including the public)?
5. How can the work we do become locally sustainable?  Can we envision putting ourselves ‘out of business’?

So kudos to organizations like Oxfam America that are opening up the discussion and encouraging others to engage with them.  We may not always like the answers, but the more we ask the hard questions and really listen to responses from within our own organizations and from others, the closer we’ll get to better understanding the whole puzzle.

We seem to be in a period where there is a lot of talk (and indeed a fair amount of action) around ‘the need for change’ and ‘doing things differently’.  Google the phrase ‘changemakers’ and pages appear.  Some people love the term innovation, others say it is becoming overused and perhaps less relevant.

I am particularly interested in initiatives around changing systems – collaborative efforts to think differently together and then put that thinking into practice – transformative not just incremental change.  What are some of the characteristics of these initiatives?

1. Broad based:  Although what they are learning may be applied to specific issue areas, the learning is broad, looking for trends that apply across issues and experimenting with processes that can provide insights to many different kinds of efforts.
2. Cross-sector:  We have become compartmentalized in many ways including by issue areas and technical skills (‘expertise’) and by who we may work for (a business, nonprofit/NGO, government).  To address the challenges we face we need to break out of these silos and pay less attention to labels.
3. Bridge building or outreach: There appear to be many islands of efforts.  These can be effective within a particularly community, but building bridges will allow information and lessons learned to be more widely shared in order to gain a greater impact.  To change systems and address major challenges we need to consciously plan to connect with other initiatives, and ideally create online, interactive portals that allow information and discussions to be accessed widely, when it is needed.
4. Multinational: Work with colleagues across the globe to broaden perspectives and approaches.
5. Listen and follow as well as lead: Recognize that all effective leaders know when to listen, learn and follow, as well as lead, and consciously model this behavior.

Here are some of the initiatives I have been following/been engaged with that are consciously building bridges:

• Clinton Global Initiative –  Originally started by former U.S. President Bill Clinton as an annual conference of global leaders “to create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges” it has since expanded to include many others through additional initiatives such as CGIAsia, CGIAmerica and CGIUniversity.  It provides a good model of being a catalyst for bringing varied perspectives together towards common, tangible goals.

• SoCap  – SoCap is an annual event series that brings together investors, foundations, institutions, social entrepreneurs and others ‘to build a market at the intersection of money and meaning’.

• KM4Development - Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) is a community of international development practitioners who are interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing issues and approaches.  What I particularly admire about KM4Development is the open community of discussions, resource wikis and other ways to interact online.

• Creating the Future –  Creating the Future is exploring the questions of What really creates positive social change? and How can social change efforts infuse those effective frameworks into all their work?

• Ci2iGlobal -  a relatively new effort I am involved with to explore ways to navigate through global transformation, with a special focus on the movement of knowledge and skills among those who consider themselves ‘changeagents’.

What efforts have you been following/been engaged with?  Where can we build additional bridges?

Books:

Mine: Wangari Matthai’s book Unbowed (and here’s a podcast I did on ‘her story ’). I was inspired by Wangari’s courage but also how she stayed humble. She knew that the honors were about the work, not just about her, and she didn’t hesitate to continue to work directly with Green Belt Movement members in the field, often literally digging in the dirt.

In the Name of Salome by Julia Lavarez – a professor finds her way among cultures (Cuban, the Dominican Republic and the U.S.) and family generations.

Daring Greatly, Bene Brown from Erika Hines Erika writes that this is a “great book about relationships; whether those relationship are professional or personal in nature, Brene Brown is talking about the ‘dirty little secret’ that is a key ingredient to those relationships: vulnerability. It’s a powerful act to not only seek vulnerability but be vulnerable as well. Brene help takes the sheer terror out of being “truly” seen.”

From Roxanne Krystalli - Susan Sontag’s diaries, edited by David Rieff into a volume called “Reborn” were telling and fascinating. Aciman’s “Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere” was a great collection of thoughts on home and wandering. I also loved Marianne Elliott’s Zen Under Fire, a book about her experiences with the UN in Afghanistan.

From Weh Yeoh: A classic - Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.  Weh calls it “an incredibly powerful story, well told. It makes you think about topics a lot deeper than you would. It makes you want to question the nature of things that we take for granted.”

From Zoely Mamizaka  Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Poems:

Here are some poems that were curated by Amanda Fenton who asked on Twitter” what are your favorite poems?”

Websites:

Loida Garcia-Febo recommends Impatient Optimists  “The models & concepts featured motivate me to continue serving multicultural populations and those in need in different countries.”

Caroline Mailloux suggested honoring honoring Saundra Schimmelpfennig’s blog Good Intentions which for years focused on providing donors with the knowledge and tools they need to make informed funding decisions and closed this year

Thanks to everyone who sent a recommendation! (Here’s the 2011 version for more ideas).  Please do share what reading inspired you this year in the comments below:

I’ve been reading a lot of things and heard a number of conversations recently that seem to imply that “If you just use this new innovation or tool, or have this kind of leader, or follow our recipe for success…”  But it’s not any one (or even two) new things.  It’s asking questions and brainstorming with the group, and having a vision, and learning from others,  and finding new partners, and innovating, and trying out these new ideas, and having a plan, and evaluating, and admitting failure, and adapting your ideas, and lots of communication, and most of all its on-going commitment and hard-work.  It’s taking the time and finding the customized mixture that works for your organization.  And when your recipe jells, when your organization finds what works for it, it can seem like magic and you might just change your piece of the world.

P.S. Don’t forget to click on the links for the resource inside.  Thanks to Katherine Lucey (aka @solar_sister) for noting the fun ‘surprise’ element!

• New international configurations and players (BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India, China) and beyond – Indonesia, South Africa, Vietnam, Mexico, Turkey and Argentina).
• Increased focus on accountability and outcomes
• Virtual connectedness
• Changing demographics – the baby boomers who took NGOs and their support organizations to a new level are now feeling the influence of a younger generation less focused on labels and structure.
• The social entrepreneur movement is now over 3 decades old and is influencing discussions about structure and outcomes.

These conversations need to take place on two levels and ideally with linkage between the two – at the level of academics, researchers and think tanks – identifying trends; and at the level of practitioners – what do these trends mean to our work and operations?

Initial conversations have focused on adjusting our existing structures – looking at accountability and effectiveness, but not changing them in any significant way.   But is this really sufficient?

Are we beginning to ask the really big questions at all levels of the sector? What structures will we need going forward to achieve the outcomes we are looking for (not just slightly adjusting the structures we have)?  What is the role of youth movements, social entrepreneurs and others who have traditionally been outside of agenda setting for established civil society organizations in driving this discussion?  Are  existing organizations ready to incorporate these influences? What should civil society leaders be discussing to ready their organizations for these changes?

Additional Reading:

Past posts: Impact without Boundaries   &  Turning Challenges to Opportunities

A Civil Society Transformation Challenge

Global changes and civil society

A Wave of Change

Private and nonprofits – moving forward together