Good Intentions Are Not Enough

The End of Good Intentions

Saundra — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:09:44 +0000

2012 was an extremely emotional and difficult year for me. During this past year I’ve lived in four different states, my mother died, and I got married for the first time (and hopefully last time).

I’ve found that as my life has changed, my need to be involved in donor education has also changed. I no longer have the drive that I once had and I’ve begun to feel that I have probably said all I have to say on the matter.

I will leave this blog/website up for another year as a resource for all the people that use it. If after that year I still find that my priorities and interests lie elsewhere, then I’ll shut the site down for good at that time.

I want to sincerely thank all of my readers, all the development professionals, and all the reporters who have been a part of my professional life these past four years. You have been great to work with and I thank you for your support, help, and interest.

Saundra

Speaking at the Poverty Action Conference Oct. 6th.

Saundra — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 22:16:00 +0000

Just wanted to let my readers know that I’ll be speaking at the Poverty Action Conference at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia this October 5th – 6th.

Registration is still open for students interested in attending.

Cambodia’s Orphan Business

Saundra — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 20:31:48 +0000

This was sent to me from Al Jazeera, as it’s a topic I write about frequently.

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Reporter Juliana Ruhfus and director Matt Haan travel to Phnom Penh to investigate Cambodia’s orphan business, and end up as undercover volunteers in a failing orphanage. The resulting grounding breaking documentary reveals how ‘voluntourism’ - the fastest-growing sector of one of the fastest-growing care industries in the world - is fuelling a high-profit volunteering business that sees volunteers’ dreams exploited and Cambodian children separated from their families.

—watch the video here

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Read 20 other posts on orphanages on this blog.

When will we stop praising people for giving “stuff”?

Saundra — Thu, 24 May 2012 11:41:59 +0000

An article in the Huffington Post’s Impact section caught my eye as the HuffPo once again heralded what is essentially questionable donor behavior.

In this particular article a man went down to a Kmart which was closing it’s doors and purchased every single item in the store and donated the $200,000 worth of goods to a single charity. What on the outside seems like a very charitable act brings up a lot of concerns for the problems the nonprofit is likely facing as a result of this unsolicited donation.

First - were all of these items wanted or even useful for the charity? How much of the stuff is going to have to be given away to another charity or thrown away by the nonprofit that received it? Donors make a huge mistake in assuming that anything they donate is useful, it’s not. Imagine all the thong underwear, bottles of cosmetics, and other random stuff they likely received. Donated goods can be more of a burden than a boon to the organization receiving it.
Second – does the charity actually have the storage space to house all of these items or is it going to cost them money to store all the stuff? Nonprofits may have to rent extra space or rearrange their entire office to store unexpectedly large donations.
Third – did the person donate any funds to the charity to help cover their costs of transporting, tracking, storing and distributing all of these additional goods?

I’m guessing the donor did not even consider any of these questions. People that focus on giving “stuff” feel that their “stuff” is always wanted and needed and do not realize what goes into storing, tracking, distributing, or discarding all that “stuff”.

The nonprofit that received the donation is not going to complain publicly about this donation because if they did they would appear ungrateful and could lose a lot of other donations. But I’ll bet you there’s a lot of grumbing going on behind closed doors right now because of the extra burden caused by the unwanted parts of this donation.

So what could this well-intentioned donor have done to improve the quality of his donation.

He could have donated all the money he spent on purchasing this stuff to the charity instead. It’s estimated to be $200,000 worth of goods but it’s unclear is this was the actual amount of money spent. But whatever the amount, this would have been an enormous help to the charity which they could have used to meet their clients greatest needs instead of just what the donor thinks are the greatest needs.
He could have checked with the nonprofit first to find out which items were actually needed and which items were useless to them, this way he would ensure that he only purchased useful items.
He could have matched his purchase with an equal amount of money to cover the nonprofit’s costs in storing, tracking, and distributing the donated goods.

While charitable intentions are good, it’s important that the desire to help is matched with the knowledge of what actually provides the greatest help. Continuing to praise all donations of stuff perpetuates questionable donor practices.

Update: A reader has pointed out that in the video linked to in the article (I read the article but did not watch the video assuming it contained the same information) the donor did pay to rent a building to house the donated goods. I’m glad to hear that he did take that issue into consideration but still question buying out a store’s entire inventory and donating the goods.

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Guides by Good Intentions are Not Enough

Lies, White Lies, and Accounting Practices; Why nonprofit overheads don’t mean what you think they mean.

Good Intentions’ Guide to Holiday Charitable Giving

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My Interview with AidWorks

Saundra — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:46:29 +0000

My interview with AidWorks, (AidWorks is a radio show devoted exclusively to aid and development issues. We want to look at the world of international development from every angle, recognising the good that is being done but also casting a critical eye over the aid ‘industry’.)

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Is it ever possible that so-called “aid” is doing more harm than good? Sending excess goods from rich countries to poor countries is a good thing isn’t it? Donating money to orphanages is surely a good thing to do? Volunteering to build a school in a developing country is a great way to spend your gap year? Actually, no, it isn’t. Saundra Schimmelpfennig is a consultant to the not for profit sector and runs the website “Good intentions are not enough” .

Through her work and on her blog, Saundra looks at some of the problems that beset the development sector, particularly in cases where decisions about how to spend aid money are driven by the desires of donors rather than the people who need the money. Cate Coorey spoke with Saundra about why good intentions are not enough.

Click here to listen to the interview.

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Guides by Good Intentions are Not Enough

Lies, White Lies, and Accounting Practices; Why nonprofit overheads don’t mean what you think they mean.

Good Intentions’ Guide to Holiday Charitable Giving

Take a Step Up: Impart Health Education in Calamity-Stricken Communities

Saundra — Sun, 13 May 2012 15:13:48 +0000

This is a guest post written by Krisca Te. Krisca works with Open Colleges, Australia’s leading provider of TAFE courses equivalent and distance education. When not working, you can find her actively participating in local dog show events – in support of her husband.

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When a crisis hits in some far corner of the world, whether a drought in the North of Kenya or flooding in Sri Lanka, and the images of malnourished or orphaned children reach our television screens, we are naturally anxious to help out in some way.

But unfortunately, as the saying goes “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and while we may feel that organizing for a shipment of clothes or flying out to distribute free food is the solution, the reality is somewhat different. Our well-meaning gestures often do more harm than good, and unless we take the time to think about the consequences of our actions and carefully weigh our options, we may actually be contributing to the problem.

It can be frustrating, however, to hear that our actions are not having the intended effects, and many people feel that while certain methods tend to be continuously booed by the peanut gallery; useful alternatives are not often provided. So today, rather than talking about what not to do, I thought this post could focus on something that is helpful in times of calamity.

The importance of health education

After a natural disaster or during calamities such as drought, famine or flooding, one of the biggest dangers people face is the breakout of a serious epidemic such as cholera or hepatitis. Even a less serious illness like diarrhea or hook worm could lead to death, especially in young children, if left untreated.

Epidemics during calamities are often wrongly thought to be due to things such as dead bodies, although more likely causes are problems that occur when a population is displaced, such as a lack of clean drinking water and proper sanitation, overcrowded living spaces and insufficient health services.

Because developing countries lack proper infrastructure, resources and basic disaster-preparedness plans, they are affected far worse when calamities strike. This makes it terribly important for those in affected areas to have access to basic health education and knowledge, something which is often sorely lacking in many rural settings.

Over one billion of the world’s poorest people lack even the most basic education that is necessary to understand what causes communicable diseases and the precautions that can be taken in order to prevent them. Education is the tool they desperately need in order to deal with calamities and continue to improve their lives long after disaster relief teams have gone home.

How can you help?

Projects like shipping shoes, clothes, canned goods or even medical supplies to affected areas, not only have short reaching effects, they may undermine local trade or even be useless to those they are meant to help.

Rather than putting your energy and resources into these short term projects, find organizations that work to provide those in rural settings with health education. There are a number of organizations that work along these lines that you could choose to support, like UNESECO, WHO and Doctors Without Borders to name a few.

If you feel the need to fly yourself over and offer your services as a volunteer, there are a few questions you should ask yourself. Most importantly, will you be a burden or a help? Do you have any experience in the health services industry or have any knowledge about or experience working with the people in the country you want to travel to?

If your answer to all of the above is “no” then your presence in a calamity-stricken community may be more of a burden than a help, as it could put a strain on already scarce food supplies or take up extra space in an overcrowded area, without giving much in return. Perhaps instead, you could help put together or support a team of experienced health care workers and educators from your area who will be able to contribute in a positive way.

Wanting to help those less fortunate is a noble ambition, but in order to make your efforts worthwhile you need to consider both the short and long term effects that your actions will have.

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Guides by Good Intentions are Not Enough

Lies, White Lies, and Accounting Practices; Why nonprofit overheads don’t mean what you think they mean.

Good Intentions’ Guide to Holiday Charitable Giving

Getting Married

Saundra — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:51:01 +0000

I leave tomorrow for my wedding and honeymoon. Needless to say, I will not be online or taking phone calls until after May 10th.

From our pre-wedding reception in Utah

As many of you know, I’ve been in Utah for the past two months taking care of my mother who was diagnosed with stage IV cancer just two weeks after we got engaged. We decided to go ahead with the wedding as waiting is not going to make anything better. However, we are going to elope as it would be too difficult at this time to have a large family wedding.

My aunt and cousins were kind enough to throw us a pre-wedding reception in Utah last month. We will have another pre-wedding reception in Oregon for his family.

We are eloping to the Oregon coast where my soon-to-be husband’s family had a cabin during his childhood.

HOW NOT TO GIVE – By Stanford Storytelling Project

Saundra — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:36:42 +0000

A 14 minute podcast by the Stanford Storytelling Project which discusses the 1 million shirts project, the blogosphere furor it created, and what finally happened. Click here to read the 60 posts written on the 1 million shirt debate.

Click here to Listen to the podcast

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Guides by Good Intentions are Not Enough

Lies, White Lies, and Accounting Practices; Why nonprofit overheads don’t mean what you think they mean.

Good Intentions’ Guide to Holiday Charitable Giving

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Why do Aid Bloggers get Snarky?

1 million Jasons

Donor Education

World Vision, the new 100,000 shirts

Enough with the donated shoes

Donating shoes and other aid fads

6 questions you should ask before donating goods overseas

Founder stories don’t really matter

Saundra — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:25:55 +0000

As an entry for the Day Without Dignity 2012, I was sent a typical White in Shining Armor founder story. Someone that had left their good job to volunteer in Africa and ended up starting their own nonprofit at great expense to themselves. We’ve all heard stories similar to this before.

But here’s the thing, the personal journey of the founder doesn’t ~~matter~~ guarantee good aid.

A compelling founder story, such as Greg Mortenson’s, doesn’t mean that the nonprofit is successful or even moderately helpful. A boring founder story doesn’t mean that the nonprofit is floundering or failing. There is no correlation between the compellingness of a founder story and the competency of their nonprofit. And yet we keep focusing on them.

Katherine Lucey, founder of Solar Sister, wrote about the pressure for a good founder story during the “Three Cups of Tea” debate. I’ve asked permission to repost it below.

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Eureka and Other Myths

A Reflection on “Three Cups of Tea”

Inevitably I am asked, “When did you have the moment of inspiration for Solar Sister?” Every interview, every grant application, every conversation leads to the same breathless anticipation that I will reveal the secret moment of inspiration. There is such a palpable desire for an origination story, an epic tale of good versus evil, a lost soul finding redemption or a single moment of inspiration. The Eureka!

Sir Herald Evans wrote about “The Eureka Myth” for the Harvard Business Review back in 2005, “Innovation, cast as the triumph of human imagination, may be the most romantic discipline in business. And the eureka moment, that epiphany of total clarity in which a breakthrough invention or discovery occurs, is the most romantic aspect of innovation. In fact, the eureka moment still looms so large in the folklore of business that it overshadows the historically far more important matter of how an invention reaches the marketplace as a practical innovation. As companies turn their sights anew to top-line growth, it is time to see the eureka moment—indeed the whole gestalt of “breakthrough thinking”—for what it is: largely a myth.”

Real solutions to real problems don’t happen that way. They don’t just pop out like the Greek goddess Athena leaping from Zeus’s head, fully grown and armed. If there is a “Eureka!” moment, it is the result of long hours of deliberate consideration, of study and preparation and open-ended learning, of trying and failing and trying again. True innovation is more likely to result from Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hours” than from a single moment of inspiration.

I once told an interviewer that there was no ‘moment’. I told her that Solar Sister evolved over time in response to market conditions. I told her that my involvement in Africa is the result of a long and not very straight path. She said point blank, “Well, that’s no good. We’ll have to think of something else.” I fully appreciate a good tale, and believe that the best way to connect to people is through story. But I worry when the desire for story as entertainment, when the need for a ‘hook’ becomes so necessary in order to connect people to important issues facing humanity that we are willing to throw over the staid truth for a more interesting, sexier version.

I am thinking of this today as I read about 60 Minutes upcoming expose of Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea”. According to 60 Minutes, Mortenson’s origination story is fabricated. In a brief rebuttal posted on the Central Asia Institute website, Mortenson defends himself, but his comments do not exactly inspire confidence. 60 Minutes goes on to talk about financial and program discrepancies which are damning if true. It will be a shame for all the work that Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute has accomplished and all it could accomplish if Mortenson is discredited.

Mortenson’s work to build schools is inspiration enough without the getting-lost-bonding-with-the-locals bit. But I can imagine that perhaps he submitted a first draft with a somewhat more mundane version of the origins of his work, and his editor said to him point blank, “Well, that’s no good. We’ll have to think of something else.”

According to Sir Harold, even Thomas Edison crafted a Eureka story, “Admittedly, the eureka myth is seductive. Thomas Edison, who usually stressed that invention was the easy bit, forgot his own 1%-inspiration-to-99%-perspiration rule in describing to a newspaper reporter how the incandescent light bulb came to him as a gift from the gods. The reporter wrote: ‘Sitting one night in his laboratory, Edison began abstractedly rolling between his fingers a piece of compressed lampblack mixed with tar for use in his telephone….His thoughts continued far away, his fingers meanwhile mechanically rolling over the little piece of tarred lampblack until it had become a slender filament.’ In fact, Edison’s laboratory notebooks suggest that he had considered carbon early on but discarded it in favor of platinum because carbon burned up too quickly. It was a new prospect—evacuating most of the air from the bulb—that induced Edison to return to carbon.” Despite Edison mythologizing the origin story, we benefit today from his invention.

I hope that the allegations about Greg Mortenson prove to be false, and that the work we have all been inspired by is not just a lie. I believe that Mortenson’s CAI has accomplished much in creating awareness about the need for education in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, especially for the girl-children of that region who have not had a place on the world’s agenda. Like Icarus, Mortenson may be punished for flying too high, but I hope that his work survives the fall.

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Guides by Good Intentions are Not Enough

Lies, White Lies, and Accounting Practices; Why nonprofit overheads don’t mean what you think they mean.

Good Intentions’ Guide to Holiday Charitable Giving

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Related Posts:

Whites in Shining Armor

Collecting “Three Cups of Tea” Posts

Al Jazeera’s The Stream Talks Aid and #Dignity2012

Saundra — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:02:36 +0000

This post is crossposted with generous permission from A View from the Cave.

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TMS “Teddy” Ruge, Co-Founder of Project Diaspora and Joel Charny, Vice President for Humanitarian Policy at InterAction sit down on the orange couch yesterday to discuss the way aid is marketed and disbursed in Africa. “The dehumanizing comes into the fact we have to be continually looked at as recipients, as the poor, as if the only thing we have to offer are these beans so you can buy them in your coffee,” explained Teddy. That is why A Day Without Dignity came into existence last year and was held yesterday. The hope is to find ways to shift the story of Africa from a single continent of misery to a place full of many countries, people, desires, cultures and experiences.

Charny struck a middle chord which I believe to be right. He argues taking the feelings of solidarity that do resonate with people and leverage it into better information and advocacy. “I don’t want to get into this situation where we are discouraging this feeling or say, ‘don’t care,’” he explains.

The program continues to then feature further discussions and great questions from Laura Seay, who delivers the money quote, “I don’t need another basket made by a refugee woman,” when asking about how to get real trade and job growth, and Karen Attiah.
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Guides by Good Intentions are Not Enough

Lies, White Lies, and Accounting Practices; Why nonprofit overheads don’t mean what you think they mean.

Good Intentions’ Guide to Holiday Charitable Giving