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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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

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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

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.

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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Related posts:

What aid workers think of 1 million shirts

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

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

Whites in Shining Armor

Collecting “Three Cups of Tea” Posts

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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

All of the rest of the entries for a Day Without Dignity 2012 – Local Champions can be found here.

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I always walk away from a conversation with Saeed Wame, founder and director of Namwera AIDS Coordinating Committee (NACC) of Malawi, with a new understanding. Whether he be blowing my concept of “capacity” wide open, or offering a completely new definition of volunteer, Saeed is the sort of community leader whose wisdom and humility always leaves you with much to be mulled over and much to be integrated into your work and life.

Saeed Wame, founder and director of Namwera AIDS Coordinating Committee (NACC) of Malawi. Photo by Joop Rubens.

The conversation I had with Saeed late last year was no different. We talked about valuing community contributions, the challenges of the intimate factors at play when it comes to child protection, and how numbers cannot portray the true value of his organization’s work.

***

Saaed Wame founded NACC in 1996 with zero dollars and just a vision for his community. Today NACC utilizes a US$100,000 annual budget, operating in 400+ villages in four districts in southern Malawi. NACC has grown from strength to strength, adding programs and deepening its presence at the community level over the past 15 years. Although NACC began in response to the AIDS crisis in Namwera, its organization’s mission has expanded holistically over the years to include work in maternal health, early childhood development, and education care and support.

But it goes beyond that. NACC’s approach is, more importantly than any programmatic focus or service delivery, concentrated on enabling communities to be more resilient.

When I first learned of NACC in 2005, I was impressed by this embeddedness at the community level, evident immediately in the way they conduct field visits with donors and stakeholders. A long list of beneficiaries is retrieved at the office, the visitor is asked to select a name at random, and that is whom the entourage visits. No staging. No coaching. Nothing to hide and nothing to promote. Just here we are.

That spirit, confidence, and connectedness are evident throughout NACC’s programs. With a volunteer corps of over 5,000 [active!] people, it’s hard to call them volunteers. Rather, they are engaged and motivated citizens contributing to the betterment of their communities. As Saeed shares, “They don’t have money, but they have energy and ideas. They can offer their time.”

And this time is no small thing.

In an aid dependent country like Malawi, an organization with US$100,000 is still considered small. Despite NACC’s success, their work, for the most part, remains “under-the-radar” among the donor community in Malawi. I asked Saeed, however, if he could put a monetary value on the volunteer effort that NACC relies upon, how this would that compare to the international donations he receives. Here’s our conservative back-of-the-envelope calculations:

Let’s say…one of NACC’s volunteers works in their community on average one hour per day, five days per week. Based on average wages in Malawi, a volunteer’s hour’s work could be valued at 20 Malawi Kwacha. Let’s say they offer this much time just 45 weeks of the year.  That’s an over US$13,500 annual contribution by the volunteer cadre, not to mention in-kind local donations.

That’s nothing to dismiss in a country where 90% of the population earns less than US$2 per day.

Volunteers are the engine of Namwera AIDS Coordinating Committee in Malawi. Photo by Joop Rubens.

What these volunteers are able to accomplish, however, is where Saeed sees impact. For example, in education, NACC is not about just getting kids in school. Rather, they assist the community to assess and analyze the barriers to attendance, performance and completion and their root causes. Saeed shared with me a recent example where a village they support identified distance as a major obstacle to primary school access; seven kilometers was too far, especially for younger children. NACC facilitated the community’s meeting with invited local Ministry of Education officials, in which the community offered to build a junior primary school for lower grades, if the government could supply the teachers. And that is what happened.

Be it child labor and property grabbing cases, NACC uses the same problem-solving approach, especially where culture and laws are in conflict. Saeed told me the story of a 12-year-old girl they served recently. Hawa had passed her exams to get into secondary school but was forced into marriage by her family instead. When NACC’s volunteers found out about the situation, they intervened. The girl’s mother then appeared in NACC’s offices, seeking not only assistance, but redemption. “She cried that she wanted forgiveness. She said she didn’t know there were laws,” says Saeed. He told her that forgiveness would come when she took her child away from the new husband, which she did.

These are the intimate, personal and family issues at the community level that local organizations are best placed to address. Saeed explains, as staff of a local organization, “We experience these kinds of issues day-to-day ourselves. Therefore it is we who can help discuss with community members and officials with a way to address the problems together.”

Not only that, the story of this 12-year-old girl retrieved from her early marriage travels. Hawa is one of several girls NACC has assisted in this situation and she is now in secondary school and has become an active NACC volunteer who “encourages her friends to work hard at school and not rush for marriages.” It may only be one case, one “result” in terms of what NACC is able to accomplish, but it gets people talking. Says Saeed, “Other families now think twice before they marry off their young daughters. It may be only one story, but that is real impact.”

“Yes, [early marriage] is in our culture, but people learn from each other that it is against ourselves.”

And that is why Saeed shares that in terms of NACC’s impact, “The time to think of only numbers is over.”

“You can say we reached 10 children or 10,000 children, but the communities need to know the impact of their work. So what?—that’s the best question to ask ourselves, and to answer ourselves.”

***

To learn more about NACC’s work, you can contact Saeed, email: saeedwame (at) yahoo (dot) com. Other posts featuring local champions on how-matters.org include:

1)   The wisdom of dlalanathi: Reflections on organizational growth

2)   The Marginalization of CBOs by Development Actors: A Perspective from Zimbabwe

3)   Nothing to Offer

4)   Aid, Africa, Corruption and Colonialism: An Honest Conversation

5)   Changing the system…from the ground up

6)   “With the available resources we had…”

Some related posts on how-matters.org regarding sound support for local champions include:

1)   How to build strong relationships with grassroots organizations – Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

2)   Spotting Community Ownership

3)   Small is Beautiful…Grants, That Is (Part 1)

4)   Reaching Girls at the Grassroots – A Sound Investment (Part 2)

5)   Sorry but it’s not YOUR project

6)   Oral Reporting With Grassroots Organizations—Here’s How!

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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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What is Poverty?

• Lack of something which otherwise could be of great importance for you. For example: basic human needs, good sources of income, or ability to think well.
• Not having enough to meet basic needs.
• Having something but not in a good quality which is supposed to be.

According to my first and last definition, I don’t consider myself as a poor person. I’ve no good sources of income but I’ve the ability to think and utilise the little I’m having so as to bring change to my community.

When talking about poor people, others’ minds go straight to not having money, shelter, food or clothes. For me, it’s more than that. Anyone who has money but their thinking capacity is poor/low, is poorer than the one with no basic human needs. This is because, what you are having can easily perish if you’ll not know how to use it.

What I think some wazungu (foreigners) misunderstand about poverty (which is good for them to know) is:

• Lacking basic needs does not mean your thinking capacity must be low.
• They sometimes think that because Africans are living in poor countries, therefore they cannot think about themselves. They think that since they don’t have money, so they can’t be able to plan, implement, monitor and supervise anything even if given chance or supported.
• They should know that, even if a person/community is poor, the best way to help is to listen and give chance to the beneficiaries to know what really is their problem, and what they think is their priority. You may think they need good road first but their priority is school, hospital or water. If you’ll not give them chance, you’ll end up doing their last thing at first.
• Poverty cannot be eradicated by just the ideas of one side. Sharing ideas of both sides can help and bring changes easily.
• Not the ways which has eliminated poverty in another country or community can be applied to every part and bring success.

For me to be rich is good thing if, you’ll be rich and happy. I’ve seen some people who are very rich but not happy at all. That is nonsense to me.

Education is the key to life. If good Education could be offered to all children, from their early years up to colleges, with time, poverty could not be an issue anymore. EDUCATION HAS POWER! This is why I’m among the people who are trying to bring even a slight change to this sector.

I hate the effects of poverty. Some of them being:

• Diseases which mostly are caused by low standard of living, which has connection to Edudation too.
• Death at early ages
• No say to your properties. Those being just few I’ve mentioned.

Let’s join hands to fight POVERTY.

Regards,
Mama Lucy.

——-

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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We’re asking aid workers, the diaspora, and people from areas that receive charity to speak up in blogs, on twitter, or at school about the contributions and needs of local champions. More details on this event can be found here.

Remember to send curriculum suggestions/ideas to Tom at Murph[at]aviewfromthecave.com and send t-shirt entries to TMS Ruge at Teddy[at]projectdiaspora.org

Please use the hashtag #LocalChampions when discussing this event on twitter.

As posts or videos are submitted they will be linked to below with the most recent posts at the top.

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46. Burkas to tracksuits – IRIN – Suggested by Tom Murphy “Three great stories of Somali women taking on equity through sport, activism and politics”

45. A Day Without Dignity: The Social Conversation – Storify – Great recap of the day’s events.

44. Embedding dignity in development - Rough Development

43. A little awesomeness – The Path of Trayle – Highlights the work of local masons on water projects.

42. The Stream Talks Aid and #Dignity2012 - A View from the Cave – Video of TMS Ruge – one of the co-founders of A Day Without Dignity – on Al Jazeera’s The Stream.

41. Mis deseos para el Tinku Kamayú, y todas las mujeres que ellas representan – Al Borde del Caos - Tells the story of the creation of a yarn spinning business to create jobs.

40. Growing up – freedom or obligation? – Hopebuilding -Ruminates over the Local Champion posts and discusses how our ways of thinking and understanding the world can be so different.

39. Elizabeth’s Story, a #LocalChampion - sAID by red – “Elizabeth is just one of the many many stories of Local Champions who I could share, but her story just goes to show that she made something of herself and will do something for her country – and she did so without anyone’s handouts.”

38. The west’s lazy reporting of Africa - The Guardian – “Once in a while we see a positive ‘Africa season’ – then western media revert to sensationalist and stereotypical coverage”

37. Rewarding the Heroic Work of Midwives in Afghanistan – UNFPA – “In mid-December, Maliha walked for five days to reach Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan, in northeastern Afghanistan, to receive her award as best midwife in the province. She felt proud as she went onstage to be honoured for her work in her community health clinic. Though Maliha is just 25 years old, she is a local hero, having delivered hundreds of babies since graduating from the Community Midwives Education Programme six years ago.”

36. In between and among the aid world – lindsey talerico - A guest post by a local aid worker “Every time I went out to the field I could see it — just a small difference between the people I was trying to help, and me. We were born in the same country, with the same laws and same culture, but somehow our realities were completely different.”

35. A Day Without Dignity: Positive Advocacy Examples from Afghanistan – UN Dispatch – “The women in this video are agents of progress. They aren’t waiting to be saved; they’re saving themselves, and creating unprecedented opportunities for their daughters. (Note that interviews with foreigners are kept short and sweet, and the video is composed almost entirely of clips of Afghan women in action.)”

34. A Day Without Dignity: International Charities And The Critics Who Question Them – Strombo

33. It’s Day Without Dignity Day — Skewering TOMS shoes, Stop Kony and other ‘bad aid’ – Humanosphere

32. A story from Uganda: being young, female and having a disability - whydev – “Although it was not my intention to interview anyone for whydev while at the conference, I was blown away by how well Josephine spoke about the topic of being young, female, and having a disability in Uganda. So impressed was I, that I simply had to hear more.”

31. Making a Difference in the Lives of Children with Special Needs in Liberia - UN Dispatch – “Borne out of a personal tragedy, his efforts on behalf of children with disabilities, who are almost always ostracized and marginalized in Liberian society, are paying off.”

30. Rural women: Clearing landmines and cluster munitions – TrustLaw – “Often women face a choice:  use contaminated land or be unable to feed their families.  The reality is there is no choice – they must risk death so their families can eat. Faced with this reality, rural women around the world are taking concrete actions to make their communities safe again. Beyond the important roles they play in teaching the dangers of landmines and cluster munitions and in advocating against these indiscriminate weapons, rural women are being hired to de-mine the land.”

29. Ida Horner: Thoughts on Bad Aid Projects to Africa - Project Diaspora – A video post. “Ida Horner is not just any Ugandan Diaspora. She is probably one of Uganda’s most prolific contributors to the country’s development. She is the founder of Ethnic Supplies (ethnicsupplies.co.uk), instrumental in the success of Let Them Help Themselves (lethemhelpthemselves.org/) and Africa on the Blog (africaontheblog.com). She is also a cofounder of Villages in Action (villagesinaction.com). By all accounts, Ida Horner is the epitome of a Local Champion and a great inspiration to the African Diaspora.”

28. Villages in Action - Independent Global Citizen – “Teddy and Project Diaspora were motivated by a meeting that took place in September 2010 to discuss the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in New York City. World leaders, diplomats, academics, and development industry people came together to discuss the state of the poor in Africa. The poor according to them are similar to the people of Kikuube village. They spoke about poor people in their absence, like they didn’t have a voice and referred to them as numbers.”

27. Don’t Be an Ugly Philanthropist When Traveling This Summer-  About.com – Tips for helping (or not helping) while traveling internationally.

26. NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR ALL IN MADAGASCAR – Agents of Change – “You can live in poverty and commit to others! In Madagascar, young people living on a landfill and in a very poor neighborhood of the capital support each other. Engaged in computer training, to ensure that they all go through. Awesome!”

25. LOCAL CHAMPIONS: MOBILIZING LOCAL RESOURCES – Spirit in Action – “One champion I met last summer was Margaret Ikiara, of Community Initiatives for Rural Development (CIFORD Kenya). I was so inspired by the work she was doing in her community to support other women and people with HIV/AIDS and now SIA is proud to support this vibrant organization, doing good in their own community. I asked Margaret to tell us about their work in her own words:”

24. A Day Without Dignity: Empowering Local Change Makers - Reconstructing – “As a person who mostly HATES to be without shoes, it was a “win-win” situation; I could get a sweet, new pair of shoes, and I could help someone in need. Then, I became older, landed in a development position, and my personal mission shifted from “a one woman circus, trying to save the world,” to a movement of “locals helping locals.”  I quickly realized that what once seemed like a selfless, powerful, and simple idea was far more complicated than I had expected.”

23. The power of seeing our world through new lenses – Hopebuilding – The power of ‘horizontal development’
The Community Development Resource Association calls this process of working with local knowledge ‘horizontal development’ – neighbours helping neighbours. It is a different process than ‘vertical development’, where experts come into a community to ‘fix’ it. Horizontal development is a universal process. In communities around the world, what inspires us to do something is seeing our neighbours do it and learning from what they do. Often this does not require money.

22. Why Designers Need To Stop Feeling Sorry For Africa – Fast Company – “TAKING A PATRONIZING APPROACH TO INVESTING IN AFRICA UNDERMINES THE CONTINENT’S PEOPLE AND ENTREPRENEURIAL PROMISE, ARGUE JENS MARTIN SKIBSTED AND RASMUS BECH HANSEN.”

21. “You Can’t Come Here With European Eyes”: A Letter To John Humphreys On His Trip To Liberia – By Richard Dowden – African Arguments – “I listened to your reports from Liberia on The Today programme this morning with growing fury. I am not angry because your reporting is bad. It is extremely good. My complaint is this: you say you have been reporting Africa for more than 45 years but why, only now, are you reporting these deeper realities? “You can’t come here with European eyes,” you say. But that is precisely what you and the rest of the British media have been doing all this time.”

20. Shoes are not a human rights issue - Bridge of Life School Blog - Discusses his own failed experience buying shoes for his students.

19. Keep Your Shoes (and Your Dignity): “A Day Without Dignity” 2012 Speaks Out Against SWEDOW, GIK, and Whites in Shining Armor – IH-Blog

18. What’s needed to put local champions at the forefront? - How Matters – A video contribution.

17. Everyone has a voice - Hands Wide Open – “…there are NO voiceless people. There are NONE who are invisible. You may never have heard of a certain war, or seen these abducted kids, or heard this people’s story, but that doesn’t mean that those people are invisible or without a voice. It just means that you didn’t know.”

16. Hassan: Hat Tip to a Local Champion – Usalama – “Mbuyuni works on a number of small-scale projects in their neighborhood, including trash collection and recycling.  They run a tree nursery, make soap to sell as a way of fundraising, and help run the school for children that can’t afford school fees or for whatever reason can’t go to the primary school just down the road.”

15. Real Impact with Saaed Wame – Good Intentions are Not Enough – A guest post by Jennifer Lentfer “We talked about valuing community contributions, the challenges of the intimate factors at play when it comes to child protection, and how numbers cannot portray the true value of his organization’s work.”

14. The Thing That Happened - Independent Global Citizen – “Hope North is a great example of Ugandans helping Ugandans for a better future.  They deserve to be recognized for their incredible efforts and  supported for pursuing sustainable development and self-determination.”

13. (Stop) Polishing Your Armour - Lost Together – “I want people to want to make a difference. I really do. I want people to use their voices to draw attention to situations that matter to them and to pressure their elected officials to respond as appropriate. But I also want people to be informed, truly informed, as to the consequences of their actions.”

12. Transformational Power of Art - Independent Global Citizen – “Ugandan artist Fred Mutebi uses art as an educational tool to reach underprivileged and vulnerable children and communities in Uganda.”

11. ‘A Day Without Dignity’ challenges international aid paradigm – Global Post – “she’d changed my perspective on the world and, with it, the way I view the people around me, and my place in it, alongside them.”

10. On the way Agnes Changed my View of East Africa and, with it, the World – Voye’m

9. A Day Without Dignity: Peacemakers in Action as Local Champions – Tanenbaum – “part of our work is to seek out and recognize religiously-motivated local heroes who are putting their lives and their freedom on the line for the sake of peace and development.”

8. A Historical Perspective on Kony 2012 – Black Star News – Suggested by @hellenotii “A very relevant read on the historic role of NGO’s in Africa from a UNESCO Chair”

7. TOMS Shoes Controversy: A Call to Move From Discussion to Action – Huffington Post – “Days without shoes and days without dignity both sound terrible to me. But the days equally worst, in my opinion, are the days full of action, having not properly discussed the implications, and days full of discussion, but without any ‘doing.’”

6. How & why Nisolo is not another TOMS - Nisolo – Discusses his experience with TOMS and how he came to work with local shoe producers instead.

5. Once I gave a man my shoes - la vidaid loca – An entry from last year that still resonates with this year’s theme. A powerful story about one man’s life and the unnecessary gift of a pair of boots.

4. How Not To Be a “White in Shining Armor” – GiveWell – Discusses what donors could do to avoid the White in Shining Armor trap.

3. MDGs 2.0: Why not ask the poor what they really need? – devex – suggests conducting mass surveys of poor areas to find out what people really want.

2. MAMA LUCY ON POVERTY – The Epic Change Blog - This previously written post was suggested for this year’s event –  ”What I think some wazungu (foreigners) misunderstand about poverty (which is good for them to know)”

1. Game Changing Women – Local Champions – The More I See – The post highlights the work of 19 women around the world taking things into their own hands.

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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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