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• To volunteer or not to volunteer: That is the question

  j_ling 1:58 pm on July 15, 2009 | 4 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: motivation (4), sustainable, volunteer

  In my pre­vi­ous post of my expe­ri­ence in South Africa, Andre raised a great ques­tion in his com­ment that I felt deserved more than just a reply, and I wanted to address it prop­erly in a blog post.

  The question/issue was: Would I rec­om­mend peo­ple to be involved with pro­grams like SE101 with the issues of sus­tain­abil­ity, cost and knowl­edge at hand? ( Please read my pre­vi­ous blog post for more insight)

  Essen­tially, what I believe can be framed in 3 ways:

  1) Moti­va­tion

  

  Image taken from: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/motivational-cartoons

  It has become the social ‘cool’ these days to par­tic­i­pate on trips to devel­op­ing nations to ‘help’, be it a stint in Kenya to build wells, build­ing homes in Mex­ico or help­ing the Orang Utan preser­va­tion in Bor­neo etc. I believe that if you want to par­tic­i­pate on a trip of such, you need to believe in its cause,  what you are con­tribut­ing and what you want to learn.

  The worst thing to do is to spend over $4,000 on a trip like this, write it down in your resume and tell your friends you’re going away to a 3rd world coun­try receiv­ing [insert ’ that is so cool’ response here] and… that’s it. I believe that peo­ple need to be account­able when vol­un­teer­ing. No one is going to turn around and say “you are so self­ish for vol­un­teer­ing because all you are tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion in your trip is your­self and hav­ing that expe­ri­ence.” The responses would likely be along the lines of “that’s so cool you’re vol­un­teer­ing. You’e doing such a good thing!”

  Therefore, I  believe that peo­ple  need to be aware of the costs asso­ci­ated with vol­un­teer­ing. Let me break a typ­i­cal 3 week trip down for you ( con­ser­v­a­tive rough estimate):

  Air­fare $2,500

  Acco­mo­da­tion $500

  Food $500

  Pay­ing the organization/prof/administrative fees/utilities $500

  Total: Approx $4,000

  That’s alot of money. Now, with the same amount, you can make 160 $25 micro­cre­dit loans at places like Kiva and change the lives of 160 peo­ple. You can spon­sor 200 chil­dren at World Vision by pay­ing $20 for their yearly school fees. You can feed the home­less for a month in Van­cou­ver donat­ing to the soup kitchen. That’s 160 lives you can change. From sit­ting in front of your com­puter with sev­eral clicks of your mouse.

  Get the sense of com­par­i­son? You may argue that donat­ing the money is dif­fer­ent than the actual expe­ri­ence of vol­un­teer­ing, and yes I agree. How­ever, what is stop­ping you then from vol­un­teer­ing online in places around world ie. writ­ing grants, doing research, or even, actu­ally fol­low­ing up with the organ­i­sa­tions and places that you have vol­un­teered at? Or even vol­un­teer locally at your home­less soup kitchen?

  Or are you one of those peo­ple that vol­un­teer for the sake of its exotic­ness, take a ‘hol­i­day’ jump­ing from one coun­try to another each for a month, to write down in your resume that you’ve helped build refugee cen­ters in Cam­bo­dia or [insert some form of pro­gram vol­un­teer­ing here].

  Vol­un­teer­ing is alot more seri­ous when you think of it in terms of oppor­tu­nity cost — what you are giv­ing up and whose life you are impacting.

  2) Sus­tain­abil­ity

  

  Now, if you have the right inten­tions and moti­va­tion, the next ques­tion you should really be ask­ing your­self is: Is  the pro­gram I am plug­ging myself into sus­tain­able? Is this the most effec­tive way I can con­tribute my time and money (refer to point one on cost com­par­i­son) to give the most impact?

  This is where research comes in. Research your pro­gram, talk to peo­ple, con­nect with past par­tic­i­pants, find out where your money goes to. Research, research, research.

  Let me give you some examples.

  Pro­gram 1: Build­ing wells in rural Kenya to pro­vide a water source for local villagers.

  Sounds great right? Well, a lit­tle more research would tell you that by par­tic­i­pat­ing in a pro­gram like this and build­ing wells, you’ve just put the local water source provider, who has a fam­ily of 5 out of busi­ness along with the sev­eral other vil­lage water source providers out of busi­ness because you not only built one well, you built 3 wells in 3 dif­fer­ent vil­lagers. Congratulations.

  Pro­gram 2: Col­lect­ing old clothes for donat­ing to local vil­lages in Vietnam

  Sounds like a good cause? Well, a lit­tle more research would tell you that all your clothes have just put the local tai­lors who sells shirts for $1 out of busi­ness. Congratulations.

  These 2 exam­ples are the clas­sic typ­i­cal pro­grams that you can find all round.

  So essen­tially, please par­tic­i­pate wisely. There are so many NGOs these days that you need to research and fil­ter. The world doesn’t need another vol­un­teer that is help­ing oth­ers at the expense of another person.

  3) Pre­pare

  

  So you have the right moti­va­tions, the right pro­gram and organ­i­sa­tion. The last thing: Pre­pare. In the right way.

  I can­not even begin to empha­size this last point enough. In my last post I described what it was like, to be on the ground and be com­pletely par­a­lyzed by my own igno­rance. Yes, I have been guilty of it and wish what I know now.

  Just like any nor­mal sit­u­a­tion, you need to be pre­pared as much as you can. Don’t swal­low what is given to you. Inves­ti­gate and learn.

  Side Note: I want to make it CLEAR, that there is a big dif­fer­ence between sign­ing up for labour vol­un­teer­ing, as opposed to ‘pro­gram’ vol­un­teer­ing. The dif­fer­ence lies in 1), you are tap­ping into an area which needs your time and labour, ie. hur­ri­caine relief work in New orleans, as opposed to, 2) you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in a pro­gram that has a frame­work ie. build­ing homes in Mexico.

  What I have been address­ing are PROGRAMS.

  ***

  So, in summary, to answer the ques­tion of whether I would rec­om­mend peo­ple to par­tic­i­pate in vol­un­teer pro­grams… My answer is: I would. As long as they:

  1) Have the right moti­va­tion. Know the cost ben­e­fit break­down of the trip.

  2) Make sure it is a sus­tain­able pro­gram. Research.

  3) Pre­pare. In the RIGHT way.

  These 3 cri­te­rias seem very sim­ple, but it’s the sim­ple things that we for­get when we get caught up in an idea and in our lives.

  Good luck vol­un­teer­ing! If you have stories/experiences to share, I would love to hear them.

   

• My African Experience: South Africa

  j_ling 10:53 pm on July 9, 2009 | 4 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Africa (3), change (10), SE101, volunteer

  In the sum­mer of 2007, I par­tic­i­pated with a group of 8 other stu­dents and 2 pro­fes­sors, in the Social Entre­pre­neur­ship 101 from my busi­ness school to South Africa. This was my team.

  

  The team at the end of the trip = UBC stu­dents + our local ground sup­port from Ubuntu + Go Global + Nancy Lang­ton + Robert Gate­man ( tak­ing the picture)

  So briefly, SE101 is part of the African Ini­tia­tive of the Sauder School of busi­ness to deliver busi­ness plan train­ing pro­grams to youth liv­ing in Africa. The efforts have been focussed in Kib­era, Nairobi and Johan­nes­burg. The work­shops we deliv­ered were aimed to edu­cate and enable impov­er­ished youth to start their own busi­nesses in a prac­ti­cal, applic­a­ble and sus­tain­able context.

  Project Components:(Kibera and Nairobi)

  • Develop and present three weeks of work­shops that inform inter­ested Kib­era youth about the essen­tial com­po­nents of a busi­ness plan, touch­ing on a wide vari­ety of top­ics from oper­a­tional orga­ni­za­tion to mar­ket­ing tac­tics and finan­cial strategies.
  • Con­duct one-on-one con­sul­ta­tion ses­sions with the pro­gram par­tic­i­pants, to share ideas and infor­ma­tion, design com­plete busi­ness plans and orga­nize step-by-step devel­op­ment stratagems.
  • Arrange guest speak­ers from the Kenyan busi­ness com­mu­nity to pro­vide a local prospec­tive, impart inspi­ra­tion and share essen­tial knowl­edge and experience.
  • Cre­ate a sus­tain­able link and spread aware­ness through web­site updates, and progress reports about the progress of the pro­gram participants.

  * Taken from the SE101 website

  How­ever, on the Johan­nes­burg, South African ini­tia­tive, our project com­po­nents were slightly dif­fer­ent. As a team of 9, we were divided into sub teams of 3, and were placed in three dif­fer­ent site: 1) Orphan­age in Soweto; 2) Busi­ness Plan Devel­op­ment, Alexan­dra Town­ship and; 3) Ubuntu orga­ni­za­tion — our local partners.

  
  

  

  I was part of the team that was assigned to the orphan­age in Soweto, and here, we were ‘con­sul­tants’ look­ing into the orphanage’s organ­i­sa­tional struc­ture and finances, see­ing what could be improved on. We looked into  the orphan selec­tion process, forms, cri­te­rias, allo­ca­tion of finances and fund man­age­ment. Our orphan­age place­ment was the Ika­geng Itire­leng AIDS Min­istry, which is headed by Carol Dyanti, affec­tion­ally known as “Mama Carol” to more than 1,700 orphans in over 200 homes. All these chil­dren live in child-headed house­holds (par­ents have passed away due to AIDS).

  Ika­geng are the orphans’ life sup­port, men­tor­ing, pro­vid­ing life skills, pay­ing their edu­ca­tion, pro­vid­ing basic needs such as food, cloth­ing and trans­porta­tion. Dur­ing my place­ment in Ika­geng, I vis­ited sev­eral child-headed house­holds in Soweto ( My Saf­fer friends are gasp­ing that I emerged unscathed, as Soweto is an incred­i­bly dan­ger­ous place) and I can def­i­nitely say that the impact and real­ity of what these kids endure, hit me very very hard.

  

  Above is the res­i­dence of one of the child-headed house­holds. The sil­ver tin shack is home to 10 kid. It is roughly the length of the truck beside it.

  I’m not going to divulge into details, but there are 2 sto­ries that I would like to share.

  
  

  Story 1: Our first day in the orphan­age, a girl of about 16 years old came into the office need­ing coun­selling. She had no one else to go. Three years ago, this girl had both a father and mother. But one day, her mother comes home and dis­cov­ered that her father was HIV+ and had not told the fam­ily. Her mother went into a rage and stabbed her father 48 times in front of her and because of that, was impro­vi­soned for mur­der. The girl then came into the care of Mama Carol and the orphan­age. She dropped all con­tact with her mother after the inci­dent. Recently, her mother was diag­nosed of AIDS and is in the hos­pi­tal dying of both AIDS and menin­gi­tis. Her mother then requested that her daugh­ter take care of her. The girl is almost fin­ished high school and needed advice on whether to leave her edu­ca­tion as it is to take care of her mother whom she has not spo­ken to in 3 years, or to ignore her mother’s requests and con­tinue her education.

  
  

  Story 2: Part of the orphanage’s sup­port is pro­vid­ing trans­porta­tion to school, as the town­ship is unsafe, and these kids live far away from a decent edu­ca­tion. 2 girls that we were in con­tact with, told the orphan­age that they were old enough to walk ( they were both about the age of 14) to school to save some money in the sum­mer as it would still be light out when school ends. Although the orphan­age was uncom­fort­able, they agreed to the sug­ges­tion — both girls lived rel­a­tively close to the school and there were oth­ers who needed the money more. The next morn­ing on their walk, they never made it to school. They were raped.

  
  

  Now, these 2 sto­ries were just some of the few that really res­onated in me dur­ing my time with Ika­geng. But it also illus­trates sev­eral key take­aways that I would like to share:

  1) Igno­rance

  It blows my mind how absolutely igno­rant I was on think­ing that I could ‘help’ the orphan­age within a period of 2 weeks that I was there. Prior to our trip, we prepped on mate­r­ial, cul­tural chal­lenges, exer­cises that we would use on site. We brought our SE101 finan­cial ‘text­book’ there to ‘teach’ the locals on organ­i­sa­tional struc­ture and financ­ing. None of us opened a page of that book. I was blown away, and I think I can safely say the rest of my team­mates, were caught off guard by the sit­u­a­tion, the peo­ple we were in con­tact with and par­a­lyzed by our inca­pa­bil­ity  cre­ate change within those 2 weeks. Time was not on our side. You often read about sit­u­a­tions like that in the news, but does the real­ity of it really process?

  2) Teach­ing vs. learning

  Before I landed in Johan­nes­burg, I was prepped with the mind­set that I was going there to help, to teach. A month later when I flew out of Johan­nes­burg, I was the stu­dent instead for the month. It struck me that I was going in blind, with­out any prior sit­u­a­tional knowl­edge or any proper con­tact before to ‘teach’ busi­ness to local Africans. What did I really know about a life, an econ­omy, a liv­ing stan­dard that is so dif­fer­ent to my own? How can I tell some­one to cre­ate change in an organ­i­sa­tion when their daily deci­sions are to turn away orphans because their can’t sup­port them finan­cially or instead, to deny trans­porta­tion rights to 2 girls that just want to go to school…

  3) What I really learnt instead

  Of all the numer­ous things that I learnt, below are some of the sim­ple things that yes, may seem repeated and heard alot, but really impacted my time there until now.

  • Never under­es­ti­mate any sit­u­a­tion that you are going into, and never pre­sume that you have an ‘upper­hand’ just because you are more edu­cated or come from a bet­ter off sit­u­a­tion. You’ll be sur­prised at what you can learn.

  • All devel­op­ment help needs to be sus­tain­able. You are vir­tu­ally cre­at­ing an expense for an organ­i­sa­tion which is already short on funds to ‘enter­tain’ you for 2 weeks and then dis­ap­pear back in your own life for­ever. If you want to help, make sure that you fol­low up, or is plug­ging into  an organ­i­sa­tion that has a sus­tain­able plan in place. This leads to Part 2 of my African trip, which will be blogged about at a later time.

  • Stay­ing for 2 weeks will not cre­ate the change that you have envi­sioned. Espe­cially if it’s just you and the locals. If you really want to help, stay longer. Alot longer. Or develop a sus­tain­able plan. — refer to point 2 above.

  • If you are trav­el­ling in a team, your team­mates can be your great­est assets or worst lia­bil­i­ties. Pick well. Mine were great peo­ple and I still see some from time to time.

  • There is always hope. Always.

  Finals thoughts:

  If I could describe my entire South African expe­ri­ence as one word, it would be: CHANGE. It changed the way I fun­da­men­tally viewed devel­op­ment and aid. It changed my view of Africa and the peo­ple. It changed me, issues I care about, future projects I worked on.

  My ‘offi­cial’ tes­ti­mo­nial for my trip:

  “Par­tic­i­pat­ing in SE101 was prob­a­bly one of the best deci­sions that I have made in my under­grad life. This pro­gram chal­lenged and changed me in the ways I view learn­ing, edu­ca­tion and team­work. I found myself dis­cov­er­ing so much more in terms of cul­ture and knowl­edge, and chal­leng­ing the tra­di­tional notions of devel­op­men­tal work. Not only has my expe­ri­ence exceeded my expec­ta­tions, I also found inspi­ra­tion and a sense of direc­tion in terms of my Bcom degree.

  As a result of the skills that I learnt while tak­ing part in SE101, I have since been able to be involved with devel­op­ment work both locally in Van­cou­ver and in Africa. I am also cur­rently struc­tur­ing a course with Sauder which incor­po­rates a global learn­ing per­spec­tive encour­ages a more cog­ni­tive learning/educational expe­ri­ence tap­ping on the pas­sion stu­dents have for vol­un­teer­ing and help­ing others.”