change

Losing My Judgement

Probably one of the greatest turning points from my time in Nicaragua was when I woke up one morning and considered my opinions and ideas from the previous few months. I´d found I had made judgements about the culture and the country that were not necessarily correct.

For example I detailed an account of Machismo a few weeks ago, and I believe I was too critical of this as being a cultural aspect. Yes the outcomes are bad. But on reflection, we struggle with the same situation the world over, and we are constantly battling to get the message out there that this behaviour is never appropriate.

This and many of my views (and yours as well?) were made from the perspective of how I (we) feel the world should look through my (our) own lenses, instead of taking into account the view from different perspectives. How do the divorcees that go to court over the family dog make their respective nations look?

It´s the same as ISIS being stated as Islamic in the press and the people believing that all Muslims are members of ISIS, crazy!

From now on I want to change my approach, not judging people and situations themselves, but instead if there must be judgement, to judge myself and how I can best interact with those same people and situations. Maybe it´s not just me, maybe we all need to take this reflection every now and then.

Introduction to Social Enterprise – Experiences with GK

In September 2011 I traveled to the slums of Manila, and what I saw there made me overjoyed with the capacity to make change. Here were people living in a garbage heap and inside this setting a group of local, not foreign, local volunteers had built a village for the poorest of the poor, this was my introduction to “nation building”, and within this was something greater, not only were they helping each other to be housed, but they were building hubs founded on social enterprises (SE) to make the change for their community permanent and to bring more up from the bottom line. This was, and this is Gawad Kalinga (GK) in the Philippines.

GK Philippines creates hubs where social enterprises can be developed by both those within and outside of the villages.

GK Philippines creates hubs where social enterprises can be developed by both those within and outside of the villages. One of these is bamboo bikes.

In November 2013 I traveled to the pulsing, overgrown city which is Jakarta, this time I went with the direct intent to see the work of the younger GK entity, Gerakan Kepadulian or GK Indonesia. The difference to GK Philippines was the removal of social enterprise hubs, here was a group that saw the need for each individual community to have it’s own independence, this meant social enterprises are places in each village. More inspiring is the values formation the group does at the foundation meaning that the villages are not reliant on outsiders to start their enterprises, as they have been educated on the vision and determination to be able to do it themselves.

GK Indonesia work with each individual community to help them build new enterprises to build skills and remove reliance on GK volunteers.

GK Indonesia work with each individual community to help them build new enterprises to build skills and remove reliance on GK volunteers.

What these experiences have made very clear is the absolute importance of charity, and of getting rid of it. Because that is the key, charity doesn’t win the fight, it’s not sustainable, and it’s not scalable. As Michael E. Porter put’s it when talking about NGOs “The awkward reality is that we’re not making fast enough progress. We’re not winning.” (you can watch his TED talk here). By using the incentives and drivers of business, SEs help to solve the social issues whilst being scalable to the demand for both the product/service and the fix which the SE provides. The big difference is that now we’re not in it to help, we’re in it to win.