Language is important. It defines and shapes conversations, conveys meaning and creates both narrative and discourse. We use it every day whether spoken or in sign.

Words come and go. They are replaced and created.

Language – words – meanings – all combine to shape thinking, interpretation and understanding.

Pamela Hartigan from the Skoll Foundation has now on several occasions made public statements to the effect that the meaning of social innovation, social enterprise, social entrepreneurship is not what it was when this language emerged a decade and a half ago.

The use of this language initially signaled a challenge to the political economy called capitalism where that political economy generates gaps between the majority class and the elite wealthy minority class. Today she laments the fact that this language has been co-opted by the very political economy it was originally seeking to challenge, change or renew and essentially has become vacuous and bereft of its original meaning.

Not only does language get co-opted and domesticated but also goes out of fashion. Can you remember when the words justice, equity and empowerment were used in the community sector and they were distinctive and pregnant with meaning?

Today they rarely appear in the world of social innovation, enterprise or entrepreneurship. I am not sure if you have noticed but they have been replaced by the word ‘good’. ‘Do some good’ they say. Do some ‘good’ capitalism they say. Doing ‘good’ (way better we agree than doing bad) feels good. Apps for good, headbands for good, hubs for good, doing good dinners, runs for good – all doing good within a system that sees good as good.

Doing justice grinds and is not as nice or polite as doing good. Doing good sits nicely in polite society and can fool people into thinking they are doing good even when they are doing good within a system that fosters injustice, inequity and disempowers the most vulnerable.

This ‘doing good’ is also commonly referred to as the ‘common good’.

Doing justice is quite different. Doing justice may not be good for everyone. Generating more just systems to ethically redistribute wealth in rich western countries will not be for the ‘common’ good – although it will be for the majority good. If you are a member of the 1% of the world’s population that owns 50% of the world’s wealth, and justice means redistribution of your wealth, then you won’t feel good at all. In fact this very suggestion is understood to be very bad.

Redistributing wealth so there is equal access to health care, education (even tertiary education), clean water, medicines, food, aged care, early years education, asylum, jobs, opportunity and outcomes – all for the majority good will inevitably be perceived as being for the minority bad.

So here is the real conundrum with dong good. If you really want to do good for the majority of people on this planet you will run the risk of doing what is perceived to be bad by the minority. The fact the rich minority will still have everything they want will not matter. Mess with their money and they will feel real bad!

Which is of course why governments in the wealthy countries can no longer tolerate the use of the words like justice, equity and empowerment. They offend the wealthy and it is the wealthy that fund their political aspirations. So better to encourage everyone to do good – even better to do ‘good capitalism’.

Remember the words social justice? Before social was applied to innovation, enterprise and entrepreneurship and was squeezed off stage by all things social and ‘good’? Unfortunately doing good – and being social – has now all the hallmarks of being the language of the status quo. Elbowing aside justice equity and empowerment, being good and being nice is the new social vogue.

Doesn’t seem to have done much for the 49% of children living in poverty in Tower Hamlets in London. But I am sure a nice and good social response will be found soon.

Alternatively maybe some old fashioned social justice might do the trick!

The post Is doing good doing bad? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Let me take you to a little village called Tengeru just outside Arusha in Tanzania, where there is a pre-primary school called Meru View.

Meru View caters for 63 of the poorest children in the Tengeru village. Most of the children have lost either a mother or a father, and in some cases both parents, to HIV. Their families live in one or two room houses with dirt floors and no running water or electricity. Unemployment is high – most parents don’t work. For many of the children their school uniform is their only set of clothes. Often there is no food available at home, so they live on nothing more than sweet tea.

Access to the school is via a dirt road lined with banana trees and rubbish that’s barely passable by car. The school consists of a rectangular patch of dirt (the playground) and one set of buildings including four classrooms, an office and a storage room. There is no electricity, no play equipment, no text books for the children, only three teachers between four classes, and on some days (depending on funding) there aren’t enough pencils to go around.

Meru View is the only pre-primary school in the area. It provides the children with two meals a day, health care and pre-primary education in English. Its vision is to break the cycle of poverty by giving the poorest children in the village the best start in life through good health and education. Without Meru View, most of the kids that attend would not eat, would receive no health care and would have limited chance of moving into Primary School.

The children that attend Meru View are people like Paulina.

Paulina (pictured left) is four years old, and has been at Meru View since she was three. When she first arrived at Meru View she was significantly undernourished, lacked energy and was often unwell. After the Head Teacher arranged tests, it was confirmed that she was HIV positive. Her father passed away from disease, she has no grandparents and her mother is unemployed. Without an income, Paulina and her mother have nothing to eat. Paulina has only two sets of clothes, and only one pair of shoes.

Since attending Meru View, life has changed dramatically for Paulina and her mother. Paulina is now on the Government antiviral program for people who are HIV positive. Meru View takes care of all her other health needs, for example providing antibiotics and extra nutritional support when she recently caught a chest infection. Her mother works at Meru View sweeping the grounds, maintaining the fire pit and watering the vegetable garden. The school provides two meals a day for both Paulina and her mother – the only food that either of them will eat all day.

Paulina’s health has improved dramatically – she is now full of energy, and has a smile that would light up the whole world. She can count to 10, name colours, speak some words in English and is learning to read. When Paulina grows up she wants to be a fairy, or a teacher.

Paulina was one of the children that we had the privilege of meeting while we were in Tanzania. What really touched us and inspired us to support Meru View is that despite how little the children like Paulina have, or perhaps because of it, their graciousness and gratitude is astounding.

We were at the school one Saturday to help distribute a set of clothes to each child. The clothes were a hotch potch of second hand items, often a little bit worn or wrinkled. Every single child accepted what they were offered with absolute joy, and would look up at us with a shy smile and in a small voice would say “thank you teacher”. Compare that to the Western world where a child can throw a tantrum because they want to wear the yellow dress instead of the pink one, or because they like their sister’s shoes better than their own.

There is no spitting out your vegetables at Meru View. Every meal time, plates are licked clean, despite the fact that the two meals they receive at school are the same every day. On the Saturday we were out at the school, one of the girls said she was feeling sad that day. When we asked why, she said it was because she hadn’t had her porridge at Meru View. That’s when it dawned on us that if the school provides their only meals, on weekends the kids don’t eat at all.

All the children know that it’s an absolute privilege to receive an education. Here the kids cry when they can’t go to school, not the other way around. So many of the things we take for granted are new for them. We ran an art class with the three year olds (what they call ‘baby class’) and set out paints, textas, coloured pencils and butchers paper. When the kids just looked at us blankly, we realised that they had never seen paint before, and had never even used a coloured texta.

These are children that have barely enough to survive, let alone access to luxury items like paint, and yet they are happy, gracious and grateful.

The school runs entirely on donations and is managed by Vikki Thomas (pictured above with Paulina), a Nurse from the UK. Vikki is an inspiration herself. Following a gas bottle explosion where she suffered 67% burns to her face and body and lost a leg, she came to Africa to use her nursing skills to help others. She volunteers her time to manage the school and look after the children’s health. Vikki is The Dragonfly Collective’s latest Project Champion.

In the past few months, Meru View has lost a major donor. As a result, the school can no longer afford to provide vitamins to the children with their meals, and the budget for the meals program has been halved, meaning there is less food available for the kids. The school has also been forced to review the numbers of students they can support.

And so on behalf of the kids at Meru View we have two requests of you:

1. That you consider donating just $26, which will provide one month of food, medical care and education for a child at Meru View.
2. That you forward this request to your friends, family and colleagues.

We can guarantee that 100% of your donation will go directly towards feeding, educating and providing medical care to the children at Meru View. There are no administration fees to cover – Vikki, who manages the project, volunteers all her time, and any fees associated with international transfer of donations will be covered by The Dragonfly Collective.

If 63 people donate just $26, we will have funded the school for one full month, ensuring the kids receive vitamins and a full serve of food at meal times.

This is an incredibly worthy cause – we wouldn’t be asking for your support otherwise.

How to donate

The Dragonfly Collective will collect donations on behalf of Meru View. You can make a direct deposit into the below account. Please include your name in the payment details.

The Dragonfly Collective
Westpac Banking Corporation
BSB: 033039
Account number: 654029

The post Would you consider a $26 donation? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Tanzania is in comparison to many other developing countries in the two-thirds world making substantial gains for its people. In some areas there have been significant developments that will provide the basis for Tanzania to lift itself out of dependency and poverty. For example in 2010 Tanzania had achieved a 96% enrollment rate in primary school, however despite these steps forward one-third of Tanzanians still live below the poverty line and exist on less than $1 a day.

The experience of volunteering at a school for pre-primary school children who are from the poorest families or are orphans in the care of extended family members is an assault to many of the senses, even if you are ready for some first hand experience of poverty.  Access is through a village outside Arusha on a very uneven dirt road – basically impassable for motor vehicles but achievable on a motor bike – before arriving at a set of buildings called the Meru View Pre-Primary School that are fenced in by a concrete wall.

All the children are in school uniforms provided by the school. Some have no elbows in their jumpers and some have rips in their trousers, but they are all proudly clean and welcome visitors with hugs, wide smiles and bright curious eyes. There are four classes and two teachers amongst the 55 students. Pencils and exercise books are in very short supply and prized possessions. The playground is a rectangle area of dirt and there is no electricity, so the classrooms have limited light.

At this point we could say something about teaching conditions in schools back in Victoria Australia where a long-term dispute between the teacher’s union and the state government has been solved through a pay rise that collectively would run and develop the Meru View Pre-Primary School for a decade – but that would sound preachy and may piss people off so we should probably avoid saying it.

If you are still reading this let us go on to describe the costs involved. Around $16 a month provides a basic pre-school education for a child living with extreme poverty.  It provides porridge for breakfast and a lunch of rice and a mixture of beans and vegetables. For the majority of the children this is the most food they will eat for the day. The school provides pre-school education in English so these children will have a chance of passing the exam they need to sit to get into a good primary school and commence a pathway out of poverty on the basis of their own work and motivation. There are no ‘back-to-school’ subsidies here!

The school is run by local people for local people with the assistance of a fund established by a British nurse to support them. There are no administration fees and no additional costs because the founder of the funding body is the major donor. It was finally provided charitable status in the UK and acts only as a fund.

Imagine if all the Victorian school teachers gave $16 a year each to provide an education for a Tanzanian youngster aged between three and five so they got a shot at assisting themselves as well as their entire nation to move from dependency to self sustainability?

Or imagine if 55 people in Australia agreed to provide $16 a month each that would cover the costs of all the current school children? It would also allow the school to set up a kitchen and move out of the open air shed where meals are prepared each day on open wood fire and fresh and clean water is purchased from the neighbors through a hose and filled into large plastic buckets. Imagine if these 55 Australians were able to be absolutely sure that 100% of their money went directly to the project, not via a government or non-government funnel.

Like we said you can read all about it and come up with a hundred reasons why you don’t need to care, but when you experience it and you’re standing in the dust with a four year old holding your hand looking up at you with a smile . . . you can’t help but be moved to action.

We’ll be volunteering with the school for the coming three weeks and looking at ways to provide support for some of the basic necessities. If you’re interested in getting involved, please get in touch!

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