It was cold. It was night and pitch black outside, the only light from a portable lamp in the corner. It was a ‘meet and greet’ session with the men who each carried 20kg of our camping gear up the Inca Trail. A four day trek they make once a week, for a salary of $50AUD.

We had seen them on the trail, mostly looking at their backs as they ran past us, with packs four times as heavy as ours, to get to the camp sites early and make sure everything was setup by the time we arrived. They did this every day and they did it for the full 43 kilometres of the trail.

We had commented how fit and strong they were as they ran past us, but  hadn’t had the chance to speak to any of them. Now in the cramped, dimly lit tent, face to face, they were suddenly human.

Their faces were eager and curious. Some were very shy, keeping their eyes on the ground. They told us about their families and their hopes. It was only days before that we had met some of their families in the little village they called home, a stop off on our way to the Inca Trail to buy scarves and jumpers they knitted from alpaca wool.

Some were young – 16 the youngest. Some were much older, nearing 50. Just like us, some had families and partners and some didn’t. Some told us they were “still looking” for the right girl (and then asked who in the group was single!).

We had the chance to ask them questions, with our guide translating. My question was why they chose to be porters. On reflection, a question born from ignorance. The answer was, they had no choice. This was their only opportunity to earn enough income to afford to live.

Their questions for us were all the same. Where are you from, and how can we get there? They wanted to go to Australia, Canada, the UK – anywhere that would offer them more opportunity than Peru.

And that’s the key difference. Choice.

One of the things four months of travel taught me was the value of having the opportunity to choose the life you live. The country you are born into is pure chance. And yet it means some will always have choice, and for others, choice won’t exist.

Here we are, two Australians that waltzed into the UK and found work and an apartment in London within weeks of arriving. And here were 20 porters who will most likely never have the choice to do anything other than climb the Inca Trail each week, so that people like us have the opportunity to choose to climb it.

One of the saddest things we heard from the porters that night, was that most of them have never been able to finish the Inca Trail and see Machu Picchu. On day four of our the hike we stood watching in awe as the sun rose over a site that, for the porters, has huge spiritual significance, while they headed in the opposite direction, back down to catch the early trail to return all our camping gear.

That’s choice in action again.

On the one hand you could feel guilty for choosing to sit in a Parisian café, when you know those porters are probably walking the Inca Trail again today because it’s the only way to feed their family. On the other, you could get active and do something for all the porters of the world, whoever they may be. And they don’t just live in Peru, or Africa, or Latin America. You can find them in Australia, in the  UK, America, and Paris.

Some people will choose not to show empathy. For example one couple we walked the trail with chose not to tip these 20 men, and instead upgraded their plane ticket to first class on the trip back to Lima.

Maybe that’s where choice can be at it’s most powerful. When those of us who are privileged, make the choice to help others who are not.

The post What’s the value of choice? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Three hours, two coffees and one cupcake later we had a business plan written on a napkin for a new social venture that we could use to support others to enhance their impact, and design social change projects of our own. We launched in January 2012, and spent that year supporting NGOs and social enterprises in Australia to create justice for homeless people, people with disabilities, unemployed people and asylum seekers. But by the end of that year, we were still restless.

So in 2013 we decided to take a risk and make a change. We signed up for a Masters in Social Innovation based in Vienna, sold most of what we owned, packed our lives into two suitcases and spent four months travelling to 24 cities in 12 countries across Africa, Europe, North America, South America and Central America.

From the dusty and vibrant streets of Africa, to the charm of tiny cobblestone laneways in Europe, to the warm breeze blowing over the Caribbean coast. From hostels and spare rooms at friends places, to a tent pitched high in the Andes, to beach resorts. From the capital of the most powerful nation in the world, to the vast expanse of the Serengeti and the snow-covered peaks of Norwegian fjords.

It was a year of discovery, exploration and most importantly, learning.

We’ve learnt that a sense of community really matters, not only for individuals at a personal level, but also for driving change.

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how much is enough, and working out what that means for us. How to live simply and live well. How to find a balance between restraint and excess.

We’ve learnt about appreciating difference. About meeting new people ‘in-between’ cultures, without normative expectations, and with an enquiring mind, open to learning what they might have to teach (and we’ve learnt that everyone is a teacher).

We’ve learnt that taking a risk can stretch you, but it’s worth it.

But the most obvious lesson was that the human drive to ‘do good’ is universal – across cultures, languages, backgrounds and oceans. There are people all over the world with enormous motivation to fix systems that don’t work, to make sure others are taken care of, to ensure equity of access to the basic necessities of life.

We met people like Vikki in Tanzania, who after suffering 67% burns and losing a leg in a gas bottle explosion, took her nursing skills to a remote African village to help others. We met Michael in Vienna, who left a well-paid job to start Vollpension, a café that provides employment opportunities for older women on the pension. And we met an Italian, a Romanian, a German, a Swiss, and a Mexican in the Masters in Social Innovation, who each in their own way are working to make the world a better place. We have discovered in different places ordinary everyday people who are not just living their lives in a bubble, but are passionate about creating opportunities to heal the earth, care for people and change the world.

Looking ahead to 2014, we plan to take our learning to London and explore opportunities to setup our first UK project later this year.

We still have the napkin we scribbled on in the café the day we came up with the idea for The Dragonfly Collective. It’s a reminder for us that if you’re passionate about your vision, there is no beginning too small.

We hope 2014 brings inspiration, passion and opportunities for learning and action for all the change-makers working to create a better world for others.

There is a Chinese proverb we love that says: “those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it”. Don’t let others interrupt you from following a dream, taking a risk and changing the world (even just a small part of it).

Happy change-making in 2014!

The post Looking back, looking forward appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

These three tiny little islands (known collectively as ‘Cayman’) are surrounded on all sides by countries in varying degrees of poverty – Cuba to the north, Central America to the west and south, and other Caribbean islands to the east. Yet because of its role as a tax haven, Cayman is incredibly well-off.

These tiny unassuming little islands, stranded out in the middle of the sparkling Caribbean ocean, have become a key international financial district, and have reaped the financial rewards.

Cayman Island dollars are worth more than US dollars. Even the actual notes seem to be better made than most other currencies. The main street in the capital of Cayman is lined with diamond, jewellery and watch stores (and they’re not cheap!). Cayman even has a TV station called ‘Wealth’ proclaiming that “wealth unlocks the door to all life’s experiences”.

It’s interesting to consider what ‘wealth’ really means. And just how different it is across cultures.

Ask a Tanzanian what makes someone ‘wealthy’, and they may say a healthy crop of corn. Ask a Peruvian, and they may say a herd of alpacas that can be bred for their wool and meat. Ask a Caymanian (or many of the American tourists you will find lying on the beach there), and they are more likely to say a mansion, a yacht or a diamond necklace.

Years ago a friend of mine told me about a sailing trip she took with her husband to the Caribbean. At the time she and her husband had well paying, busy jobs in London and they saved so they could afford to travel. As they sailed through the turquoise waters, locals would approach them in canoes selling fresh fruit, hoping to make a few dollars, and would marvel at their beautiful sail boat. My friend said it made her wonder who was really richer – the people that earned executive salaries and could afford to sail to the Caribbean, but that lived stressful and busy lives, or the people who earned hardly anything by comparison, but were surrounded by natural beauty every day with no expectation of 9-5?

While access to money increases freedom by providing choice (perhaps some of the Caribbean locals actually hate the beach, and would prefer to live in the rain in London?), I’m not sure that money and wealth actually have a lot to do with each other.

Wealth is a mindset as much as anything else, and it’s also relative.

It’s interesting reflecting on our time in Africa. By comparison to the Cayman Islands and the rest of the Western world, Africa is far from wealthy in financial terms. But there is wealth of other kinds to be gained from living in a place that doesn’t beat to the rhythm of the capitalist drum.

In Tanzania we automatically lowered our expectations. In fact in general we didn’t have any expectations at all. We embraced a very simple lifestyle and stepped into sync with the slow pace of life. And it was surprisingly freeing.

When you don’t expect hot water, you aren’t annoyed when your shower is cold. When you only have one pair of jeans with you, you don’t waste an hour of your life deciding what to wear out. When you know that ‘soon’ can mean three hours later, you cool your jets and just wait.

When you stop striving for whatever version of ‘The Great Australian (capitalist) Dream’ you aspire to in order to become ‘wealthy’, you find that you’re no longer stressed about how close or far you are from achieving it. There is more room to breathe.

It’s the juxtaposition between places like Tanzania and Cayman that brings into sharp focus the absurdity of spending a lifetime working to enable you to consume to meet the Western ideal of wealth, when that doesn’t necessarily leave you ‘wealthy’.

The Africans and Peruvians were some of the happiest communities of anywhere we’ve visited. In that sense, they are incredibly wealthy. There were limited signs of the ‘diseases of excess’ (obesity and stress) that plague the Western world. So which countries are wealthier?

What if we altered our mental frameworks to embrace an idea of wealth beyond the image imprinted in our minds by the right wing capitalist media machine?

How freeing might that be? How much happier might we be, if we no longer had to strive for more, and more? And in increasing our happiness, how much wealthier might we become?

The post What makes us wealthy? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that what I actually love is being in between.

When you travel, you are always between cultures. No longer within the culture that you’ve grown up with, but neither are you part of the culture that you’re visiting. And in that open space lies the freedom of being released from cultural expectation.

Every culture contains behavioural norms (often unspoken and unacknowledged) that define the ‘way we do things around here’. When the cultural ‘code’ is removed, it can leave you feeling strangely uninhibited.

As a traveller you are taken just as you are, at that particular moment. Your identify is no longer reflective of a shared cultural framework that is understood by other members of a group. You’re always defining yourself afresh when you meet new people, on your own terms, without a set of shared cultural references.

Being in between cultures also gives you the opportunity to observe a culture with an inquisitive mind, and to think critically.

When you step outside your culture and sit for a while in others, it becomes natural to reflect and consider which cultural norms you accept, and which you would challenge. It also makes many cultural norms from your home country visible, whereas when you live within a culture, cultural values are so deeply embedded and taken for granted that often they are difficult to name.

We’ve noticed that people ask ‘why’ much more often when they’re travelling.

When you meet people from other countries, conversation naturally turns to the ‘way things are’ in the place they call home. Often to outsiders, the ‘way things are’ in a different place doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  It’s interesting that when the ‘why’ question comes up, it often leaves people wondering about the answer. Now that they think about it, why is it that things are the way they are?

We’ve observed with curiosity how actions that we take for granted vary across cultures.

We learnt that in Austria, you show thanks to a speaker in an informal setting not by clapping, but by tapping your hands on the table. We leant that in the Cayman Islands, you wave and say hello to every single person you see, but in Denmark, you don’t say hello to anyone.  We learnt that in Tanzania you cover your shoulders and knees in public, but in Cuba, nude sunbaking is quite acceptable. And we can’t even remember how many times you are meant to kiss someone on the cheek as a greeting in all the different places we’ve visited (it seems to range from one to four)!

It’s from the ‘in between’ vantage point that the norms of other cultures become not only quite fascinating, but highly visible.

The space of in between offers the opportunity to ask questions about other ways of life, especially your own. It allows you to learn from different ways of living. And it’s much easier as an outsider to see the cultural barriers that impede communities from thriving – to reflect on why things are they way they are, and whose interests that serves.

Perhaps being a ‘traveller’ is a culture in itself, always living in the space of in between with a curious mindset.

But perhaps there is also an opportunity for us to adopt some critical thinking in our own communities. That way we might have the chance to make some different choices, that are not only better for us, but for other members of our community.

Perhaps the first step is to ask a simple question – ‘why?’.

The post Living in between appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

If it wasn’t for the old stone ruins sitting on the hillsides, and the ever present images of Machu Picchu in the shop fronts of bookstores and tour companies, it would be hard to imagine that this world was previously governed by the once proud and powerful Inca nation.

Like so many countries around the world, hundreds of years ago Peru was ‘conquered’ by people from another land. In the case of Peru, it was the Spanish that marched into the high peaks of the Andes in the 1530s and spent the next 30 years wiping out the native Inca empire that stretched almost the entire Western coast of South America and numbered 10 million people at the time.

The Spanish considered the Incas barbarians, despite the observations of the Spanish Conqusitors that the buildings in the Inca empire were as grand and well constructed as those in Spain at the time, with massive stones locked together with such precision that a knife couldn’t fit between them. They observed that the Inca cities were well ordered, and the Inca leaders intelligent, fiercely brave and quick to learn.

These Inca ‘barbarians’ had developed a kingdom of stunning cities, including irrigation systems, agriculture, taxation systems and paved roads through the previously impassable Andes. Their society was flourishing and growing. In fact the Spanish discovered that there was an oversupply of production, where items from crockery to fabric to food were stored in large warehouses, and when the warehouses overflowed, the items were given away by the Inca leaders as gifts to the peasants.

As Kim Macquarrie notes in the book The Last Days of the Incas, the Incas succeeded in not only creating a massive empire, but more importantly guaranteeing all the empire’s millions of inhabitants the basic necessities of life – adequate food, water and shelter. This is an achievement that no subsequent Government – Spanish or Peruvian – has achieved since.

The Incas by no means had all the answers to developing a productive society (and displayed some cut-throat behaviour of their own in establishing their empire), but they weren’t doing too badly, even by European standards at the time.

As we walked through the peaks and valleys of the Andes, on the same roads the Incas had built hundreds of years earlier, the question running through our minds was – what is it about human nature that leads humans to the kind of destructive behaviour displayed by the Spanish? What is it that leads us to make the determination that our ideas, abilities, ways of life, are somehow ‘better’ than others?

It is clear that the Spanish sought to conquer the Incas primarily out of greed – for more wealth, more land, more prestige. The Inca empire was fabulously wealthy – rich in gold and silver. Each of the initial 180 Spanish Conquisitors walked away from their first plunder of the capital city of the Inca Empire (Cuzco) with 80 years worth of their salaries in gold and silver (literally ripped from the walls of the Palace of the Sun God – the European equivalent of the Vatican – to the horror of Cuzco’s inhabitants).

But embedded within the act of genocide and plunder must have been the assumption that there was nothing of value to retain in the Inca culture, and nothing the Spanish could learn.

This assumption is not unique to the Spaniards of the 1500s.

In a modern day setting, this type of arrogance occurs in not-for-profit organisational settings often – to the detriment of the local communities that these organisations seek to assist.

We met with a women in Washington DC who has spent years working with the justice system in America. She relayed the story of a meeting she attended, where four large not-for-profit groups were offered a multi-million dollar grant from the Government to develop a project to support people exiting prison. Everyone around the table felt it was a great opportunity and agreed they would be part of it. But within one hour of the meeting, every single group had called to say that they would only participate in the project if they were leading it. The end result? No deal.

Similarly, a panel at a conference for Baptist not-for-profit leaders we attended a few years back (that had just announced that they had decided to investigate opportunities for partnerships with other Christian denominations) was asked whether they had considered working with groups of others faiths, for example Jewish or Buddhist not-for-profit agencies. The response? Silence. Blank looks. Some looks of incredulity (who would even think of such a thing?). The answer was a resounding ‘no’.

What wasted opportunities. And for whose benefit?

So what is it about human nature that leads us to assume that we know best, are they only ones that can do best, and that we should have exclusive rights to whatever it is we think we’re best at?

What if, instead of being threatened by the knowledge or power of others, we sought to learn from it, in the process strengthening both our own ability to deliver positive community impact, as well as that of our partners?

What if the Spanish had sought to learn from the Incas, to replicate the best parts of the Inca culture back in Spain, and to share their knowledge with the Inca people? The native Peruvians actually greeted the first Spanish ship with gifts, and questions. Perhaps that’s the first lesson the Spanish could have learnt from the local people.

What would the Inca empire look like today, if it had been left in peace to flourish and develop alongside the rest of Europe? What might we be able to learn from the Incas, if their empire still existed?

Kim Macquarie ponders this question in his book, suggesting that had the Spanish allowed an Inca Emperor to govern the last remaining Inca province in Peru (Vilcabamba) alongside the Spanish, then perhaps today the kingdom of Vilcabamba might be represented at the United Nations with a Quechua speaking ambassador. The same tourists who visit Machu Picchu every day might have the chance to visit a functioning Inca capital, perhaps learning about ancient Inca techniques such as stone cutting.

The question ultimately comes back to the idea of a ‘common good’. Working together for shared benefit. There are many great examples where this is occurring, on both a micro and macro level. And we want to encourage more of it.

Let’s not continue to display the same arrogance as the Spanish Conquisitors, who in their short-sighted greed, destroyed an enormous amount of valuable Inca intellectual capital. Perhaps a little humility and a cooperative spirit could be our first lesson.

The post To conquer or collaborate? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

How do you go out for a nice dinner, when you know you’ve just eaten two months salary for one of the African teachers who so openly welcomed you into their school?

How do you leave food on your plate, when you’ve held the hands of the smiling children who only receive two meals at school and nothing else, meaning no dinner, and no food at all on weekends?

How do you invest in a piece of art, when you’ve volunteered with kids that have never seen paint before, and never even used a coloured texta?

Faced with varying degrees of poverty in Tanzania, where like all societies there are different income levels and some have more than others, how do you live when you return to the Western world, where poverty appears to be quite relative and most have so much in abundance?

How do you benchmark what is enough and what is excess? Two shirts or five shirts – or as one colleague I worked with once said “five suits in my wardrobe – one for each day of the week”.

There are no ‘preachy’ answers to my mind. To make people feel guilty about what they have because others have so astonishingly little does not produce much more than guilt . . . and then guilty anger.

But the facts of the matter cannot really be avoided.

As Clive Hamilton, Richard Dennis and David Barker documented some years ago (Wasteful Consumption in Australia, 2005), Australians are becoming addicted to consumption. And not for the pleasure of owning and using an item, but for the thrill of the purchase – actually consuming goods bought is secondary and may not take place at all. Despite this, most Australians believe that they don’t have enough money to meet all of their needs, including half of those on the highest incomes.

Wasteful consumption (funds spent on goods and services that are never or very rarely used) in Australia amounts to over $10.5 billion dollars annually (not including wasted consumption on excessively large houses, rarely used holiday homes, caravans and second cars). By way of comparison, this amount exceeds spending by Australian governments on universities and roads.

In 2004 Australians threw away $2.9 billion of fresh food, $630 million of uneaten take-away food, $876 million of leftovers, $596 million of unfinished drinks and $241 million of frozen food, a total of $5.3 billion on all forms of food. This represents more than 13 times the $386 million donated by Australian households to overseas aid agencies in 2003.

When you visit Africa and see first hand how little people have, these facts become quite disgusting. Especially when you’ve met some of the people and seen their gratitude and the joy they take in the simple things.

We were out at a local school in Tanzania helping distribute one new set of clothes to each of the kids (which the school does twice a year). The clothes were a hotch potch of second hand items, some a little wrinkled, some not quite the right size. And every single child accepted what they were offered with absolute joy. Some would look up at you with a shy smile and say “thank you teacher”.

Compare this 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 in Africa. At school meal times, plates are licked clean, even though the meal is same rice and beans every day. And in Africa, children know that education is a privilege not everyone gets. Here children cry when they can’t go to school, not the other way around.

While making people feel guilty really does not motivate people to long-term commitment and sustainable action over the long-haul, that should not deter us from naming greed where there is clear evidence it exists.

Is Australia more the ‘greedy’ country than the ‘lucky country’? For some it is way more lucky than for others obviously. Not every one gets to enjoy fine dining at Vue de Mond – which interestingly is French for ‘view of the world’. What worldview does it generate up there on the top of the Rialto Centre in Melbourne? (Disclaimer: we have dined at Vue de Mond and its reputation for excellence is well deserved – luckily we were not paying!).

This is precisely the dilemma we need to grapple with. What view of the world do we have? In the face of so much opulence and consumer driven materialism – how does one live back in western society when one has experienced a little of life in Tanzania?

Perhaps a start is to seriously consider the facts about consumption in Australia and maybe live with a view of the world that includes generosity, regulates greed and moderates wasteful consumption.  To live mindfully not mindlessly.

The post What comes after Africa? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

We’ve come across some exceptional projects that are making a significant impact for the local community. There is the School of St Jude, established ten years ago with three students, that now caters for 1,600 of the poorest and smartest children in the region, funded entirely by donations. There is also the Shanga Shop, a social enterprise employing local people with physical disabilities to make glassware, jewellery and clothes from recycled items.

Both of these projects are flourishing. But unfortunately they are rare. The majority of the projects we’ve visited are at best struggling to operate, and at worst slightly questionable in their intentions.

There is the women’s refuge, the only one of its kind in Arusha. It provides housing, food and fees to cover education for women who have been abused or abandoned by their families. It’s an incredibly inspiring and very well organised project, but at the moment they only have enough funds to cover the next two weeks of operations.

There is a local school providing primary education (a combination of free education and fee-paying students), where all income from school fees and donations is deposited into the personal bank account of the Principal. When you find out that all the teachers, including the Principal, where given pay rises last month, while some of the classrooms don’t even have roofs yet (apparently due to a lack of funds) you can’t help but question what’s really going on.

There is the hostel for volunteers designed to link volunteers with local projects, which in theory is a fabulous idea. But there is no volunteer management plan – ‘volunteers’ are dropped at a project and end up standing in the middle of a school yard with no direction about what support is needed and how they might assist. And some are wondering why local services recommended by the hostel appear to cost double the price of services that have been arranged from elsewhere (taxis being one case in point).

Amongst all that you’re left feeling slightly uneasy, and a little overwhelmed by the need. You get the sense that there is some kind of missing link, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Why wouldn’t the NGO sector in Arusha be flourishing?

There is no shortage of great intentions. There are numerous small start-up organisations around the Arusha region attempting to address a multitude of challenges from access to education, to supporting abused women to housing orphans.

There is no shortage of obvious need – it lurks on every street corner. There is the man that follows us home most days attempting to sell us Australian coins. There are the people wheeling around carts of scrap plastic and metal they’re hoping to sell. There are the kids that don’t attend school and spend their days running around the villages.

There is no shortage of people that are willing to contribute either. There are many passionate and committed volunteers in Tanzania, many supporting multiple projects. And the fundraising success that some projects have had indicates that there is no shortage of people willing to donate, if you know where to look.

But it seems that there is work to be done in connecting the dots. Connecting good intentions, with evidence-based need, with people who are willing to offer time and funding.

And there is the added complication of low levels of trust in the community, born from poverty that leads to desperation. As a ‘muzungo’ (a white person) you often feel like a walking dollar sign and never really know if you’re being taken for a ride. Even amongst locals there are difficulties. The schools we’ve been working with lock everything up at night, including their chickens, because whatever is left unsecured will be stolen.

The lack of efficiencies is also a challenge. The locals operate on what they call ‘Africa time’. There is a saying in Africa – ‘pole pole’- which means ‘slowly slowly’. ‘Soon’ in Africa can mean three hours later, and apparently in Africa you’re doing well if you get one thing done per day. It took us two entire mornings just to get one quote for a new chicken coop for one of the schools.

In that environment, how do you build a sustainable and impactful project that fights poverty and oppression? In the face of all the challenges, do you give up? Crawl into a foetal position and say it’s all too hard? Never.

There are two obvious opportunities from our perspective. One is strategic and business planning (including financial, marketing and fundraising planning). The majority of projects have no strategic plan, no business plan, no articulated mission or vision statement, and all are in desperate need of funding. Some don’t even keep records of accounts. When we asked the Principal at one school for a copy of her books, she brought us a piece of paper where she had hand written the cost of the items she purchased last month.

Without a strategic plan and a clear mission that sets priorities, everything becomes a good idea. When it became clear to us that we weren’t going to get any guidance on what kind of volunteer support we could offer at the projects we visited, we started to make our own suggestions. Would you like a new chicken coop? Yes please! Would you like a vegetable garden? Absolutely! What about new school books for the kids? Of course! Could we support you with fundraising, or teaching assistance, or sports activities, or painting or building a new shelf? Yes to everything. Which leaves you not really knowing where to start.

The other opportunity is collaboration and partnerships between NGOs. In the time we’ve been here we haven’t come across any partnership models. The projects don’t seem to be aware of how many or what type of other organisations are operating in their space. There is no real need for a ‘competitor analysis’ in the sense that demand for services well and truly exceeds supply, but there is a seemingly obvious opportunity for NGOs with similar missions to strengthen each other through collaboration and shared learning.

Filling those two gaps alone could make a significant impact for a lot of the projects we’ve visited.

A friend of ours who works at The School of St Jude made the wise comment that the need in Africa is overwhelming, and that’s why you need to pick one project (one clearly defined need) and stick to making an impact in that space.

We couldn’t quite narrow it down to one, but we have narrowed it down to two projects that we plan to support long term (more will follow in upcoming blogs). One project we will work with on a bro-bono basis to develop a strategic plan, marketing plan and fundraising plan, and to look into options for collaboration with other similar NGOs. The other we will be supporting with direct financial assistance.

It’s easy to become disenfranchised in Africa, particularly when you arrive with high hopes about the contribution you can make. But that doesn’t mean you should give up. Through long-term partnerships with two projects, we’re hoping we can make a focused impact in working for a more just world – pole pole.

The post How do you fight poverty in Africa? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Compare this to the people we’ve met in the hostel for volunteers in Tanzania, where people have travelled from all corners of the globe specifically to make a contribution to some of the poorest communities in the world.

There is the group of students from Julliard in New York, visiting a series of local schools to perform for the kids and teach them to sing and dance. Next week they will put on a performance for the community to raise funds for the projects they’ve visited.

There is the Australian who has just finished university who has spent the last year saving everything she can for the opportunity to volunteer in Africa. She spent the last week preparing a vegetable garden and a new chicken coop at a local pre-primary school for kids that can’t afford to pay for education. For many of these kids the two simple meals they receive at the school will be the only thing they eat all day.

There is the nurse from the UK who first visited Africa years ago, and when she saw the level of poverty and need, decided to work with one of the local schools long term. She has since assisted the school to move into new buildings, install running water, increase the number of students the school caters for and who funds the project herself.

Clearly there are many people across the world committed to justice who are willing to put their time and money where their mouth is. But why is it that so many others either choose to close their eyes and ears to the suffering of others, or simply aren’t interested in doing anything about it? How do you engage the minds of the middle class in Western society to understand that there is more to travel (and more to life) than taking happy snaps and eating ice-cream while walking down a boulevard surrounded by other tourists?

The photography exhibition at the Nobel Peace Museum included some work from a young woman from Berlin, who had used photography to capture the idea that our identity is concealed somewhere between a blue screen and the Hollywood hills, and unravels somewhere between advertising and theme parks. If Western identities are created in this way, always in reference to Hollywood, the media and advertising that is all designed to support a capitalist system that’s anti critical thought, it’s no wonder that so many people look but don’t see, and listen but don’t hear.

We were reading an article in the global edition of the Herald Tribune a few weeks ago about the difficulties that Barak Obama (who as an aside was the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize) is currently having in getting the Republicans to cooperate to introduce much needed reforms, such as background checks for the purchase of guns. Obama made the comment that it wasn’t his job to get the Republicans to behave – they were elected members of Congress and should act accordingly. The author suggests that actually, it’s exactly Obama’s job to get them to behave – it’s called leadership.

Perhaps it is up to the people who are passionate about justice to educate and inspire others to act in the interests of a common humanity. And there are many inspiring leaders doing just that. But when two American tourists are face to face with the opportunity to learn about some truly remarkable change-agents, and then dismiss it as of less value than dinner at a Western restaurant that they could find back home, where does that leave us?

We came across the term ‘verdensborgeren’ in Olso, that means ‘citizen of the world’. Let’s dream big for a minute. Imagine if every person in the world considered themselves to be a verdensborgeren, and within that framework was genuinely committed to the ‘common good’ where the whole is only as strong as the weakest link. What impact would that have on some of the major challenges the world is still facing in the 21st century, like poverty for example?

Effectively shifting unspoken (and unconscious?) values and norms that are constantly reinforced by the lumbering capitalist machine in Western culture (and increasingly across the rest of the world) is incredibly difficult. But the more of us that speak up, the greater the impact we can have. When you’re face to face with poverty in Africa, it only reinforces just how far we have to go as a collective of world citizens to achieve justice and equity for everyone.

But as Winston Churchill said – never, never, never give up. We don’t plan to.

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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!

The post Social innovation in Tanzania for $16 a month appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

But when you scratch the surface, there are some interesting cultural differences.

There are hardly any beggars here. Unlike other cities, where you will find homeless people sleeping on the footpath or asking strangers for spare change, in the week we were in Stocholm we saw only two people shaking a cup of coins asking for change, and both appeared to be Romani (gypsies) rather than residents of the city.

While in other large cities it’s common to see an old plastic bag or a McDonald’s wrapper tumbling along the street, caught in the breeze from the passing traffic, in Stockholm the streets are clean. There is no graffiti. The gardens are perfectly manicured, and at the moment, the city is splashed with the colour of new spring flowers.

There are no houses (at least not in the traditional Australian sense), and not a backyard in sight. People live in apartment blocks, and their ‘backyard’ is the large open community parks, gardens and squares that are dotted throughout the city. Rather than sprawling suburbs where people isolate themselves behind their white picket fences, it’s a communal life where public outdoor space is shared and enjoyed.

Like most Western cities there are people of all races and cultures, but in Stockholm there are no areas of the city that appear to be dedicated to particular ethnic groups (like China Town in Melbourne for example). People of all cultures appear to have integrated into one shared community without particular ethnic norms and values governing the culture of separate pockets of the city.

And just as in most cities, by around mid morning the streets and parks fill up with parents pushing prams, enjoying the sunshine and the crisp cool air. What’s unusual in Stockholm is that there are just as many men doing this as women.

It’s a community that really appears to work. It’s ordered, clean, open and friendly.

What I’ve now learnt is that this is known as the ‘Swedish Model’. Fundamental to the understanding of Swedish society is that every citizen should have equal access to medical assistance, housing, education and job opportunities, made possible through even distribution of wealth across the community (regulated by the Government in the form of taxes).

The Swedish model is a compromise between social democratic rule and a widespread privately owned industrial sector – a middle ground between unlimited private capitalism and a socialist planned economy.

Since the Great Depression, Swedish politics has been dominated by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. As a result of that there is a focus on even distribution of wealth (or a redistribution of wealth to lower income earners) and sharing of community resources for the common good.

The country operates on a Keynesian model where taxes are high (among the highest in the world actually at up to 57%!) and the Government takes a very active role in regulating society. But in return for this, everyone is taken care of. And a tangible expression of this is evident in the way the community operates.

You don’t see beggars or homeless people on the street because people don’t need to beg. The Government covers 97% of medical costs, and when a person is declared ill by a Physician, they receive a percentage of their wage until they are declared fit again. University tuition is free. There is affordable housing for those that can’t afford their own apartment, but there are no ‘ghettos’ or high-rise public housing blocks. Here affordable housing is integrated seamlessly and invisibly into city life.

People are happy to use open public spaces as their ‘backyard’, because public space is perfectly maintained, and quite beautiful in fact.

Different ethnicities mix because of Sweden’s generous asylum seeker policies and attitude towards immigrants. The Government provides asylum seekers with accommodation in self-catering apartments spread across the city when they arrive if they cannot arrange it for themselves. In addition, a daily allowance is supplied to cover food and medical care, and asylum seeker children are entitled to education under the same conditions as residents of Sweden. Asylum seekers and migrants are welcome in Sweden as ‘one of us’, eliminating some of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality that exists in other countries and can lead to racial tension or vilification.

You see fathers walking their babies in the middle of the day because in Stockholm, parents are provided with 16 months of paid paternity/maternity leave per child at 80% pay.

It’s much more of a socialist model, and it appears that it’s working. Sweden is at the top of international ranking lists both in terms of economic clout and quality of life.

There must be something that other countries can learn here.

In a Government model where focus is placed on the common good, when surplus wealth is redistributed to lower income earners, when people of all cultures are welcomed, the end result is an inclusive, trusting and welcoming community that looks after each other.

Creating this type of community is not wishful thinking as a result of being too idealistic (as I used to be told by a previous manager) – Sweden provides an example of a ‘common good’ model working in practice. That’s not to say that Sweden hasn’t also had its difficulties, but overall its managed to build a country with a unique, prosperous and enviable culture and lifestyle.

In a Western world dominated by capitalism, individualism, and greed from those who already have more than they need, a little bit more idealism and an active focus on the common good couldn’t do us any harm. In fact, it’s absolutely crucial in addressing some of the biggest challenges of our times.

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