Tiny Living (and Shotgun Shacks)

Every now and then there’s a huge spike in traffic to my blog. In one case it was because @cblatts linked to a post of mine. But most of the time it’s not because people are actually looking for me. It’s something even better. They are searching for the term “shotgun shack.”

What’s a shotgun shack? Wikipedia gives this history and definition:

‘The shotgun house is a narrow rectangular domestic residence, usually no more than 12 feet (3.5 m) wide, with doors at each end. It was the most popular style of house in the Southern United States from the end of the American Civil War (1861–65), through the 1920s. Alternate names include shotgun shack, shotgun hut, and shotgun cottage.’

Wikipedia says that the style can be traced from Africa to Haitian influences on home design in New Orleans, but that shotgun shacks are found all over the US. The homes became a symbol of poverty in the mid 1900s.

‘Shotgun houses consist of three to five rooms in a row with no hallways. The term “shotgun house”, which was in use by 1903 but became more common after about 1940, is often said to come from the saying that one could fire a shotgun through the front door and the pellets would fly cleanly through the house and out the back door (since all the doors are on the same side of the house).^{[citation needed]} Another reputed source of the name is that many were built out of crates, e.g. old shotgun-shell crates, and those made for other purposes. However, the name’s origin may actually reflect an African architectural heritage, perhaps being a corruption of a term such as to-gun, which means “place of assembly” in the Southern Dohomey Fon area.^[2]‘

Midwestern rocker John Mellencamp’s song Pink Houses alludes to shotgun shacks. It’s a bit on the sarcastic side and makes commentary on rural hardships in the US: “Ain’t that America for you and me, ain’t that America somethin’ to see baby, ain’t that America, home of the free, yeah. Little pink houses for you and me….” And the killer line near the end:  ”Cause it’s the simple man baby, pays the bills, the thrills, the pills that kill”

The Talking Heads song ‘Once in a Lifetime‘ directly references shotgun shacks and it’s where I took the name for my blog. The song captures a feeling I get often when moving around in the world of aid and development. I’ve found myself waking up in a shotgun shack one morning and then heading to the US to visit my parents in their middle class houses that feel absolutely palatial and luxurious in comparison. Or spending a couple of weeks eating rice and ‘leaves’ and an occasional egg in a rural community but being wined and dined at some donor meeting the following week.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here?

But people searching for shotgun shack these days are not looking for me or for those songs for the most part.

Nope. They are looking for information on how to build their own shotgun shack either because they are unable to pay for their current home given the economic downturn in the US or they are making a clear decision to downsize, prioritize and live more simply. (Or a smart combination of both).

For example this story: ‘…Debra and her family lived in a nearly 2000 square foot home on an acre and a half of land. Then her husband lost his job and they began to work 4 jobs between them to pay the mortgage, until one day they remembered they had a choice.

Before having their son, Debra and her husband Gary had spent 9 years living in very tiny homes in South America. Living small hadn’t felt like a sacrifice, but a way to stay focused on what is important. They decided they wanted to get back to that.

They stopped working so hard, sold or gave away all of their extra stuff and began looking for the perfect tiny home.’

I discovered this weekend that ‘tiny homes’ is actually a whole movement, thanks to a tweet by @blakehounshell pointing to the Tiny Life: Tiny Houses, Tiny Living blog.

According to the site, Tiny Living encompasses:

• Tiny Houses
• Life Simplification
• Environmental Consciousness
• Self Sufficiency
• Sound Fiscal Plans
• Social Consciousness

A pretty cool movement. So if you’ve arrived here looking for me, great – read on! But if you arrived by accident looking for info on shotgun shacks or tiny houses, head over to Tiny Life and get your tiny living on.

Holes

I made my first trip home to the Midwest after I’d lived out of the US for about 2 years. I wasn’t yet an ‘expat aid worker‘ but I had married a ’local’. My husband and I lived minimally, surviving on his salary. Neither of us was on the front lines by any means, but the war in his country had only recently ended and things were still on edge, so we lived a bit on edge too.

This trip home was a classic example of so-called ‘reverse culture shock.’ Before my 2 years in my husband’s country, I’d been on the West Coast for almost 5 years. So being back in my mid-sized, middle class, Midwestern home town was a trip. People were big. They shopped in bulk. They ate large portions. They drove everywhere. They loved the mall, super-sized stores and fast food restaurants. The women had big hair, summer tans and gold jewelry. The fruit at the supermarket was big and fake looking. When you got it home, it was flavorless. Buildings were closed up, air-conditioned, sterile. The houses were sided or nicely painted, the lawns square and manicured. Streets were wide with multiple lanes. People drove shiny new cars and minivans. I felt a bit like I’d stepped into the Black Hole Sun video….

On the one hand, sleeping under a down comforter in a chilled, quiet room with venetian blinds drawn meant I didn’t wake up with the sunrise and the roosters, and that was nice. My feet didn’t get dusty when I walked around outside. There was a washing machine, a dryer and a dishwasher. There were no mosquitoes or roaches or any other bugs in the house. The streets weren’t jammed with buses and cars beeping, revving engines or blowing out clouds of black smoke. I could watch old episodes of my favorite childhood shows on Nickelodeon, and they weren’t even dubbed. My mom made my favorite meals. You could drink water from the faucet. There was an abundance of cheese, real butter, green salads, and the chocolate didn’t taste like flavored wax. I didn’t worry about being assaulted — or worse.

On the other hand, I felt like a stranger.

I remember my mother complaining about how my younger brother was wrecking the house and didn’t care. The house didn’t look wrecked to me at all. It looked just how it had always looked, and it was about a thousand times nicer than where I lived with my husband. ”Come in here and look at this!” she said. “He put a hole in the carpet.”

We were having a conversation about a hole in the carpet?

I followed her into the room where the hole was. ”It’s right here….” She scanned the floor for the hole. She couldn’t find it. She knelt down and ran her hand along the carpet, feeling for the hole. “Ah! Here it is. Look at this!” I looked at the small tear in the carpet and made what I hoped were appropriate comments. I felt closed and distant. I was angry at her for complaining. Did she have any idea that most people in the world didn’t even have carpet? And she was upset over a small hole?

I couldn’t relate my mom, or anyone else really. I didn’t know where to start when they asked what it was like where I lived. Most people had no idea where the country I lived in was located, what language was spoken there, or that there had been a war there that they were funding with their tax dollars. My grandmother wanted to know if we had toilet paper over there. It took too much effort to explain and contextualize. My self-righteousness ran high.

One of my best friends from college came out from the West Coast to see me for a few days. She at least knew her geography, wars, history and US foreign policy. But it took us awhile to find some common ground. I had my young child with me. I wasn’t as hip as I used to be. She talked about how she didn’t have her dream job yet, that it was hard for people our age to get going on a career. She talked about her aspirations to be something or someone special. I tried to find a way to relate, but it was hard. Where I lived most people didn’t have big career dreams and aspirations, they felt lucky to have some kind of income.

It was her first time in the Midwest and she was culturally shocked too. Things mostly just made her laugh in dismay. She found the Midwest ‘scary’ and Republican. We had often gone vintage clothing shopping in college, so we took a day trip away from my home town out to some smaller rural towns to check out the thrift stores. They normally sat on desolate Main Streets alongside little diners, variety stores, quirky craft boutiques and secondhand bookshops. She took black and white photos of the 1950s style storefronts, the old-fashioned signs for ice cream and hot dogs, and the church signboards with crooked or missing white letters that urged sinners to come in and be saved. We ate French fries and grilled cheeses and drank lemonade at one of the diners. A friendly old man in a baseball hat and overalls tipped his hat and held the door open for us, chatting us up in his slightly Southern accent.

After I got back home to my husband, my friend sent me some cassettes of her favorite bands, things she knew I’d like. She explained in the enclosed letter that one of the bands was fronted by Courtney Love, the wife of the lead singer from Nirvana. The band was called Hole.

I was excited to have some new music from an old friend. I popped Hole into the cassette player. Teenage Whore… Babydoll… Garbadge Man… It sounded harsh and ugly to me. My husband made faces. ‘Why are you listening to that?’ I pressed stop, annoyed at him, yet I couldn’t explain why I was listening to it. I wanted to defend myself, my college friend and Hole, but I had nothing to say.

For the next several weeks, when he was out of the house, I listened to Hole over and over, trying to learn to like it, trying to hang on to bits of my old self.

The forest, the trees, and the shoes (of course)

I was waaaaay up in the mountains of Honduras, in a remote rural community. My colleague was with me. It was her first time traveling outside of the US. We were visiting a housing project that a major donor had been supporting over the past several years. He wanted some pictures and a first hand report, since we were going to be in Honduras anyway.

It was the rainy season. We spent several hours on narrow, winding roads pitted with deep potholes. We got stuck in the mud once and the driver offered us his umbrella to stand under while he dug the car out. We drove through small rivers. Everything was green and red-brown. The houses were of clay and thatch. They blended in beautifully with the countryside. Unfortunately the insects that spread Chagas disease live in thatch, and breed in the walls and roofs of these types of homes. Chagas is a big problem in much of Honduras, and was one reason for the housing project we were going to see.

The community was quite happy to have us. Visitors from the outside were a rarity. They invited us around to see their homes, clearly there was a lot of pride going on. We gathered in a circle, some of us sitting on plastic chairs, under a big tree as the sun came out from behind the rolling clouds. The housing project committee explained how they had put in all the manual labor, they had organized for the material purchases, and they had worked with los señores ingenieros to agree on housing designs.

Mothers told us that now, because they had cement floors, they were sending their children to school. We were confused for a minute. What did a housing project have to do with children attending school? The mothers explained that they had been unable to keep anything (or anyone) clean before, because of the mud floors. But now they were able to keep school uniforms and shoes clean and ready for school, so they were not embarrassed to send their children off to school over in the next community.

Now that the housing project was complete, the community wanted to negotiate funding from the donor for a water project. They would be able to plant two times a year instead of once if they could tap into an irrigation system. They showed us the feasibility studies that they had managed to get done. They invited us inside the community president’s home to eat giant portions of turnips they had recently harvested, telling us how they could double production if the water system could be funded.

The community was animated. They were in a tough situation, but they were moving ahead. I felt really motivated.

As we drove away, I looked over at my colleague. She was in tears, upset by the poverty she’d seen. ’Oh! Did you see the children?’ she said. ‘Some of them weren’t wearing any shoes!’

Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

*****

This post is part of the Day Without Dignity Campaign, a counter-campaign to Tom’s Shoes Day without Shoes Campaign.

Instead of going barefoot for a day to ‘raise awareness’ (eg., to promote Tom’s and reinforce the idea that poor people are helpless victims), why not do some research and donate the amount you’d spend on a pair (or 2) of Tom’s shoes to a good organization that does something concrete to support people to achieve their own goals though their own dignified efforts?

Doublethink

I started reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four over the year-end holidays. So far I’ve only gotten through the 2003 foreword by Thomas Pynchon, the annex on Newspeak, and the first 5 pages of the book.

Pynchon is perhaps best known for The Crying of Lot 49, another book I need to read. Strangely, I can’t remember if I’ve read either 1984 or Lot 49 already.

Pynchon’s foreword alone has me fascinated. I’m going to enjoy (or maybe simply be depressed about) finding parallels between Orwell’s 1984 and life in 2011, I can already tell.

Some interesting bits in Pynchon’s forward include:

Doublethink and cognitive dissonance

Pynchon says, “there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking, in which words like ‘democracy’ can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously….

“We recognize this ‘sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking’ as a source for one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse — the identification and analysis of doublethink…. Doublethink is a form of mental discipline whose goal…is to be able to believe two contradictory truths at the same time. This is nothing new, of course. We all do it. In social psychology it has long been known as ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Others like to call it ‘compartmentalization.’ Some, famously F. Scott Fitzgerald, have considered it evidence of genius….”

Doublethink in government entities

In 1984, “Doublethink also lies behind the names of the superministries which run things… the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures…. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problems with a war-making apparatus named the ‘Department of Defense,’ any more than we have saying ‘Department of Justice’ with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI.”

Doublethink in the media

Pynchon goes on to say that “Our nominally free news media are required to represent ‘balanced’ coverage, in which every ‘truth’ is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed ‘spin’ as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time — it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever.”

Doublethink now

Obviously the current US (and every other) government system uses doublethink in pretty much every way, shape and form, regardless of the party in power.

And consider the reactions in the US to similar yet somehow different situations and events. I don’t say this to be offensive, but I’ve heard these arguments thrown out to counter each other:

• Can we blame the horrible killings at Colombine on Marilyn Manson? Can we blame the horrible shootings of an Arizona congresswoman and others on Sarah Palin?
• Should the NRA hold a conference in Colombine? Should a mosque be built near the site of 9/11?
• What does Internet freedom mean in Iran and China. What does it mean in the US (hello Wikileaks).
• What about support for Cote d’Ivoire post election vs. support for today’s Sudan referendum?
• What about abortion being right and the death penalty wrong… or the death penalty being right and abortion wrong.

Certainly context and nuance need to be taken into consideration in each of these cases, but context and nuance are usually colored by our own subjective belief systems. We tend to do a lot of doublethink as a nation and as people living within political systems in general.

I won’t even go into the Tea Party movement’s doublethink. And if you are a Tea Party supporter reading this, certainly you’ll list off doublethink that you see in the beliefs of Democrats.

Doublethink in aid and development

Shortly after reading Pynchon’s foreword, I read this interview where Ben Ramalingam talks about complexity and aid. About two-thirds of the way down, Ben is asked How well do aid organizations operate in complex environments? and he responds:

“One of the most interesting complexity perspectives is the idea that has come out of Rosalind Eyben’s recent work at the Institute of Development Studies. Ros used to run DFID country offices across Latin America and was also the DFID chief of social development, and her argument is that…a number of people in aid agencies do deal [with] complex, non-linear, realities on a daily basis, but they do it under the radar, below the wire, away from the watchful eyes of head offices….

But these same people also have to spend a huge amount of time filtering complexity, making their good work fit the hungry machine, to feed what Andrew Natsios has called the aid counter-bureaucracy, which increasingly demands positive numbers and simple narratives.

People always talk about the challenge of speaking truth to power, the ongoing Wikileaks is just the latest and highest profile manifestation. But in our sector, there may be as much of need to get power to speak truth. Andrew Natsios could only speak out about the complexity of aid, and the idea that measurability was inversely proportional to development relevance – his words, not mine – when he was no longer in USAID. While he ran USAID he couldn’t say that – he perpetuated, perhaps even strengthened – the counter-bureacratic system. Why? There is a real, unspoken, but intensely felt, human cost to living with this level of cognitive dissonance.”

Doublethink isn’t only happening at USAID and other large institutional funding agencies. What about doublethink when it comes to marketing vs programs? What about corporate social responsibility doublethink?

So what’s up with Doublethink?

Is mastering doublethink a necessary survival skill in today’s world, a sign of genius as F. Scott Fitzgerald said? Or is doublethink something that needs to be overcome by speaking truth to power and pushing power to speak truth?

Swimming Lessons

YMCA pool

When I was in 4th and 5th grade, my mom signed me up to go to the YMCA after school. In the dead of winter.

A bus would come to my Catholic grade school and take us over to the Y every day after school for 2 weeks. 2 miserable weeks. Each year I was signed up for the same three 45-minute sessions: gymnastics, swimming and crafts.

After gymnastics, I’d go over to swim. I’d sit on the edge of the pool, lips blue, teeth chattering, body shuddering. Only when the instructor scolded me in front of everyone would I get in the water and swim to the other side or try to do the dead man’s float for the longest 1 minute ever. I remember swimming as cold and scary and feeling very small and vulnerable.

Once swim was over, I had 5 minutes to rush, still shivering, dripping wet, over to the humid, chorine-y smelling locker room, and yank my clothes on over my wet skin to try to get warm as soon as possible. From there, it was to the craft room to make some kind of something or other out of yarn and popsicle sticks, and then the bus ride back to the school parking lot.

And then, the interminable freezing cold trudge home in the near dark, with my heavy backpack and still wet hair, to do my paper route and my homework.

I’m not much of a swimmer to this day.

****

Rock Classic Hotel pool by day

Fast forward to the Rock Classic Hotel in Tororo, Uganda, some years later. I was with a group of US and Ugandan kids on an exchange trip. It was the first time they’d met. Their English was so different that none of them could understand each other very well. Things were pretty quiet and stiff.

The second night was balmy, so we decided to hang out by the pool. It was my night for adult chaperone duty. The hotel was empty except for our group. The night guard put his radio out for us. The tinny sound was small in the quiet of the night, the stars in full force, and the big Rock that gives the hotel its name still visible through the dark in the distance.

Most of the kids didn’t actually want to get in the water, but one of the American girls, E., realized that one of the Ugandan girls, J., did. So E. jumped in the pool. J. followed suit, but she hadn’t ever been in a swimming pool before. It didn’t occur to her that a pool is different from a river. A swimming pool is deep.

She jumped in and went under. She panicked. Before I could even get out of my chair, E. had her in a gentle embrace and was floating with her over to the shallow end.

The two girls, spent the rest of evening together in the pool, E. showing J. how to float, holding her in her strong arms so she would feel safe. A totally different kind of swimming lesson than what I ever had: warm, caring, physically secure.

The rest of us drank sodas and mineral water by the side of the pool and listened to the radio. The dancing started. Two of the Ugandan kids were not supposed to dance due to their religion. Two of the US kids were too cool to dance. But within a couple songs, they were all in a circle together, swaying at least a little bit, and singing and doing campy poses to Michael Jackson.

The laughter had started, the barriers had lowered, and by the next morning it was like they had known each other forever.

Caught between Growing Up and Waking Up

As I get older I’m trying to mature. To not harbor the younger rebellious me’s feelings about the injustices of how things are set up. To understand the give and take of the real world. To realize that “that’s how the world works” and “the poor will always be with us”. To remember that it’s bad to take an us vs. them approach. To realize that we need the wealthy and the corporations as partners to change the world. To believe the new head of USAID when he says that Coca Cola and the military are at the core of the new development community (as I heard via Twitter this morning).

And sometimes when I’m out in a community with people who are generally doing OK, it doesn’t hit me so hard. Often people in poor communities have resources that we lack in the “North” or the “West” or whatever you want to call those of us who live in Europe and the US and don’t worry so much about poverty in our own lives.

Sometimes I’ll sit and fantasize about one day having a little house somewhere out in a beautiful place, where my neighbors and I will walk slowly and greet each other and stop to chat in the evenings on our way home from our day’s tasks. I’ll take cold bucket baths as the sun rises, adding a pan-full of hot water to my bucket on especially chilly mornings. I’ll buy out-of-this-world homemade afternoon snacks from a little tienda or kiosk down the hill, or from a crinkly smiley old woman by the side of the road. I’ll cook fresh food (purchased every day or so, not once a week in bulk), over an open fire outside in back of my house under a tin awning. I’ll wake up early most mornings and open my front door and my wooden shutters to the sound of the birds and a view of the mist lifting off the mountains that surround me. I’ll have an un-spayed-or-neutered dog that will sleep outside to guard the homestead, a couple of cats to keep the mice population down, and maybe some chickens in a little coop. I’ll take a voluntary vow of poverty and live a simple life with few material possessions.

Buuuuut then it always seems the fantasy dims…. I’ll talk to someone whose brother accidentally hacked off his finger when working out in the fields and ended up losing his hand because he couldn’t get medical treatment. Or several people will be missing from a workshop because they are at the hospital getting treated for malaria.  Or I’ll meet a girl who’s pregnant and married at 13 or 14, shy and visibly miserable. Or some children whose feet and ankles are swollen and full of sores. Or hear of a terrible road accident where several people died. Or meet people living in makeshift houses in a precarious zone because they were kicked off their land. Or talk with a teen-aged boy whose only dream is to get out of the community to someplace where life is really happening and he can achieve his dreams.

Oooor I’ll spend time in a country being overridden by big companies and corporations. I’ll see the ladies who used to sell their delicious homemade juices being pushed out of business by a soda company. I’ll see their babies drinking powdered milk or bright orange Fanta from a baby bottle instead of nursing at the breast. I’ll see people eating imitation Doritos instead of fresh food. I’ll hear about an oil line passing through a pristine forest or an ecological disaster topping the BP oil spill, yet no one talks about it. Or someone will tell me about logging and mining companies devastating a particular part of the country I’m in. Or I’ll sigh at the plastic bags littering the side of the roads. Or my stomach will feel ill at the conflicts fought because of dictators propped up by Western governments.

I’ll read about events like the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) happening this week in New York City. Where the corporations that we used to protest against en masse are now the owners not only of the global market, but of the world’s aid and development work.  I don’t know. Maybe they have always been the owners and I didn’t know enough to realize it. But when did we all sell out and stop protesting it? When did we accept it as the only way forward? When did we stop asking the hard questions and just let them invite us to be wined and dined in fancy hotels, and actually pay $20,000 (can that be right?) for the privilege to sit in the room with them and tantalize them with a new innovation or a catchy new slogan so that we can access their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) crumbs?

When did we stop demanding some kind of accountability from them for how they do business? When did we buy into this? How did it happen? When did we fall for this? When did Corporate Social Responsibility become charity rather than actually preventing the damage that corporations do or forcing them to be ethical in how they do business? And does demanding accountability even make any difference at all, since things like boycotting sweatshops and campaigning against cell phones often end up actually hurting the very people that we want to help, and they don’t seem to actually make any kind of impact or bring about the change we are seeking?

I can’t help but feel really de-motivated reading about CGI and the MDG Summit and the UN Digital Week events happening this week. I feel like we are all getting hoodwinked. It’s difficult to negotiate when the power balance is so much in favor of one group. When one group holds all the cards and when they also own most of the world’s political leaders and the media. And, as several have already pointed out this week, the people that everyone talks about, the people everyone says we need to listen to, the people we’re all supposedly interested in helping, are not anywhere near the venue.

It’s possible that I’ve misunderstood the situation, that in my immaturity I’ve misunderstood how CGI works and what its purpose is. That I’m acting like a teenager and not willing to listen. But let me tell you, from the outside it looks, as I said yesterday, like a big love fest of the rich and famous and powerful who get to decide the fate of the world.

So today instead of fantasizing about my vow of poverty and living the simple life, I’m fantasizing that I’m in New York. I’m pretending that I’m Zack de la Rocha and I’m walking into the CGI meeting looking like a rock star. They all think I’ve grown up. That I’m the next Bono. But then I get on stage, and I break out into that song Wake Up. I’m rap-screaming (in pure Zack style) “What do I gotta, what do I gotta to do to wake you up? to shake you up? to break the structure up?”

I know, I know, I know. Waste of time. Grow up and simmer down and stop wasting your breath…. Because this is the new world order and no one is waking up any time soon.

—–

Postscript:  This video narrated by Slavoj Zizec and animated by the team at RSA sums up a lot of what’s bugging me… thanks to @michael_keizer for tweeting it.

This is for my Corporates. Lesson 5: How to kill what your non-profit had going for it

This is Lesson 5 in the This is for my Corporates Series.

Click for Lesson 1: Watch your Language, Lesson 2: Y’all really believe in that vision sh*t?, Lesson 3: What’s “The Field” Got to Do with It?, and Lesson 4: People are not Props.

If you happen to be a big manager at the head office of a big non-profit organization, and you’ve been brought in from the corporate sector to show those wishy-washy bleeding heart non-profit suckas how it’s done, this series* is for you.

Lesson 5: Purpose Motivation is stronger than Profit Motivation

As different as the corporate and non-profit sectors are, and as hard as it is to get us to change and see the corporate light, you’re going to have to work with us if you plan on sticking around at a non-profit.

We got connections. We got social capital. We got experience in the field. A lot of us actually really do know what we are doing. Plus, we’re your access point for your donor magazine stories and your PR photos. If you learn how to talk with us… if you spend some time on the ground understanding that the challenges we face are not simple and that the root of the challenges is not our lack of a corporate mentality… if you remember to see that the bigger goal is the VISION not the MONEY… if you avoid exploiting the people in communities where we work for your marketing campaigns, we will probably get along just fine after the initial hiccups.

If you leave your ego at the door and come in to learn and converse rather than demand and mandate, people will eventually welcome you. We’ll learn some of your corporate ways too, we’ll blend them with our non-profit ways, and we’ll do even more quality work, all of us together.

Well, that’s my logic anyway.

But if you’re still thinking that what a non-profit needs is a good corporate shake up, some good old fashioned business models, then watch this video The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It’s based on Dan Pink’s book Drive, and it speaks in a language that may be closer to corporate speak than what I’m capable of.

Pink writes that that for simple, straightforward tasks, the old model, the carrot and stick idea works; paying people a reward to do better works. But when a task gets more complicated and requires conceptual and creative thinking, those kind of motivators don’t work. (Note: He says that you should pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table and allow people to focus on the work itself, which I totally agree with.)

Skip to minute 5 of the video for Pink’s conclusions.  He says that there are 3 factors that lead to better performance and personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery and purpose. He says that more and more, businesses and organizations want to have a “transcendent purpose” because it makes coming to work better and is a way to get better talent.

He says that “When the profit motive becomes un-moored from the purpose motive, bad things happen.” “When the profit motive becomes unhitched from the purpose motive, people don’t do great things.” “Companies that are flourishing are animated by purpose.”

The majority of work that non-profit employees (except perhaps the finance and administration departments) do is not factory work. Not repetitive. Not mechanical. The majority of our work is relationship building, knowledge management, co-designing and complex problem solving. And we already have a purpose. That purpose is what brought most of us to work at the organization. We have a vision we are working towards, and it’s a lofty one.

So, considering that autonomy, mastery and purpose are what seem to motivate people. Considering that purpose motivation makes for better outcomes. Ask yourself: Are you actually killing off one of the best things your non-profit had going for it? Are you dooming the organization that you’ve come in to improve because you are shifting the organization’s focus from the vision to the money, and you are making profit motivation overshadow our existing purpose motivation?

Why would you want to do that?

—–

More Lessons in the This is for my Corporates series:

Lesson 1: Watch your language

Lesson 2: Y’all really believe in that vision sh*t?

Lesson 3: What’s “the Field” got to do with it?

Lesson 4: People are not props

Lesson 6: Win-win or forced marriage?

Lesson 7: A handout is a handout is a handout

*The Lessons here are based on carefully recorded participant/observation sessions among myself and subjects working in a variety of non-profit settings. In order to qualify as a “Lesson Topic” each conversation point must have been heard at least a dozen times per year over a 15 year period. New Lesson Topics are being compounded daily. If you would like to suggest a topic, hit me up.

This is for my Corporates. Lesson 4: People are not props

This is Lesson 4 in the This is for my Corporates Series.

Click for Lesson 1: Watch your Language, Lesson 2: Y’all really believe in that vision sh*t? and Lesson 3: What’s “The Field” got to do with it?

If you happen to be a big manager at the head office of a big non-profit organization, and you’ve been brought in from the corporate sector to show those wishy-washy bleeding heart non-profit suckas how it’s done, this series is for you!

Lesson 4: People are not props.

The work we are doing is about the real-live people featured in the glossy photos in the donor brochure, not about the dollars or euros or pounds or yen that the brochure brings in. It’s about the real-live people whose stories are used to grab attention in that catchy advocacy campaign, not about the number of addresses you are going to add to the email solicitation list. It’s about the kids who are going to be able to stay in school, and the fact that their children’s health and education will probably improve because their parents attended school, not about the fact that you are going to get a ton of PR because a big celebrity is giving a big donation for those children.

So don’t lose sight of that. This is about people. About Real. Live. People. They are as real as your husband. As real as your wife. As real as your children. As real as the neighbor you don’t get along with. They are just as complex and imperfect as people who you know personally. Just as intelligent. Just as irritable and even irritating sometimes, like all people. And those of us who work on the ground work personally with them on a daily or weekly basis.

So when you get push back from us on how you want to portray people in your marketing campaigns, on how you want to simultaneously simplify and exaggerate (or make up) their stories to get a bigger “lift” in your direct mail piece, try to understand. We are picturing our friends, our neighbors, people in communities that we work with regularly, our own children in those campaigns. In those advocacy photos. On those TV commercials.

Imagine if it were your child on a billboard.

No, I mean really, stop and imagine.

Your kid was playing outside last night, went to bed without a bath. They come around with a camera in the morning. You say wait, let me tidy him up first. They say no, this is more realistic. You don’t want say no because you’re afraid it will seem rude. They go ahead with the photo shoot. You sign some consent forms in legalese, and next thing you know, there’s your un-bathed child up there on a billboard, maybe smiling or laughing, maybe not. Possibly his nose is running a little or he has sleep in his eyes. His hair is messy. The label next to him says “POOR and NEEDY”. Feels great, huh?

Or someone photographs your beautiful daughter. They put her face on a direct mail piece. Sure her name is changed, but there’s her face. It’s next to big red letters saying “desperate” or “trafficked” or “abused” or “HIV positive”. It tells a story about how you and your community are incapable of protecting and caring for your children and need outside help. Depending on the imagination of the creative director of the marketing piece, you as a parent are either a villain or a martyr or an uplifting hero. No one actually asks you for your real story, because it doesn’t matter. What matters is the story that the target demographic wants to hear. The story that moves them to donate. Now your daughter’s photo and this made-up story get mailed out to hundreds of thousands of people in another country, and emailed to another huge number of people. Maybe it even goes up on the home page of a big organization’s website.

Since you’re good at this imagination thing, turn back into yourself in your current job at your INGO or imagine that you are a community outreach staff person.

Picture yourself going out to the community where you’ve taken photos and film recently. Arrange a community assembly. Stand yourself in front of the whole community and show them what you’ve done with their pictures and their stories. Translate it all into their language so that they can read or listen to every word that you’ve said about them. See what they think of it.

Uncomfortable much?

Yes, yes, you’ll say, but we need to raise money! But this is what works! This is what people respond to!

And I will say back to you:  Find another way. Stop marketing to the lowest common denominator because it makes you the lowest common denominator. If you can’t get people to support the real work you do on the ground, you are not doing your job. The real work is way better than those stupid commercials and those pathetic direct mail pieces. Figure out how to get people to understand it.

People in communities are not props.

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More Lessons in the This is for my Corporates Series!

Lesson 1: Watch your language

Lesson 2: Y’all really believe in that vision sh*t?

Lesson 3: What’s “the Field” got to do with it?

Lesson 5: How to kill what your non-profit had going for it

Lesson 6: Win-win or forced marriage?

Lesson 7: A handout is a handout is a handout

*The Lessons here are based on carefully recorded participant/observation sessions among myself and subjects working in a variety of non-profit settings (often with the helpful prodding of my assistant Al Cohol). In order to qualify as a “Lesson Topic” each conversation point must have been heard at least a dozen times per year over the span of a 15 year period. New Lesson Topics are being compounded daily. If you would like to suggest a topic, hit me up.

This is for my Corporates. Lesson 3: What’s “the Field” got to do with it?

This is Lesson 3 in the This is for my Corporates Series.

Click for Lesson 1: Watch your Language and Lesson 2: Y’all really believe in that vision sh*t?

If you happen to be a big manager at the head office of a big non-profit organization, and you’ve been brought in from the corporate sector to show those wishy-washy bleeding heart non-profit suckas how it’s done, this series* is for you!

Lesson 3: Get your ass to the field

The actual work that non-profits do on the ground is about as different from their commercials as the size and color of the close up Big Mac you see on the McDonald’s commercials vs. what you actually get when you eat there, but in a different way. (Not that I ever eat there, just trying to make a point).

Those 30 second bits you see on TV are, get this, ADVERTISEMENTS designed to create an emotional response so that people will donate money.  So don’t believe them, even if you are in charge of making them. (And I get into that in another post)

Go to the ground to understand reality. Leave your tidy office full of giant glossy posters of beneficiaries, and ethnic touches from around the world, and hushed tones of people answering donor calls and go see the actual work on the ground. It’s like breaking out of a stifled photograph and walking into a complex and layered 3-D movie. Like going from Cliff Notes to the depth and beautiful prose of a good novel.

You need to do that to have any kind of nuanced understanding of how the pieces of this thing we call “development” or “humanitarian aid” fit together. You’ll see things that amaze you. You’ll discover a respect for people that you never had. If your organization is any good, you’ll see that the actual work being done is way more complex than what the commercials tell you and it will take you awhile to process that. (Note: I am not saying good organizations should have stupid commercials, but currently stupid commercials are the norm in the world of non-profit work.) You’ll see things that piss you off, internally in your non-profit and externally in the community. And if you are sharp, observant, chill and open to listening, you will better understand why those things happen.

I don’t know about you, but if I were going to manage something, I’d sure as hell want to know what I’m managing. And if I were going to solve problems, I’d want to know what the roots of those problems are, and what’s been tried in the past to resolve them, and if the attempted solutions didn’t work, I’d want to discover why. Hint: It’s probably not because everyone is stupid and incompetent (though some people definitely are… the trick is knowing who is and who isn’t). It’s probably because the problem is complex. Or because people are stuck thinking about it in an old way. Or because power dynamics don’t allow the problem to be addressed. Or because of the multiple pressures put onto people from all sides. Or due to inherent contradictions in the system. Or any one of a million other things.

The quality of your work, and the leadership and support you can give to the rest of the organization will improve exponentially after you go to the field. So do it. As soon as possible. Please. It’s hard to take you seriously until you have.

Get the bigger boss to authorize you to really work on something in the field, to work with a team to really get something implemented. I knew a guy once who became a general manager at a hotel. As part of his training, he had to work a week or 2 in each of the departments. He did laundry. He did restaurant and room service. He worked the front desk. Something like that would help you get a sense of things.

Spend some time there, on the ground. But don’t go to the field in a bubble. Don’t stay in the office. Don’t do short day visits to see a ton of showcase projects and children dancing in traditional costumes. Don’t let the local office do that to you. Spend time in communities too.

And while you are there, don’t feel sorry for people. Nobody needs your pity, it just gets in the way of things. Most people probably don’t feel sorry for themselves, so why should you? They’re getting by just like everyone is. So respect people and their dignity. You and your agency are just one small part of their lives except in really extreme cases.

And don’t be surprised if you arrive to a health center or a community and there are 500 people there to welcome you. That is normal. That is what people do. Don’t be blinded or sidetracked by the pomp and ceremony. They do it for everyone who visits. You’re not special, and it has nothing to do with the quality of our programs or the quality of your work.

Be open. Learn. Observe. Ask. Share meals in the community and at the office. Stick around long enough so that you are not the center of attention all the time. Sit on the ground if everyone else is. Stop taking pictures and just experience things. Take a bucket bath. Sleep in a hammock. Ride public transportation or in the back of a pick-up truck. Eat street food. Share an office and a computer. Figure out how to meet your deadline when there’s a 24-hour power cut or when it takes 6 days for you to get someone’s signature on something. Go to someone’s house for dinner. Shift the focus to the real core. To people. Don’t get frustrated that things aren’t moving at your pace. Understand that your pace isn’t the pace of most of the rest of the world and deal with it. Learn from people you work with. See what the work is all about, spend time listening.

And don’t ever say things like “Well, why don’t you just…?” Yep, and why don’t you just tell the Tea Party the truth about Obama’s birthplace. Or just provide more resources to urban public schools that are under-performing. Or just get people to eat healthy and start exercising. Or just bring the troops home.

The world of non-profits is a funky place. It’s not like where you come from. In order to do your job well, you need to understand it. Don’t barge in and drop your corporate solutions on everyone. Organizational culture is hard core at non-profits. And that will frustrate you immensely. It frustrates us too. But sometimes there are real reasons we don’t do things how you’d imagine we should. And you need to understand things in order to sort the bullshit from the reality.

So spend at least 6 months to a year listening, experiencing, and learning, because it will take you at least that long to even begin understanding. Then you’ll be able to talk and listen to people in a genuine way from the right place, from the stomach, from the heart. When you know what you are talking about, and people trust you, THEN when you ask them questions about why they don’t do this or that, they may give you a real answer instead of one designed to please you or one that avoids outing their colleagues. Blend your business savvy with your gut and your heart and you’ll be a huge asset to everyone, in the non-profit sector… or even back in the corporate world.

—–

More Lessons in the This is for my Corporates Series:

Lesson 1: Watch your language

Lesson 2: Y’all really believe in that vision sh*t?

Lesson 4: People are not props

Lesson 5: How to kill what your non-profit had going for it

Lesson 6: Win-win or forced marriage?

Lesson 7: A handout is a handout is a handout

*The Lessons here are based on carefully recorded participant/observation sessions among myself and subjects working in a variety of non-profit settings (often with some spirits that loosen the tongue). In order to qualify as a “Lesson Topic” each conversation point must have been heard at least a dozen times per year over the span of a 15 year period. New Lesson Topics are being compounded daily. If you would like to suggest a topic, hit me up.

This is for my Corporates. Lesson 2: So y’all really believe in that vision sh*t?

This is Lesson 2 in the This is for my Corporates Series. Read Lesson 1: Watch your Language.

If you happen to be a big manager at the head office of a big non-profit organization, and you’ve been brought in from the corporate sector to show those wishy-washy bleeding heart non-profit suckas how it’s done, this series* is for you!

Lesson 2: Don’t lose sight of the larger goal.

I don’t know what the corporate sector is like, but a lot of people who work in aid and development are in it because they believe in a vision. (Note: I normally only hang out with people who give a shit, so this post may be slightly biased towards their frame of reference.) They believe in making the world a better place. (Hell, maybe you’d even say you joined the non-profit world from the corporate sector because you wanted a job with meaning.)

Local aid and development workers want to push their countries forward, to improve health, education, human rights, and the  political and economic systems. They’d like to see their country progress to be more self sufficient. (Plus development organizations often pay more than government, though much less than the UN, and people feel they can actually make a difference at an NGO, rather than what they can accomplish working in government). Foreigners working on the ground, the ones I hang out with at least, want the same thing, to work towards the vision.

People who work with development programs don’t see growth and branding and marketing as a means to grow a business and make shareholders happy. They see them as a means to an end. That end is the vision, the larger goal. A lot of times they feel more accountable towards communities and the countries they live in than towards you and your donors over there in the head office, or in Europe or North America or wherever, regardless of who those donors are.

When the head office sends out congratulatory emails for huge grants raised and no emails for huge numbers of lives improved via small grants, it seems like all the head office cares about is money. When you focus only on the cash, we see you as trying to grow the organization for the sake of growth. It starts to sound like you view people on the ground as your personal employees, working for you to raise money for your own glory, instead of us all working together to implement programs to achieve the vision we signed on to when we started working here.

When you talk about needing to raise our profile, bring in more donors, do advocacy, and get more money, remember that we are doing that for a reason: to improve more lives. More often than not, unless you are speaking at a big event to lots of staff to motivate them, you forget that last bit of the phrase. You lose sight of the larger goal. And people roll their eyes at your empty words. The vision seems like an afterthought and that bugs us.

We are not naive. We know that we need money to run our programs. We probably understand that even better than you because we are the ones suffering budget cuts and skimping by to stay within overhead rates and trying to explain those cuts to communities and local partners. But here’s the thing:  the point is to raise money to do programs that will help to achieve the vision, NOT to do programs so that you can promote them in order to raise money. You twist it around backwards sometimes.

And that rubs us the wrong way. Most of us really do believe in that vision shit.

—–

More Lessons in the This is for my Corporates Series:

Lesson 1: Watch your language

Lesson 3: What’s “the Field” got to do with it?

Lesson 4: People are not props

Lesson 5: How to kill what your non-profit had going for it

Lesson 6: Win-win or forced marriage?

Lesson 7: A handout is a handout is a handout

*The Lessons here are based on carefully recorded participant/observation sessions among myself and subjects working in a variety of non-profit settings (often with the helpful prodding of my assistant Al Cohol). In order to qualify as a “Lesson Topic” each conversation point must have been heard at least a dozen times per year since 1995. New Lesson Topics are being compounded daily. If you would like to suggest a topic, hit me up.