Thirst for Change

Blogging on international development, integral mission, and organizational leadership

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How to Assemble a Team of Changemakers

How to Assemble a Team of Changemakers

This is the second of an eight-part series, using John Kotter’s change model to dig for non-obvious insights on leading change in Christian organizations.

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”@thirstforchange” suffix=””]It doesn’t matter how good you are—you can’t lead change on your own.[/inlinetweet]

A century ago, the most common theory of leadership pointed to “Great Men” (and presumably great…

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How to Build a Sense of Urgency for Positive Change

How to Build a Sense of Urgency for Positive Change

This is the first of an eight-part series, using John Kotter’s Change Model to dig for insights on leading positive change in Christian organizations.

Change is inevitable. It’s happening to all of us, all the time. But if you don’t want change to just happen to you—if you want to proactively initiate and sustain positivechange in your organization or team… well, that can be one of the hardest…

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How to Build a Learning Organization, One Person at a Time

How to Build a Learning Organization, One Person at a Time

More than ever before, emerging mission-driven leaders are hungry for opportunities to learn—particularly practical, hands-on skills and abilities they can use in their current and future work. Promising leaders are more willing to stay with an organization if there are learning and development opportunities. On the flip side, they’re more likely to leave if learning isn’t a priority.

From a…

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Three Simple Ways to Find Innovative Ideas

Three Simple Ways to Find Innovative Ideas

Nonprofit organizations have been around long enough that we’ve settled into conventional wisdom. The accepted ideas for raising money, managing teams, building strategy, and implementing programs get repeated again and again. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”@thirstforchange” suffix=””]Why do we have such a hard time leaving the well-worn path?[/inlinetweet]

The trouble with tribes

As humans,…

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The Secret Recipe for Innovative Ideas

The Secret Recipe for Innovative Ideas

Nonprofit organizations have been around long enough that we’ve settled into conventional wisdom. The accepted ideas for raising money, managing teams, building strategy, and implementing programs get repeated again and again. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”@thirstforchange” suffix=””]Why do we have such a hard time leaving the well-worn path?[/inlinetweet]

The trouble with tribes

As humans,…

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Why nonprofit leadership is so darn hard

Why nonprofit leadership is so darn hard

Last week, I was part of a group of 25 senior nonprofit leaders (mostly CEOs) who were looking for fresh ideas and confidential counsel from their peers. Over the course of two days, I found myself listening to leaders who were passionate about their mission, but facing challenges of every kind — from founder’s syndrome to dysfunctional boards to programmatic scope creep. These discussions…

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Water and Poverty: A Conversation with Tearfund's Frank Greaves

Tearfund is an organization that was born in the 1960s out of The Evangelical Alliance in the UK.…

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Book Review: Mission Drift

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The Bill & Melinda Gates School of Poverty Mythbusting

This week, Bill and Melinda Gates published their annual letter on poverty and aid, “Three Myths…

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Transformational Development Means Getting Out of the Way

Those of us from relatively rich countries often see development challenges that seem…

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The Charitable-Industrial Complex

As more lives are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

-Peter Buffet, in his recent NYT op-ed piece

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Kibera

It’s touted as the largest slum in Africa. The sea of rusty tin roofs, interspersed with piles of garbage and gullies of free-flowing sewage, is an icon of global poverty—a location featured in the film The Constant Gardener and the scene of countless celebrity photo ops. The first time I saw Kibera was more than 10 years ago, and today it looks exactly the same.

Estimates of the slum's population vary wildly (from 200,000 to 1.5M), but it's anyone's guess how many hundreds of NGOs have worked here over the past few decades. It's a classic example, in most cases, of Westerners showing up with predetermined solutions and timetables, assuming they can “fix" in a three-year program what has taken generations to devolve.

A few years ago, a housing project was started on the edge of Kibera, with the goal of providing alternative dwellings for those who were motivated to move out of the informal dwellings (shacks) that make up the bulk of the slum. Rent for the newly constructed homes was set at 7,000 Kenyan shillings (about $80 US)… Higher than the average slum dweller’s rent of 2,000, but still affordable to many. Applications were sent in, and tenants were selected. It was only discovered later that most of the new renters stayed in their slum “homes" and sub-let their shiny new housing for a cool 5,000 Ksh a month net profit. Rather than shrinking the slum by a few hundred, the project had grown it.

When I visited Kibera earlier this week with a co-worker of mine who lives a literal stones’ throw away, sharing stories like this one, I was reminded how hard development work is, and how fruitless it can be when we don’t take the time to know people, to understand what motivates them, and to see them with the dignity they have as beings made in the image of the living God.

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I've sat in Adams Arcade dozens of times over years of visits to Nairobi, watching kids climb and slide on this fantastic sculpture. I never thought I'd see my own kids here. This was a good day.

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Serving Justice, Saving Souls

In the new issue of Reject Apathy, Tim Høiland does a fantastic job of addressing "the tension that was never supposed to exist" between social action and evangelism. The article looks at it through both historical and theological lenses, echoing much of my own journey of realizations on the topic of integral mission. He even quotes my friend Steve Moore. It's well worth the 15 minutes it'll take you to read it.

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Be a savvy WASH investor

Safe, sustainable water and sanitation services are among the most cost-effective investments in community development—particularly when combined with improved hygiene behaviors (aka “WASH”). If you’ve been watching the WASH sector for any time at all, you’ve seen statistics trying to point out just how cost-effective these services are—stats like, “$20 can provide clean water for one person for 20 years.” A few years ago, a lot of us (present company included) were citing statistics like this to get people excited about donating toward water and sanitation systems. Over the past few years, though, we’ve been learning that it takes more—and costs more—to build systems that are truly safe and sustainable. As of this week, we have some new insight. The real per-person cost for basic water supply from a borehole and hand pump, it turns out, should include at least $20 to $61 for construction plus $3-6 per year to keep it working. That's $50-$121 per person over 10 years, or $80-$181 for 20. On the sanitation side, a traditional pit latrine should be expected to cost $37-$106 per person over 20 years.

These numbers are from a new set of minimum benchmarks published by WASHCost, a research project of IRC, which has spent the past five years collecting data from Burkina Faso, Ghana, India, and Mozambique (full report here). The main discovery here is that many NGOs don't plan for the operation and maintenance, capital maintenance, and other types of support needed to keep water flowing and latrines working; either that, or they severely underestimate their costs. Offering "cheap" projects causes donors to be unwilling to give the dollars it really costs to build and maintain sustainable systems, and only harms the people we all claim we're out to help. The bottom line? If you give to organizations that install water and sanitation systems, and they claim numbers significantly lower than these (remember—these are minimums), you should ask some hard questions. Are they working to support communities for the long term, helping them build capacity to manage their own systems? Do they really understand what this takes, and what it costs?

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There's a lot going on in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector these days, and it's a challenge to keep track; I try to stay on top of things by managing a folder full of RSS feeds from key sector websites. Since I'm going to the trouble to curate this list for myself, I thought I'd share--I've created a "bundle" of these feeds here. If it looks useful, feel free to subscribe to the consolidated feed, or pick and choose a few feeds that look interesting.

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As I prepare for the 2012 Accord Developing Excellence Forum (where I'll be co-facilitating the WASH Summit), I ran across this video talk that Bryant Myers prepared for the Transformational Development Summit at last year's event (via @tjhoiland). Excellent summary of the development of TD thinking, along with a compelling call to action.