A pedido voy a publicar de nuevo el articulo Staying for Tea (Quedándose para el Té) como una serie de entradas de blog en seis partes. El artículo fue publicado originalmente en una revista llamada The Global Citizen (El Ciudadano Global). Mientras publico cada sección, las siguientes ligas se activarán: [1:Quedarse para el Té] [2:Importa el Proceso] [3:Enfocarse en los Valores] [4:Chequea tu Filtro] [5:Cultiva un Corazón Sirviente] [6:Conclusión] Click here to read in English

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Introducción

Cada año cientos de hombres y mujeres jóvenes comienzan a hacer servicio voluntario comunitario. Miles mas han hecho del desarrollo comunitario una carrera profesional. Si tu eres uno de ellos, este articulo es para ti. Muchos de mis amigos han pasado tiempo haciendo servicio voluntario en comunidades que no eran suyas. Hemos comparado nuestras experiencias y algunas gemas de valor reconocibles se han presentado con notable consistencia. Muchos de nosotros hicimos los mismos errores innecesarios y aprendimos las mismas lecciones. He tratado de extraer estas lecciones y hacer un conjunto de principios para compartir contigo y ayudarte a evitar nuestros errores. Muchos de nosotros hemos concluido en que tener un conjunto de principios para guiar el trabajo de desarrollo comunitario es fundamental. Aunque el conjunto ni es de aplicación universal ni completa, si aun no has desarrollado tu propia, que este te sirva como punto de partida.

Principio #1 Quedarse para el Té

Nuestras vecinas y la única tiende de la aldea

En 1998, yo estaba viviendo con mi fallecida esposa en Bañado de la Cruz como voluntario con el Comité Central Menonita (CCM). Nuestra misión en esta aislada aldea de Bolivia era algo que CCM llamaba “acompañamiento”. A pesar de que tenía un sentido intuitivo de lo que esta palabra significaba, yo no estaba muy seguro de como hacerlo, cómo traducir la misión a los elementos de mi lista de que haceres. CCM no nos permitía generar planes o lanzar nuevos proyectos; simplemente esperaba que nosotros acompañáramos a la comunidad en su proceso endógeno de desarrollo. Pero yo había sido invitado por la comunidad a Bañado, por lo que claramente esperaban algo de mi. Yo tenía que saber algo y hacer algo que contribuyera al bienestar de esta comunidad. Sin embargo, muchos días me despertaba sin saber realmente lo que ese algo era.

En esos días, cuando no había una tarea clara para hacer, muchas veces solo salía por la puerta y caminaba por la única polvorienta calle que atravesaba la aldea. Mientras caminaba, iba encontrando a la gente y nos saludábamos mutuamente. Algunos me invitaban a sentarme con ellos por un rato. A menudo compartimos una tasa de té. Algunas veces hablamos sobre uno de los proyectos en que estuvimos trabajando – de apicultura, de las letrinas secas, o de contabilidad de la cooperativa de agricultores – pero normalmente hablábamos sobre la vida, de donde éramos y donde habíamos estado, sobre nuestras familias, y sobre como Krista y yo estuvimos adaptándonos a la vida en Bañado. Yo tenia que confesar que estuvimos luchando; no estábamos acostumbrados a vivir en una casa de una sola habitación hecha de barro y estuco sin electricidad ni agua potable. Todavía no entendía el idioma ni las costumbres muy bien. Seguía enfermándome y sufriendo pequeños accidentes. Yo ni siquiera sabia como regar mi propia parcela experimental de maíz.

Después de un tiempo, me di cuenta de que algo más estaba pasando mientras tomábamos el té. Mi título y posición estaban erosionado; yo estaba convirtiendo en algo real para ellos. Al mismo tiempo, mi estereotipos simplistas de ellos se estaban desmoronando; ellos se estaban convirtiendo en algo real para mi. Dejé de ser un voluntario de desarrollo comunitario; yo era solo un nuevo vecino, un extraño en aguas profundas tratando de encajar y hacer amigos. Fui socialmente torpe y muy a menudo no muy útil. Dejaron de ser los pobres, los desamparados que necesitan asistencia de afuera. En cambio, los vi como gente fuerte y creativa, cuya resistencia en un lugar difícil exigió mi mas profundo respeto. Mis ojos se abrieron a lo mucho que Krista y yo dependíamos de su generosidad y su amistad. Ellos nos dieron comida de sus tierras, nos enseñaron como lavar ropa en el río y como utilizar plantas nativas par curar nuestros cuerpos, nos invitaron a sus hogares y compartieron su sabiduría tanto como sus locuras. Incluso aprendí como regar adecuadamente.

Mientras tomábamos el té, construimos confianza y nos hicimos vulnerables el uno al otro. Lentamente, me dieron acceso a información privilegiada de la comunidad y de las normas sociales complejas y de la historia que las rigen. Por ejemplo, me enteré quien lanzó la piedra que convirtió a mi vecina con 12 hijos en viuda. Me contaron sobre el comportamiento abusivo de otro vecino, cuyo suegro tuvo que mudarse con ellos para proteger a su hija, y como la comunidad esta dividida en dos clanes que se disputan el poder. Comportamiento misterioso empezó a tener sentido, problemas escondidos salieron a la luz, sueños más grandes y miedos más profundos se dieron a conocer. Me mostraron la topografía social que yo necesitaba navegar para ser relevante y útil para la comunidad. Mi trabajo  ganó fuerza y avanzaba de una manera que dio a la comunidad una razón para estar agradecida por mi presencia allí. Quedándonos para el té nos ayudó a llegar a ser mutuamente endeudados. Yo llamo esto ‘operando al nivel del ojo’ con la comunidad, y ha hecho toda la diferencia en la calidad e impacto de nuestro tiempo juntos. 

No es saludable ni productivo dejarse ser percibido falsamente como un héroe, o percibir a sí mismo como tal. En realidad se puede debilitar a los miembros de la comunidad a través de cultivar una imagen de tener todo en orden y tener todas las respuestas. En realidad, es fácil y tentador abusar de la diferencia de poder con el que pudo haber entrado en la comunidad. Las personas con falsas expectativas de quien eres someterán sus propias ideas buenas a las malas tuyas y confiarán en tu debilidad más que en su propia fuerza. Incluso pueden contar tus fracasos como sus propios. Entonces, es fundamental ser honesto sobre tus propias necesidades y vulnerabilidades, generar oportunidades de recibir en los lugares donde sirve, llegar a ser mutuamente endeudado, y desarrollar relaciones reales que te ayudan a operar al nivel del ojo con la comunidad.

It was early 2006. I had been sent to conduct a results review of a large humanitarian organization’s response to the Indian Ocean tsunami. It was a sort of audit of the accuracy of the organization’s reports of what it had achieved in the first year of it’s multi-year response. On this day, I was somewhere along the southern coast of India, checking on a random sample of wells that had been reported as rehabilitated after being flooded with contaminated sea water. My schedule was tight as I still had a number of other reports to validate that day, including the provision of several thousand hygiene kits and mosquito nets, dozens of fishing boats, and scores of bicycles for fish mongers.

A group of fishmongers providing evidence. "Yes, we got the bikes. Thanks!"

I can’t actually recall how I came to be such a caricature of the professional humanitarian aid worker that day, but there I was arriving at people’s homes in a cloud of dust, stepping down from a white Toyota Land Cruiser with a clipboard in hand, decked in ExOfficio, dark sunglasses, and an American baseball cap, surrounded by an entourage of local colleagues taking advantage of the “learning opportunity”. I allowed myself to be led onto people’s private property without so much as a hollered warning or knock on the gate, where we proceeded to huddle around their wells and conduct our tests. What a tool.

At this particular home, a frail woman emerged from the shack near the well we were examining to inquire what we were doing. She seemed gracious as one of the district office leaders engaged her in conversation. When it seemed to me that he was laughing and saying “no” about something, I asked the translator what was going on.

“She has invited you into her home to share a cup of tea.”

“What did you tell her,” I asked.

“Suresh* told her that you are an important visiter from America and that you are very busy working on the tsunami relief project. It is impossible for you to accept.”

Temporary shelters and playground

And that’s when I wanted to punch myself in the side of the head. Not a year had passed since I’d published “Staying for Tea: Five Principles for the Community Service Volunteer,” in which I explained that the first principle of good work in a community is staying for tea. I figured that if you couldn’t or wouldn’t accept an invitation from a community member to share tea with them (or whatever the local cultural equivalent would be), then something was either wrong with you personally or with your organization.

After shedding the local retinue, I returned with my translator and the local worker. I apologized and asked if I could humbly accept her offer. We entered her home. As she prepared the tea, we began talking about the tsunami. I explained what I was doing and what my organization had been doing. She began to tell me about her experience. As we sipped tea, she produced two photographs. One was obviously of her husband. It was framed and had been hanging on the wall. She explained that he had been working that day and was never found. The second photo she pulled folded from some hidden pocket. It was of a beautiful young woman, perhaps in her teens. As tears began to stream down her face, she told me how they had been together when the tsunami came and how their grip on each other had failed. I took the photo in hand and began weeping with her.

For a brief time, we shed our superficial roles defined by my work and became just two people, sharing grief over a tragedy, equal in our humanity, sharing together with generosity and grace.

From then on, my work got a lot slower. We spent more time walking from home to home. We knocked and explained what we were doing before marching onto people’s land to look at “our” projects. I accepted multiple invitations for tea. I began carrying around photos of my family as well as my late wife to reciprocate the sharing of personal stories. Work days went from 10-12 hours to 14-16, but I felt like a human again, and not so much like an hypocritical ass.

I still make mistakes and have to check myself from time to time, but I’m getting better at avoiding the worst abuses of my own principles. I don’t tell this story as a confession nor from feigned humility – it’s just that these things happen and we have to learn from them. It’s a good story for me to remember and retell.

This is the final post of a 6-part series republishing the original Staying for Tea article from The Global Citizen journal (2005). You can link to the other posts in this series here: [1: Stay for Tea] [2: Process Matters] [3: Focus on Values] [4: Check yourFilter] [5: Cultivate a Servant's Heart] [6: Conclusion]

Receive new posts in your in-box by subscribing today. Just click on the “Sign me up!” button to the right. You can also follow me on Twitter at AaronAusland and through Facebook at Staying for Tea.

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Conclusion

Although these principles may seem somewhat obvious, I’d like to demonstrate with a real example how easy it is to forget the principles and serve poorly. There are so many opportunities to serve that we often get over-anxious to say yes. It’s easy to get excited and forget to ask some critical questions about what we’re doing. This is especially true when the service is connected with a church activity or Christian organization. We seem to forget that Christians have a history of making terrible mistakes just like everyone else. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes and joy in service cannot replace the thoughtful application of principles to our service.

Not Guatemala, but you know the scene.

I have a friend who worked in Central America helping to organize visits from church youth groups. She had one that took to throwing American footballs and coins out the windows of their van while driving through small communities. They took joy in watching the flocks of children clamoring after the van and crying out with delight at the money and strange misshapen balls. My friend, who had quite a bit of experience serving these communities, first asked, then pleaded, then admonished them to stop. The accompanying pastor reproached her for attempting to limit the youths’ expression of love. He chastised her for stifling their well-intentioned generosity and curbing their fun. As far as he was concerned, it was a beautiful thing to see young Americans eager to share their blessings with the poor children of Guatemala and having a good time doing it together. It should be reinforced and encouraged, he said, not tempered.

If you’re not sure whether to cringe or side with the pastor, that’s okay; that’s why I chose this example. It is neither extreme nor rhetorical. It wasn’t a disaster, and the pastor had a point – it is beautiful to see young Americans eager to share – but it demonstrates the dangers of not bounding our service by a few principles.

This is why I think this is a bad example of service. Its not that footballs and money are bad or unnecessary, but the way they were given was a dehumanizing treatment of the children. Rather than bridging the power differential between the wealthy and poor youth, the passing interaction only reinforced it. The need to have fun, take pictures and bring home amazing stories from an exotic place defined the agenda more than the values, resources and contextual reality of those being served, to which little interest was shown. Rather than stopping and taking an interest in these communities, the speeding vanload reinforced their isolation and unimportance. They didn’t even warrant a real visit; instead, they had stuff tossed at them in passing.

The youth group didn’t see the division, jealousy and strife among the children left in their wake, some of whom were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, some who weren’t. They didn’t reflect on the possibility that the attitude conveyed in their actions might have debilitating effects on the children’s views of themselves and of North Americans.

We should not be paralyzed by the fear of committing errors, but we should be self-conscious and think critically about how we go about serving others. Taking the time to submit our community service to a few principles should help us to avoid doing harm and, with God’s good grace, may help us be part of a positive process of transformation.

This is the fifth post of a 6-part series republishing the original Staying for Tea article from The Global Citizen journal (2005). You can link to the other posts in this series here: [1: Stay for Tea] [2: Process Matters] [3: Focus on Values] [4: Check your Filter] [5: Cultivate a Servant's Heart] [6: Conclusion]

Receive new posts in your in-box by subscribing today. Just click on the “Sign me up!” button to the right. You can also follow me on Twitter at AaronAusland and through Facebook at Staying for Tea.

Principle #5: Cultivate a Servant’s Heart

Cultivating a servant’s heart has three pieces. First, since you don’t have the power to steer a community, don’t pretend you’re at the helm. Second, since people with self-respect resist arrogant generosity, make sure to operate at eye-level. Third, since, unlike us, God does have the power to transform a community, we should be interceding passionately on its behalf.

It Doesn’t Depend on You

It’s easy to take ourselves more seriously then we should. We like to think that a whole lot depends on us when it doesn’t. It is healthy to remember that we are not the parent, savior or master of the people we serve. Rarely are we their last hope. They got along without us before; they will continue to after we’ve gone. We may play a critical role in the positive transformation of a few, but on the whole, the trajectory of the community we serve depends little on us. In fact, it is more likely that they will have a greater impact on the course of our lives than we on theirs.

Since the welfare of the community doesn’t depend solely on you, it’s okay to watch some of your efforts fail. By all means do your best work, serve generously and wisely, employ the best theory and techniques, invest your emotions, time and money, plan carefully and attend to details, but after all this, don’t be broken when the results you sought elude you. Let it go and try again, taking consolation that it didn’t entirely depend on you to begin with.

Keep it real. People are people. Don't ever look down on the people you serve.

Operate at Eye-Level

Consider how easy it is to pick up on a person’s humility when you interact with him or her. I know that I personally resist the humiliation of receiving from someone who refuses to be at eye-level with me, who lords my need over me and self-righteously pats himself on his own arrogant back, wearing his charity like a merit badge. So, as a principle we should be careful to “keep it real” and hold our pride in check. Remember that people are people; some are more resource poor than you, but take care not to diminish the person for this. Don’t ever look down on the people you serve.

Be an Intercessor

It may be that our best service is done with folded hands and doubled knees. Many of us serve out of a conviction that God has called us to it, that service is a Kingdom value. If you are a person of faith, then prayer should be part of your service. Prayer recognizes our limitations and asks for help beyond what we can provide, which is to say a lot. In addition to giving a poor woman a microloan, plead before God for economic justice and prosperity on her behalf. I have put so much effort into designing projects and interventions, into writing grants and writing checks, into sharing time and love and money, but I am dismayed to reflect on how little I have asked of God. Perhaps I have been too arrogant or had too little faith. Or perhaps I have just not been mindful that I can ask a stronger, higher power for help.

Before we begin to do anything in a community, we should have already begun to intercede in prayer, asking God to act on behalf of those we serve. We should pray for ourselves as well, for purification of motives, for the cleaning up and shipping out of pride, for the strength, wisdom and humility required in service. We should thank God that we have a wealth of resources to give and share, and we should thank God that that we also have needs, that others may serve us. If we serve with faith, we must serve with prayer.

This is the fourth post of a 6-part series republishing the original Staying for Tea article from The Global Citizen journal (2005). You can link to the other posts in this series here: [1: Stay for Tea] [2: Process Matters] [3: Focus on Values] [4: Check your Filter] [5: Cultivate a Servant's Heart] [6: Conclusion]

Receive new posts in your in-box by subscribing today. Just click on the “Sign me up!” button to the right. You can also follow me on Twitter at AaronAusland and through Facebook at Staying for Tea.

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Principle #4: Check your Filter

One of the things that can happen as you go into a community to serve is a subtle dehumanization of the people there. It’s not intentional, but it happens sometimes, especially when you roll into town with projects already formulated. There is a difference between being invited into town to live and learn where you can help with the endogenous development process already underway and arriving in town with ready-made solutions to problems you haven’t even encountered yet, but assume (or hope) exist. In that scenario, it’s like you’ve got a hammer and are looking for nails. This approach shifts the people in your new community from the subject to the object of development. If you haven’t been given the trust of the people and shown the social topography of the community, the people may even seem like obstacles! “If it weren’t for these darn people and their baffling behavior, I’d have had these women’s health exams finished long ago!” Many community service volunteers have encountered this attitude creeping into their minds at one time or another. It happens when we loose sight of the second principle (Process Matters) and begin focusing again on our projects and not on the people. I developed a metaphorical framework to remind myself to check my thinking when I began to feel frustrated in Bañado about the pace or “success” of the different projects we worked on with the community. I call it “Checking my Filter”.

The fact is that our perception of the world is altered by the conceptual filters through which we view it. Each of us makes ontological and epistemological assumptions about the world and how it works, and these ought to be made explicit. But what I want to get at here is a more specific model of conceptual filtering and it has to do with how we see people in relationship to us. Specifically, checking the filter is about how we, as communityservice volunteers, conceptualize the people in our communities. It is possible that there are appropriate times for each of these filters, but my hope is that this simple mental model will help you to be more self-conscious about checking your filters as you live and work in a community of people.

First Filter: People As Function

It is very common to treat people (unconsciously) as functions in the activities of our lives and not as our fellow kind. We fail to see people for who they are apart from us; we may see them only for the functions they perform in relation to us. This man-function is my waiter. This woman-function is my bank teller. And if the person malfunctions, we can hurl abuse because functions exist in an emotional and historical vacuum. If you’ve ever worked in the service industry here in the States, you will know how shockingly inhuman people can treat you when they filter out your humanity and see you as nothing more than a malfunction in their transaction rather than as a person with history, sensibilities, soul, and a piece of the Creator within. If we want to botch our time in a community, we can treat people as receptacles of our service; we can serve them because it’s our job and they happen to be there in the necessary role of the poor and needy. To get it right, we must be willing to see Christ in all humanity, to see the spark of the divine in the creation that was made in God’s image.

Second Filter: People as Backdrop

It can be difficult to engage people at eye-level. It’s easier to set our mind’s eye on wide angle at 10,000 feet and just take it all in from a safe distance, treating people as the background scenery to our life. On life’s stage we don’t engage the shifting backdrops painted with the scenes of other people’s lives. Miserable, idyllic or mundane, none of them directly involve or touch us; they merely frame the stage, which is populated by actors of our choosing. If we do pay attention to the backdrop, it is to admire at arm’s length. We can enjoy the world like a cultural zoo. We travel through it and take pictures of colorful, exotic and fascinating people, limiting our understanding of them to what we read in a Lonely Planet guide. This filter blurs individual people into a medley of abstract smudges. Taken to an extreme, it dehumanizes, stripping from view the essential elements of individuality and personal consciousness.

The Polarizing Lens

Photographers use the polarizing lens to gain clarity. It filters out glare and penetrates water and sky. It orders light to reveal an object without obscuring or distorting. As a rule we should seek clarity to see people for who they are: unique expressions of God’s creative proficiency, fellow human beings with a full range of emotive faculties and wholly enabled desires to belong, to have enough, to overcome, to create, to give, to enjoy life, to survive, and most of all, to have meaning.

The “Check your Filter” principle means to avoid dehumanizing those we serve. We dehumanize by showing up in their communities and telling them about their problems and the solutions we’ve brought for them. When we meet the poor, the oppressed or the abused with our giving agenda in hand, we relegate them to the role of either receptacle-function or silent backdrop of our good deeds. How do we check our filter? If we are the source of all the ideas and plans, if we fear that nothing will get done or improve without us, if we are the motor of initiative, if we are stressed-out that we might fail in our efforts, if we have trouble recognizing the names and faces and stories of those whom we serve, then it’s likely our filter needs replacing.

The ongoing debate on poverty tourism got a paroxysm of blogger attention following the recent NYT op-ed by Kennedy Odede, whose personal experience gave him harsh words for what he called Slumdog Tourism. A good assemblage of recent blogs and articles related to the poverty tourism debate is posted at Good Intentions Are Not Enough. As I followed the debate, I realized that the nebulous meaning of “poverty tourism” had many bloggers and commenters talking past each other. A couple of weeks ago I posted my contribution to the debate as a taxonomy of the terms used. The intention of that first post – “Poverty Tourism: A Debate in Need of Typological Nuance” – was that with linguistic clarity, the debate could be more productive and less shrill. The post became my popular and the word tree graphic was reproduced and discussed on a number of blogs and websites, which provided ample feedback leading to this Poverty Tourism Taxonomy 2.0. To avoid a rerun, I’m only providing a few update notes here; for a more complete explanation of the taxonomy, please refer back to the original post.

The Poverty Tourism Family of Travel Terms

Although it sounds straightforward enough, the term poverty tourism has been used to describe a range of travel types involving distinct types of travelers and purposes. The term is most often used disparagingly. An alternative term used more by those highlighting positive aspects is “development tourism.” Both terms are used to discuss three quite different genus-level travel types: education travel, tourism, and volunteerism. Each of these implies a distinct purpose: learning, leisure, and labor, respectively. These are not mutually exclusive, of course; many people travel with mixed motives. The distinction is useful, however, because the primary travel motive informs the way the travel is designed and conducted. For example, a university designing a study abroad trip might include volunteer work, but the primary motive is student learning. This informs the focus the of the travel and defines in large part what a “successful” trip will look like. Likewise, a non-profit organization hosting a group of voluntourists may be mindful of both the learning and leisure motives of the travelers, but they will have a primary focus on the labor that is to be done. Dotted lines in the graphic make explicit some travel types where mixed motives are integral the travel design.

Species-level Update

The only change from the first version is the splitting of voluntourism between commercial and non-profit providers. Commercial voluntourism operators tend to be customer-centric, and primarily profit-driven. Their history and core competencies are focused on responding to the leisure motives of tourism. Non-profit providers of voluntours tend to be more community-centric, and primarily project-driven. Their history and core competencies are focused on responding to the labor motives of volunteerism. In one of my very first posts as a blogger, “The Future of Voluntourism” I provide a more detailed explanation of this difference and its implications for development and vulnerable communities.

Again, to avoid a rerun, I’m not going to describe the meaning of each of these species-level travel types here, but rather refer you back to the original post, “Poverty Tourism: A Debate in Need of Typological Nuance.”

a.k.a.

The list of “also known as” terms is by no means comprehensive. I’m getting introduced to new terms almost daily, including “pet-the-orphan tours”, “cultural zoo trips”, and any number of creative, mostly disparaging terms. The purpose of listing any of these is to show how the taxonomy can help us sort such terms into a linguistic system that facilitates greater clarity. So, although done, one shouldn’t use the term “poverty safari” to talk about a non-profit voluntour. It’s true that a voluntourist may gawk at the locals and snap inappropriate photos, but the type of travel he is doing is not defined by these behaviors, but rather the purpose of the travel as designed by the host. Likewise, you shouldn’t use “missionary safari” to talk about a group of donors from a Christian non-profit that are visiting the projects they help fund. These are just fundamentally different types of travel. Its fun to invent and throw around deprecating terms at people traveling through poor communities, but without at least some care to use terms that actually link back to the intention of the trip, it makes debating the merits or dangers of such travel difficult.

A Case for Competence

A friend once tell me that “passion is perfected in discipline.” The passions that turn people into activists should be harnessed, channeled, and nurtured. Although I’m a big believer in action learning, sometimes the best expression of a passion is to wait, stay out of the action for a while, and invest in your capacity to act with competence. Although it escalated into a sad shrill kerfuffle, I think this was the primary message from the aid bloggers to Jason Sadler and his now defunct 1millionshirts project.

Let’s be clear, you don’t need a Masters degree to effectively serve others, but my own experience has shown that I’m less effective when I’m uninformed. When I don’t know the relevant theories, what has been tried before by others, what the practical steps are to efficiently accomplish what I want to achieve, or even how to frame the right questions about the matter, I’m less effective. Whether at a formal institution or in our hammock – we should all be balancing action with ongoing contemplation and learning.

Effective passion is not about spikes in blood pressure, raised voices, and rock throwing, it’s about caring enough to consider that you might cause harm if you storm in unprepared. It’s about strengthening your voice so that you can be an effective advocate, deepening your knowledge so you can be a non-trivial player, and sharpening your skill so you can be a builder of capacity in others. If you launch into community development, humanitarian aid, environmental activism, peacemaking, or any of the other important activities that people are passionate about without investing in your own preparation, you reinforce the subtle condescending view that these activities don’t constitute real work that require real skills, professionalism, intelligence, or competence. You tacitly underline the idea that the people you serve don’t deserve the best that you or the world has to offer. You reveal your own prejudice that service is more about good intentions than effectiveness. Good intentions aren’t worth much if they bring harm to the people you intend to serve.

An Example of Harm

A lot of the commenters following J’s critique of the Hughes’ bike project wanted to know what the harm was. This is a valid question. The premise for Saundra’s blog title: Good Intentions Are Not Enough, begs the question, “What’s wrong with good intentions? Isn’t doing something better than doing nothing?” Development and aid professionals need to be able to demonstrate with concrete examples why good intentions aren’t enough, and why being an aid elitist isn’t necessarily a terrible thing.

It basically comes down to the law of unintended consequences. The world is a complex place and things don’t always go the way you plan. There will always be unpleasant surprises, but with experience and training comes the ability to foresee and avoid some of them and mitigate others. I’m sure there are better examples than this, but I’ll share an example from international child rights activism that I’ve written about before in The Global Citizen journal.

There are millions of child laborers around the world working in scores of industry and service sectors. The idea that we could we save them by simply boycotting a few of the products manufactured using child labor is a tempting one. In fact, at any given time one can find dozens of ongoing child-labor related boycotts against corporations like Nike, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Nestle, and Coca-Cola, and specific trade goods like Chinese fireworks, Indian carpets, and Pakistani soccer balls. A quick Google of “child labor boycott” provides ample evidence of how popular the boycott is. Activist teachers turn boycotts into school projects, activist churches turn boycotts into missions, activist politicians turn boycotts into campaign issues and bills.

The intentions are good; the problem is with the outcomes. Few boycotts are ever followed up to see what the actual impact on child welfare was. Most are based on the unexamined assumption that, if they force the closure or relocation of a factory that employs children, child welfare will improve. And so the measures of success are in terms of pain inflicted on the offending companies and changes in their behavior. However, there are some good studies that do follow up on the impact of boycotts on the formerly employed children, and the evidence does not offer much support to these assumptions. The truth is boycotts sometimes result in a decline in child welfare, not an improvement.

When factories close, the underlying preferences and incentives that brought the children into that factory in the first place don’t just disappear. Parents don’t suddenly decide that they can afford to send [their child] to school now that factory is closed. The children don’t suddenly realize the long-term value of pursuing an education. Governments don’t suddenly make policies that obviate the needs of these families. Children who end up laid-off as a result of a boycott often end up moving into more dangerous and lower paid work like stone crushing, fireworks manufacturing, street hustling, and prostitution. Boycotts can lead to a decline in wages paid to child laborers and, paradoxically, even an increase in child labor.

Clearly I’m not advocating child labor, nor am I saying that boycotts of abusive businesses can never improve child welfare. The point is that assumptions about what will happen when you take an action need to be examined carefully. The world is complex and we can’t always predict how economic and social structures will respond to interventions. This shouldn’t paralyze us but if we really care about the people we wish to serve, it is good to value competence. Make sure you are actually affecting the intended change without creating unintended counter-directional change. [We should] intentionally take time to think before [we] act, observe as [we] do, and reflect on what [we've] done.

Whatever your service assignment or vocation, take it seriously. Just because you are a volunteer or do social work or are employed by a faith-based non-profit organization, you are not excused from being professional and well-informed, from being held accountable for both your process and results, from having more than good intentions expected of you by those whom you serve. Subscribe to the pertinent journals, read the relevant literature, attend a conference, find a mentor, go to graduate school, whatever. Get engaged, value competence, be relevant, and do no harm.

A Case for Humility

The bread and butter of a lot of aid bloggers is critiquing aid and development done by professionals. Those of us with Masters degrees in international development and a dozen years of experience still stumble about mucking things up, so isn’t it a bit hypocritical to be so hypercritical of good folks like the Hughes? When I read some of the outright mean comments about these folks, I just want to say “Darn it, we need more people like the Hughes, not less! The world benefits from people who give a damn and are willing to do something, people who can be moved and are motivated to move others. We need the Jasons and Hughes of the world because the alternative is apathy, stagnation, the status quo.” Maybe the world doesn’t need their first efforts, but maybe we shouldn’t shoot them down, but instead nurture them into better second and third efforts.

We tend to manage the tension between embracing people with good intentions and the knowledge of the law of unintended consequences. But we start with being a bit more honest: we aid professionals are first and foremost people with good intentions with a shocking lack of adequate knowledge, experience, and tools to act on those good intentions without causing harm. We do it all the time, so let’s lay off the non-professionals a little bit. In fact, the history of bad development is the history of hubris run amok. I think of the excellent book by James C. Scott, “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” and I think about our profession. Our best examples of the law of unintended consequences come from  within our own professional ranks, not the amateurs who generally lack the credibility to be entrusted with giant budgets and resources to really mess things up on a grand scale.

Good critique is necessary, I agree. But we can do it without being mean-spirited, condescending, and elitist. I like Saundra’s approach at Good Intentions are Not Enough. She’s posted numerous helpful and well-toned lessons and guidelines like this one; she’s also pushing for a panel at South by Southwest to discuss what we all can learn from the 1millionshirts venture – an effort that’s also being championed by Tom at A View From The Cave. Sure, blogging success can be found sometimes in being controversial and highly-opinionated, but it can come at a cost of being dishonest and mean, and ultimately it can erode the legitimacy of one’s voice – maybe all of our voices.

I think the best we can do is to encourage good intentions while raising cautionary red flags, demonstrating how real harm can be done by acting too quickly on good passions, and then working to facilitate competence in others, especially those new to the aid and development field. And we can and should do this with grace and humility.

This is the third post of a 6-part series republishing the original Staying for Tea article from The Global Citizen journal (2005). You can link to the other posts in this series here: [1: Stay for Tea] [2: Process Matters] [3: Focus on Values] [4: Check your Filter] [5: Cultivate a Servant's Heart] [6: Conclusion]

Receive new posts in your in-box by subscribing today. Just click on the “Sign me up!” button to the right. You can also follow me on Twitter at AaronAusland and through Facebook at Staying for Tea.

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Principle #3: Focus on Values

So now that you are helping build capacity in the community to manage its own development process, how do help community members define their situation and shape their plans? The standard formula tends to begin with a needs assessment. You might ask questions such as, “What are the problems facing your community?” in order to identify the most important needs. More sophisticated types might precede this with the development of a community vision. This has the added value that the community can compare the vision with the reality and see where it falls short (where the needs are). This is a logical approach, but there may be a drawback to defining the situation in terms of needs, because it automatically frames the whole development issue in terms of the community having something wrong with it that needs fixing. It lacks something, and therefore the solution is to get this needed thing; this can lead the community to seek an interventionist solution. Let me illustrate:

Q. What’s the problem?
A. We have no school.
Q. What do you need?
A. We need a school.
Q. Shall I build you school?
A. Yes please.

As a side note, communities can be strategic about their answers. If a truck shows up in town with engineers from an NGO that does water projects, how do you suppose the people are going answer the needs assessment questions? Is it likely to be different if the NGO does microcredit or health education? You’d better believe it.

It’s not surprising that beginning your work in a new community with a needs-assessment tends to lead to the types of projects I talked about in the previous section. The poor community is seen both by itself and by you as incapable of supplying its needs, but you’ve got solutions and resources – cash, materials, technical solutions, a dozen volunteers with hammers, whatever – and you’re going to save the day. Sometimes this stuff works, I admit, but I think as often as not it produces solutions that are not sustainable, not empowering, sometimes not even realistic (We need a million dollars ‘cause we’re poor and helpless), and are often based on principles of redistribution rather than those of development.

So what’s the alternative? One is values-based planning. In 1999, I attended the First International Conference on Values-Based Planning, in Bolivia, with Heifer Project International and World Concern. Values-based planing was a relatively new idea to almost everybody there, but it’s actually been around for a while. The basic idea is to start with values instead of needs and to allow these to shape the dialogue on planning, monitoring, and evaluation. According to the World Bank website, “Empowering poor communities and groups, so that they exert agency over their own development, requires deference to their values and aspirations… [and] helping these groups to develop decision-making skills that lead to practical actions based on their values, that can evolve into methods of sustainable self-governance and strategies to influence others.”

It’s been pointed out to me that volunteers working in urban community development here in the States use something similar; they call it “asset-based community development.” Instead of mapping problems through needs to external solutions, you help the community identify its values and then map these through local resources to develop a vision and action plan.Intervention may still be called for and appropriate, but it will be of an entirely different flavor. It will be the kind of help that gets them over a bump in the road, or maybe builds a bridge along the way, not the kind that builds the road, provides the car, gas and driver, buckles the seatbelts and pays the tolls.

I applied this values-based model with the women’s groups my microfinance program worked with. This led one group to realize that they had been formulating annual plans based on the services we could offer them, not on what their hearts desired for their community. They decided that, while working with us for microcredit and training was good, what they really wanted was to organize more activities for their children. Since then, they have organized events, including an annual Christmas celebration for nearly 1000 children from their own and surrounding villages.* My program’s role in these is minimal. Had we started with a different set of questions, we would have never gotten further than “The problem is we have no access to capital; our need is microcredit; the solution is that you lend us money.”

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Toward a Common Language and Taxonomy of Poverty Tourism

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UPDATE: An updated graphic with new notes has been posted at Poverty Tourism Taxonomy 2.o

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Poverty Tourism has lately been the subject of renewed blogger chatter and debate. It seems a perennial issue that gets a paroxysm of attention each time a major media outlet runs a story on it. The latest series of posts was set off by a recent NYT op-ed by Kennedy Odede, a Kenyan who had some personal experience and harsh words for what he called Slumdog Tourism. The tone has ranged from reflective to outright shrill.

A decent assemblage of some relevant blogs and articles was posted a couple days ago at Good Intentions Are Not Enough. Especially thoughtful is the Dilemmas post from Lindsay Morgan at Dispatches. Especially interesting is the exchange (criticism, defense, partial apology) between William Easterly at Aid Watch and the Director of a group that operates a Millennium Village Tour in Rwanda.

As I read through these and other posts, it became apparent that many bloggers were talking past each other and using wildly different working definitions of what poverty tourism (or development tourism) is. This makes it hard to have a coherent debate. I’m not the first to notice this; some older posts from Tales From the Hood made a brief attempt at a taxonomic approach noting, “We need some common language for talking about this subject. … We need to be able to make sense of things.” So, I began creating a compendium of names used across the posts – some openly disparaging like “poverty porn”, others more benign like “community tours.” While “Poverty Tourism” or “Development Tourism” is like a family name in biological taxonomy, the dozen or so other terms are sub-varieties like distinct genus or species.

Consider this comment by Chris Blattman in Slum tourism, easy target, harder solution:

I don’t think there is anything good to be said about the worst of the slum tour, but that’s not to say development tourism can’t be respectful or beneficial.

He’s saying that while slum tours are bad, not all development tourism is bad. Implied is that the former is subsumed by the later – a genus within a family. What follows then is my proposed taxonomy of the Poverty Tourism family along with some examples of comments that frame the discussion for each type. I hope this helps us have more linguistic clarity around the fault lines and confluence in our ongoing discussion of poverty tourism.

Type 1: Slum Tours. aka – poverty safaris, ghetto tours, poverty porn, & disaster tours.

When bloggers use these terms, it is generally to derogate poverty tourism. (See Disaster Tourism). Implied by these terms is a dehumanizing voyeuristic approach to travel in poor communities, where the poor are objectified and treated like a zoo exhibit. The tourist remains far removed from their reality as she passes through on a gratuitous visit taking pictures of colorful, exotic, and fascinatingly miserable people, limiting her understanding of them to what the tour guide tells her, and blurring individual lives into a medley of abstract smudges of poverty. It seems the worst of these are those that are organized by for-profit (even if socially-conscious) tourism operators.

Alanna Shaikh at Blood and Milk writes an unusually beautiful and vulnerable reflection related to this:

…poverty makes for great photography. Poverty has texture. … In other words, a good synonym for picturesque is desperate. Aesthetics are seductive. … That can lead you all sorts of terrible places; it can lead you to mistake tragedy for authenticity. It can make you think there is some value to authenticity when people are starving. It can lead you to take gorgeous pictures of the countryside without ever realizing that you are documenting a quiet horror.

Kennedy Odede, who grew up in Kibera, one of the largest slums outside of Nairobe, writes this in Slumdog Tourism:

Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from. People think they’ve really “seen” something — and then go back to their lives and leave me, my family and my community right where we were before.

Nor do the visitors really interact with us. Aside from the occasional comment, there is no dialogue established, no conversation begun. Slum tourism is a one-way street: They get photos; we lose a piece of our dignity.

But is there anything good about this type of poverty tourism? Chris Blattman writes in an older post on Development Tourism that “Its only virtue, perhaps, is that it is not disguised as a helping hand.” (Thus distinguishing it from other species like voluntourism.) Several bloggers go further, proposing specific changes in attitude and behavior that mitigate the worst dehumanizing effects of slum tours. Nilima Achwal at next billion offers 6 things to look for to make such tours more sensitive to and empowering for the local communities in A New Brand of Poverty Tourism. And, in an otherwise shrill post On poverty tourism: my two African cents at Project Diaspora, the writer admonishes:

“You really want change? Put down the camera, walk up to anyone in that slum, get to know them. Have some tea and crumpets, maybe a chapati slice or two.”

The implication is that there is perhaps a principled, relational approach to slum tourism that preserves human dignity. I particularly like the image of sharing tea, since staying for tea is this blog’s metaphor for a principled, relationship-driven approach to accompaniment and community development. The problem, however, is that while it could be possible for an individual to approach a slum or a community in crisis in this relational, slow way, it is hard to imagine an organized tour managing to pull off anything short of our worst fears.

Type 2: Voluntourism. aka – volunteer vacations, service tourism

Voluntourism is essentially a vacation with a few volunteer activities peppered in. People who sign up for these volunteer vacations sometimes do so out of a desire to touch something more authentic and gritty than the standard cruise ship fare. In other words, the home base in terms of purpose is still tourism. Others, sign up out of a real desire to do something good in the world, but they don’t know where to begin and decide to rely on the professionals to provide not only the logistics, but also the development thinking for them. In this case, the home base is service. Given this duality of purpose, it is not surprising that two very different sort of providers have stepped in to meet the growing demand: for-profit tourist operators and volunteer-sending development NGOs. While the NGOs have mostly just rebranded existing volunteer opportunities as voluntourism, the tourist operators are creating something new, something that looks and smells a lot like a development organization, but is actually customer-centric rather than community-centric, something that aims to generate private profit rather than common good.

But, either way, the poverty tourist is given the opportunity to “do something” immediately about what they are seeing and experiencing during their poverty tour.  In some ways, I think this can be a less honest approach, as often as not the volunteer activities provide superficial and marginal benefit to the community, while assuaging the conscience of the tourist by making them believe they’ve actually done something meaningful. I think I’d rather the tourist observe, struggle with their desire to do something right then and there, discuss, reflect, and then go home to figure out what the experience means for them and how they can be part of something bigger than themselves that is helping make a lasting change.

I tried to give a fair treatment of the subject in my post: The Future of Voluntourism, while raising the necessary red flags. Two other resources are: Voluntourism Gal, a blog dedicated solely to the topic, and VolunTourism.org, which continues to be relevant as one of the first signficant organizations dedicated to voluntourism by name. (I should note that not all voluntourism is associated with poverty-allevation – e.g. there are also many environmentally- and culturally- focused voluntours.)

Type 3: Exposure Trips. aka – vision trips, immersions, & donor tours.

Taking a step toward acceptable practice is the Exposure Trip. The difference between this and a slum tour is two-fold: who goes and with what purpose. Exposure trips are taken by those who have at least an interest connection with development activities taking place in the visited community. Often the visitor is a committed or potential donor, sometimes a Board member of an NGO, sometimes a staff member whose job isn’t field-facing (i.e. someone who works in a pro-poor organization, but whose tasks don’t bring that person into actual contact with the intended beneficiaries of his labour.) The purpose of these trips is for someone with an actual connection or interest in ongoing activities in the community to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of what is actually happening there by seeing it first-hand. Some reasonable unease with exposure trips centers around them being used to justify what are in fact gratuitous visits (i.e. slum tours).

Tales From the Hood writes in Development Tourism: thinking out loud…:

I don’t really want it to be my job. But we need a way to meaningfully and appropriately expose our work to our third audience: ordinary people in our home countries. I’m not saying development tourism is the answer. But it’s one possibility.

Obviously it all has to be structured and handled in a way that does not objectify and demean beneficiaries, and that will necessarily mean that some projects in some places never ever ever get visited as part of development tourism. But again, I have personally seen enough instances where project beneficiaries were very happy – positively stoked, in fact – to receive as visitors “ordinary citizens”…

Saundra Schimmelpfennig at Good Intentions Are Not Enough asks, When is it appropriate for a donor to visit an aid recipient?

Donors do need to have a greater understanding of what does and does not work in aid as well as common problems associated with aid. Properly structured visits can help them become better donors. However, it is important that donor visitations are done is such a way that it puts the needs of aid recipient over the needs of the donor. Care should be taken so that the visit does not objectify aid recipients and ensures that the recipients concerns are heard.

Saundra goes on to suggest 10 very constructive guidelines to help ensure that donor visits focus on education (of the donor), not titillation.

There’s also been some good discussion around Ravi Kanbur’s recent paper “Poverty Professionals and Poverty” that was quoted at some length in Owen Barder’s blog Owen Abroad. Dr. Kanbur suggests that development professions engage in immersions every year or so to get a reality check and reset their focus on the core mission: “serving and helping poor people to work their way, sustainably, out of poverty.” Again, there is some unease about these becoming a way to justify slum tourism, but I think it is reasonable to hope for a net positive affect from connecting those whose work or support is related to the development activities taking place in a community with the community members.

Type 4: Study Abroad. aka – service-learning, cultural exchange & student research

Like exposure trips, study abroad has as its purpose and intentional focus on learning. Obviously, a lot of study abroad trips have nothing to do with poverty tourism. (e.g. a semester in France) But, with the increasing interest in international development, more and more study abroad programs, service-learning programs, and student research is bringing students into poor communities with the intention of learning about them, about poverty, and about anti-poverty projects. The potential for these trips to result in the same pernicious outcomes of the worst of poverty tourism is real.

Chris Blattman takes a rather negative view here:

Yesterday I mourned the extractive and self-serving quality of many student research trips. For me, two-week development adventures fall clearly in the tourism category as well. Is there an argument for these trips actually helping? If so, is the benefit even close to the best use of the thousands of dollars it took to get that person out there?

But these trips also have a potentially rosier upside. Students presumably go with an open mind and an attitude to ask questions and learn. And, if done right, they can even build on a longer-term institutional/community relationship that supports longer-term development activities. One example of this is the Comprehensive (Intercultural Servant) Leadership Program at Gonzaga University lead by Josh Armstrong that has a study abroad component designed collaboratively with community members in Zambezi, Zambia. The community recognizes itself as the host and teacher of the students, while at the same time as beneficiary of student assistance with ongoing activities. By returning each year, a relationship of trust and feedback can be developed between the community and the university.

Beyond the question of what benefits are immediately provided to the host community, study abroad holds out wider potential to shape future global citizens with greater sensitivity to and understanding of global issues like poverty, cultural sustainability, and environmental vulnerability.

Type 5: Short-term Volunteer Trips. aka – church mission trips, missionary safaris

Each year hundreds, if not thousands of short-term volunteers go to all corners of the earth to dig trenches, paint churches, construct latrines, maybe play a game of soccer, and perhaps share their version of the gospel. Each year dozens, if not scores of bloggers aim derision, destain, and disgust at them. It’s an easy group to pick on because they are so green, go with such upside notions of what they doing, and are so clearly the unsuspecting beneficiaries of the whole endeavor.

Maurice at Mostly Maurice offers his critique by way of a definition of a development tourist:

An intern or short-term employee on a contract of up to 1 year, who wants to “experience the developing world” and “help out”, and who will afterwards leave the country, leave Africa and/or even leave development aid work altogether.

Tales From the Hood flat out condems the idea from a Do-No-Harm perspective:

I do not think that it is a good idea for untrained, unpaid foreigners to be sent to work in another country as part of a development or relief program. …if the motivation is an honest and informed desire to offer the very best programming to beneficiaries in the most efficient manner possible, it is all but impossible to justify international volunteers.

Some argue against volunteers from an economic view comparing the cost of exporting unskilled labor from the USA or Germany against the cost of hiring a local. The value of the “free” volunteer doesn’t come close to offsetting the cost of planning, hosting, and managing him, let alone his airfare, room and board. But I think this misses at least half the point of international volunteerism. Of course, the material or project benefit could have been purchased for less than the plane ticket, but the personal and relational benefit of mutual transformation for both the host community and volunteer…well that’s harder to place a dollar value on. And this doesn’t consider any long-term committments to justice and pro-poor policies that begin with exposure and leads to understanding through relationships. Even Tales From the Hood acknowledges:

I got my start as a volunteer. … That initial year as an English teacher in Bangkok changed my life on multiple levels. It exposed me to life outside of North America. It opened a world of possibility. And it led to formal employment with an INGO.

I got my start as an MCC volunteer. Saundra at Good Intentions Are Not Enough got her start as a volunteer. In fact, most people that I know who care deeply about international issues of justice, human rights, environmental and cultural sustainability, fair trade, etc. got that way because of some international volunteer experience that rocked their world. The Jesuits at JVC have a great saying regarding the life-long effects of volunteer service: “Ruined for Life.” This is a big part of the philosophy behind The Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship, for which I serve as a Board member.

The value proposition is changed lives, not just of the visited, but of the visitor, and this is a worthy value proposition.  That said, s-t volunteerism would be less nauseating to the professional development/aid worker if this value proposition was explicitly acknowledged by the visitor (in the place of say a Christ complex) and downright virtuous if made explicit by all parties: the volunteer, the sending organization, and the host community.

Chris Blattman again:

I’m more comfortable with development tourism if it is explicitly that: if students and Westerners are going with an eye to learning rather than saving; if they recognize that they are receiving a service from others more than they are giving of themselves.

Type 6: Community Tours

This is perhaps the most benign and potentially empowering type of poverty tourism because it is the community that manages it. They are involved in the design of the tourism project, sometimes even initiating it. They control who comes, how many come, and what messages they hear. In terms of economic benefit, a typical slum tour may generate some employment in the communities and the tourists may end up donating money to an aid or development organization working with them, but there really isn’t any empowerment or agency happening. With community tourism, on the other hand, the communities control the message – they retell their own story rather than let the tour guides decide how to treat it. And as the hosts, they can also have more say in how the profits are shared and used. For a thorough and very positive (if self-interested) take on community tourism, read Is Community Tourism a Good Thing? at Grassroots Journeys.

Tourism Concern provides a good 10-point checklist of “shoulds” for community tourism in What is Community Tourism? Among the obvious shoulds (be run with involvement and consent of community, give a fair share of profits back, etc.), they say that community tourism should have mechanisms to help communities cope with the impact of western tourists, brief tourists before the trip on appropriate behavior, not make local people perform inappropriate ceremonies, and leave communities alone if they don’t want tourism.

The Millennium Villages tour in Rwanda that was much debated between William Easterly and Michael Grosspietsch seems to be in this category. Dr. Grosspietsch’s response to the initial critique defends the project in part by pointing out the role of the community is designing and controlling the tours.  World Vision report also recently aired an interview with Josh Ruxin, the founder and director of the MV project in Rwanda, who discusses the importance of community involvement.

Some, however, will still find the whole idea of tourism in poor communities degrading, regardless of community involvement. William Easterly is one of these:

I continue to believe that the whole idea of tourists going to see poor people simply because they are poor — or to see the interventions targeted at these poor because they are poor — is degrading. It perpetrates the patronizing view that the poor are some faceless mass of helpless victims which the MV is rescuing, which is part of the flawed philosophy of the MV itself.

A little help here?

So there it is – one of the longest blogs ever posted with over 25 links and a dozen quotes. I already feel a little ridiculous for having written it, but it’s at least ordered my own thinking about the poverty tourism debate. I hope it meets a need for others as well by providing a common linguistic platform for the discussion to move forward on. If you think I’ve gotten something wrong or missed an important distinction, I absolutely welcome your feedback.

This is the second post of a 6-part series republishing the original Staying for Tea (Five Principles for Community Development) article from The Global Citizen journal (2005). You can link to the other posts in this series here: [1: Stay for Tea] [2: Process Matters] [3: Focus on Values] [4: Check your Filter] [5: Cultivate a Servant's Heart] [6: Conclusion]

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Principle #2: Process Matters

The world is littered with community development projects gone wrong. More often than not the source of failure was an overemphasis on output and underemphasis on process. Take, for example, the ubiquitous latrine project. When project success is measured by output, most latrine projects are successful. After all, most such projects do, indeed, get latrines built. But if you go back in a few years and look for the outcomes that these latrines were supposed to generate – fewer diseases, cleaner water, etc. – there seem to be far more failures. In fact, most latrines that I’ve seen in the developing world aren’t even used, at least not as latrines!

Part of the problem is that planners don’t map out logic models that take people and their incentives into account. Logic models are maps of interventions. They are intended to show a complete, coherent causal chain from inputs through activities to outputs, and then to short-, medium- and long-term outcomes. But often there are unexamined, yet critical, assumptions made about how people are going to behave – assumptions that create weak or broken links in the chain. For example, just because you estimate that 300 families need latrines doesn’t mean that 300 families will use them in the ways you intend them to if you build them. You have to ask, “What would motivate this behavior?”

It’s important to understand that simply getting buy-in for the project often isn’t enough. There are many reasons other then your outcome intentions that could result in superficial buy-in leading to successful outputs with failed outcomes. The community may have supported the project because having you operate one in their community brings it or its leaders status; perhaps they liked the social component of working together on something – on anything, perhaps they really wanted a place to store potato seeds, but you weren’t offering to build silos, and as soon as you blow out of town they’ll convert the latrine into a storage shed. When logic models forget to examine the behavioral assumptions in the links between intervention and outcome, it amounts to forgetting that people are at the center of the development process.

But how can we as outsiders know what a community is thinking? Well, we can’t, which is why many people have begun to rethink the whole process of planning and implementing projects. Increasingly, practitioners are focusing on empowering communities to manage their own development processes, from identifying their own objectives to creating their own plan to managing the activities that realize the plan. The community, after all, is far better positioned to assess its own needs, strengths, resources, intentions, and incentives than any outsider. Too often, projects have been an outsider’s solution to problems only the outsider can see. A problem may be real, but unless the community both prioritizes the problem and has ownership and a stake in its solution, the members’ incentives will not be aligned with your logic model. Latrines are a classic example. An outsider can come into a community, test the water, assess the need, build the solution, and move on without ever acknowledging the community of people living there. An outsider can totally miss the fact that the community has a unique set of cultural lenses, economic incentives, and social structures that may run orthogonal to one’s neat logic model.

There are also other benefits to community members having a stake in naming and solving their problems. When a community walks through this process of identifying objectives, creating a plan and managing the activities, its members are building capacity that can be applied to other development issues as well. Communities face multiple development issues that no single project can address. But a community that knows how to self-organize, prioritize objectives, think critically, calculate costs, mobilize resources, leverage assets, manage conflict, and self-evaluate is going to be far better equipped for the development challenge than a community that simply agrees to allow outsiders to haphazardly bring projects to town.

As a volunteer [or employee], you will generally be bounded by the institutional culture and norms of the church or organization that sent you. Radically altering the way they work simply is not possible unless you are in a position of authority. Nevertheless, try where you can to move away from a project-centered approach to community development. Don’t volunteer for work where you are set up to “educate” the community about its problems, work in which you generate plans and then get “buy-in” from the community, in which your performance is measured by deliverables and timetables, in which the priority is the development product (latrines, health center, church building) rather than the people, in which you bring in the capacity rather than help build it. If you are already inside such an organization, do what you can to help colleagues realize that development is an ongoing, endogenous process. It doesn’t simply lurch along dependent on outsiders arriving with solutions and resources. In fact, this kind of “help” is likely to stunt development because it tends to create dependency, conflict and feelings of helplessness.