What is most impressive about Bunker Roy is his emphasis on *really* listening to the poor and structuring our programs and initiatives around them – allowing the poor to lead and take a primary role in the movement, while we support them in achieving their ambitions and dreams, and in revitalizing their communities. Listening is far too important, and far too infrequently done. Thank you Bunker Roy.

Related posts:

1. Feature Friday: Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Durban Shack Dwellers’ Movement
2. Let’s make this a movement: Holistic Advocacy

I think Lemmon makes a great point. When we think “microfinance” we think of women. But when we hear the word “entrepreneur”? Our thoughts invariably shift to men – like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But why can’t we look up to women entrepreneurs as examples to admire and believe in? Why do we keep expectations low for women? Why can’t we believe women, too, are capable of big things – huge things – that change societies and economies for the better? When our expectations for women remain low – micro, in fact – we don’t invest in women to the level they are capable of, and we undervalue 50% of the population.

Let’s think bigger for women. Macro, not just micro.

Related posts:

1. Note to social entrepreneurs: change requires politics
2. Be the change: Empowering Women Through Microfinance, by Grace Boyle
3. Feature Friday: Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights

Yatin has been snapping photographs since he was ten years old. Being the only child in his community to own a camera, Yatin would set out each weekend to capture “life” going on around him. He always found beauty in the everyday mundane activities of his neighbors. He admired how the community succinctly vibrated to a constant hum of vitality: the people, architecture and technology (or lack of it) all worked in a harmonious paradox.

In the 1950s, Yatin’s family founded numerous large-scale textile factories that brought great prosperity through employment, training and technology to the otherwise desolate and impoverished community. As a community leader and ambassador of education, Yatin’s family built many social enterprises to help empower the community in their town of Bavala, located in the district of Ahmedabad. Upon the sale of his first web-based company at age 36, Yatin immediately reached out to his hometown community and offered his hand in the philanthropic activities his family was involved in.

Despite his detour, Yatin has never strayed far from his artistic roots. He continues to work on photography, and in November 09, he returned to India, and walked through the streets of Ahmedabad with his camera to come up with the “Sutra” collection. Sutra, an ancient Sanskrit word, means the thread or line that holds elements together – it is a display of the interplay of all the elements that coincide to create a highly functioning, cohesive community in which the ancient and the contemporary reside. In this collection, Yatin wants to reveal the textural fibers woven into the environments of present-day urban India, evocative of its ancient society and civilization at large.

Yatin is using his photography not only to capture glimpses of India in a different light, but also to raise money and give back. I love initiatives like this which not only have an inherent artistic, but a philanthropic and social aim as well. He has hosted art shows to raise funds for organizations such as The Annika Foundation, Kerosene Lamp Foundation, and March of Dimes.

Art Exhibition

Art Show

 I certainly find a lot of beauty in India’s complexity, contradictions and paradoxes. India presents to me a rich ancient culture alongside powerful modernization, poverty alongside burgeoning wealth, and tight knit community ties that sustain over the decades. I’m glad to see photographers recognizing this rich diversity and the incredible energy that India has, and is.

Related posts:

1. Life goes on… Taliban or not?

And, as she writes, the pervasive nature of modern NGOs could actually lead to a weakening of the state. The republic of NGOs begins to provide all the services that the state should be providing, ultimately serving to replace and undermine the public sector. Instead, we should be working to strengthen government services.

NGOs tend to follow their path or that of donors and this may result in possible overlapping and duplication of activities. In Haiti, for instance, following the January 12, 2010 earthquake that destroyed much of Port-au-Prince, concerns about the role of NGOs in the small island’s development have been raised. In the past, directing aid through NGOs has created dependency and contributed to limited government capacity, as well as weak institutions. Which, translated into simple words, means that Haitians look at NGOs rather than their government for basic public services.

Quite frankly, I too am trying to take a more critical look at my future involvement in the NGO sector. I like the idea of working with startups; on a personal level, they provide a fulfilling work experience with greater responsibility. But the last thing I want to do is continue to support the mushrooming of unnecessary NGOS and the weakening of the public sector. The last thing I want to do is replicate efforts without proper coordination. I think that NGOs, whether international or local, have to be intentional about 1) using their money well, and 2) striving to ultimately integrate with government-provided services.  Here’s a great example of this I saw recently, by the International Legal Foundation, a non-profit that is striving to expand criminal defense services in post conflict countries. The ILF writes:

Although ILF-Afghanistan was built by an independent NGO funded by international donors, the ILF’s ultimate goal is to facilitate the creation of a government-supported, locally run public defender system. The agreement signed today represents a major step toward realizing this goal in Afghanistan. This model of institution building is common in other development sectors such as medicine; medical facilities are often established by NGOs with donor support before being turned over to the government. However, this type of arrangement is unique in the justice sector and may serve as an innovative example for other efforts to strengthen the rule of law in countries emerging from conflict or in transition.

Great initiative by the ILF — and I hope that more non-profits push for similar collaborations with governments. Another point I agree with is this:

I am convinced that many humanitarian workers are belonging to the “I-can-be-anywhere-and-I-don’t- care”-category of people, which are those who will conduct the same type of life no matter where they are. Goma, Nairobi, Ndjamena, Dadaab, Haiti, they will keep drinking beer under bomb attacks or post-tsunami affected areas without asking themselves a single question about why they are delivering tents and food to war refugees and IDPs. Many aid workers prefer meeting in fancy restaurants (always available in conflict zones) rather than reflecting on why they’re getting paid 3 or 4 times more their “local staff”. I’ve been told this is a psychological surviving strategy, a way to cope with suffering that people who are not used to it put in place. I don’t necessarily agree with this justification. I tend to blame the lack of curiosity and commitment of human beings. I also believe that many humanitarian workers go to underdeveloped countries, such are some in Africa, to try an exotic experience, to flee from their problems back home or to have living standards they will not be able to afford where they come from. Once they start, they love the money and find the lifestyle cool and fascinating, and they keep on rolling.

So many aid workers are employed by INGOs, the US government, USAID, and UN offices and while they have a relatively glamorous lifestyle, local people – including local aid workers and non-profit employees – are usually not given the same salary or perks. This truly frustrates me. While expats are going out to fancy restaurants and partying on weekends, “locals” (Note: I dislike this word too, but use it for lack of a better one) frequently are going without a meal. One Director of a local NGO told me she only eats out at a restaurant once a year. At the same time, I have seen expats going to restaurants several times a week and being paid more than three times the salary of local non-profit employees.

These are just a couple of things that are problematic with the international aid machinery, and I hope we can begin discussing these issues frankly and coming towards better solutions in the near future.

Related posts:

1. Questioning the international development system
2. International Bridges to Justice

The film is produced by Tom Silva, and I’m excited to present an interview with him!

What is “Silhouettes” about?

Silhouettes is a love story that unfolds over a series of conversations, in the spirit of “Before Sunset” and “Lost in Translation.” Aamod is a retired executive who lives alone in his sprawling downtown Chicago apartment; Nadia is a successful lawyer in transit to see her conservative Muslim parents for the first time in more than a decade. Both are nursing their own traumas of loss and banishment. After a chance meeting, they are drawn together for a magical day in Chicago, wandering its loneliest spaces and its most haunting views, probing their experiences as globalized minorities caught between worlds, languages and cultures. What emerges through words is a tragic secret and the reality of their feelings for each other. Silhouettes is a new chapter in the American love story — unusual because it confronts issues of race, identity and culture head on, with a view to representing ethnic characters in the full breadth of their complexity and experience.

Tell me more about yourself; how did you develop an interest in filmmaking?

My story is one which is not uncommon these days: I am an Indian who grew up in Southeast Asia, went to British school, and have spent most of my adult life in North America. After attending the MFA Program in Film at Columbia College, Chicago, I was film critic-at-large at the Daily Southtown newspaper, a subsidiary of The Chicago Sun-Times. The Quiet, my first feature film, premiered at the Art Institute of Chicago and was named Best Independent Film by Chicago Screen Magazine. Related to my interests, I am currently part of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago where I am focusing on the intersection of culture and identity. Silhouettes is, in many ways, a direct result of my research in new imaginaries and possibilities for people who defy categories.

What do you think is missing with regards to South Asians and their representation in film, TV, and popular culture in the U.S.?

Our history in this country stretches back to the 19th century when Punjabis started arriving in the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin  Valley after braving a 30 day journey by sea from the subcontinent. That’s an awful long time to be in a country and still not see representations of your group in mainstream media. I’ve talked to Indian actors who still see their ethnicity as a burden and live in hope that they can pass for other races. After all this time, we haven’t had a single leading role for a South Asian in a major American or English film that didn’t define its character entirely by his or her ethnicity. The ethnic frame is a vice that denies characters psychological complexity, the ability to engage with the world fully and to be recognized as free agents.

I believe that Indians and Pakistanis and Asians in general can function as universal characters who can embody the human experience — just as English and American characters do.  Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray blazed the trail in the late 50s and early 60s when they won the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals. The Chinese 5th generation filmmakers followed up with some wonderful films. But succeeding generations haven’t built on this legacy — we’re devolving into formula films and Bollywood extravaganzas which aren’t really serving any real aesthetic enterprise. The Hamlet and the King Lear of the future will be Asian or African, I’m convinced. I think people in America or Europe will accept seeing Asians as universal characters and ultimately come to think of this as normative.

How does your film challenge cultural and religious stereotypes?

We have a strong, independent Muslim female who isn’t constrained by her identity — she isn’t reduced to being pious or victimized or radical. Instead, we’ve given her the range and registers of any Western character — humor, sexuality, independence and intelligence. I think the other characters  similarly break out of the reductive parameters that American films often put minorities in.

I think South Asian films and filmmakers have to be careful about employing the same tropes and themes in dealing with the subcontinent as Western filmmakers (stories about arranged marriages or dire poverty, for example) because it becomes confining; it makes them an aestheticised, exoticised other that isn’t useful in advancing the identity of Asians.

And filmmakers have an especially tough time depicting South Asian women.  Invariably, they come across as submissive or petulant or even caricatures. Consider that even a lauded film like Gandhi doesnt have a single substantial Indian woman character in it — not even the great Indian independence leader, Sarojini Naidu, who become the President of the Indian National Congress and was critical in the fight against colonialism. The same is true of otherwise fine films like Avi Nesher’s Turn Left at the End of the World or Hanif Kuresihi’s My Son, The Terrorist to say nothing about how women are treated as window dressing in Bollywood films. Considering the remarkable accomplishments of women like Gayatri Spivak, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Arundhati Roy, there is a great need for films that can depict South Asian women in all of their complexity and intelligence.

What makes your film different?

Silhouettes is an honest meditation on how South Asian women balance the extraordinary expectations placed on them with their need to form and assert their own identities — women caught between cultures, languages and countries. What’s unique about the film is that it is seeking to introduce a new kind of South Asian woman to American screens — characters who are cosmopolitan, with lots of cultural capital and political agency. In addition, it was important in the wake of all the anti-Islamic rhetoric in the States, to create a new kind of Muslim character — a woman of extraordinary confidence, wordliness, humor and a deep connection to her Muslim roots. And the film confronts taboo issues like the fetishism around skin color, and the ostracism that comes when a woman defies her community’s assigned roles.

Related posts:

1. What does race have to do with it? The case for South Asians in public interest law
2. Unsettling Identity: South Asian & Social Change
3. Feature Friday: Sakhi for South Asian Women

But I was enraged not only at her story and the abuses she has experienced — but also at the way the journalist, Bowley, had treated Sahar Gul:

“No one can see Sahar Gul,” he said. “Too many people have come to see her. She has psychological problems. She is hitting herself. “

I told him that we didn’t want to talk to Sahar Gul if it would upset her. We just wanted to tell her story, and we had a signed permission letter from the Public Health Ministry.

[....]

When I arrived back at the Times’s bureau, I found that the Associated Press had also visited the hospital — and had more luck interviewing Sahar Gul.

When I was reporting for the business desk, being doggedly persistent — and even pushy — to get access to a protected source was a feature of normal life. But I am new to reporting in Afghanistan, and I have found myself treading lightly around a culture to which I’m not yet accustomed. But I realized that despite the delicacy of the situation, I should have pushed past ‘no.’ Her story was too important.

The next day, Sunday, we returned to Wazir Akbhar Khan. And this time, I wouldn’t be turned away.

Sayad Hassan, a white-bearded man who was in charge of the nurses, led us up the tiled stairwell to Sahar Gul’s room.

I found a small girl, cringing beneath a comforter. Her face was cut and scratched, her left eye bruised and half closed. Her forearm was withered and thin. Her hair was a dark tangle beneath a brown headscarf.

Upon reading this article, I felt Bowley was simply ignoring the fact that Sahar Gul is a human being – and not just that, but a traumatized survivor of severe violence – while in his blind quest for a story. There are so many things wrong with this picture!

First, Sahar Gul is only 15-years old; there is no way she could have given informed consent to speak with a reporter about her experiences. Second, Sahar Gul is severely traumatized and a victim and survivor. She has been subject to extreme violence at a very young age; from the article, she clearly has psychological problems. She shouldn’t be forced to speak with a reporter — especially one who clearly has NO training in speaking with trauma victims in conflict zones, or with survivors of gender-based violence. By asking her triggering questions about the abuse she has encountered, the journalist could be causing flashbacks of the trauma, which only serve to further disturb her psychological state. Forcing survivors to tell and retell their stories can be extremely traumatizing! Telling one’s story can be therapeutic – but ONLY on the survivor’s terms! In this situation, Sahar Gul basically had no say in telling her story. She was forced to relive her experiences over and over again. Can you imagine how painful that could be?

Finally, reporters need some training in seeing a subject as a *human being* and not just as a “story.” And that is exactly what Bowley was doing. In his dogged quest for an article, he ignored the impact he might be having on Sahar Gul and her life. He didn’t *need* to get this story as it had already been covered by a number of other major Western media outlets. There was no need to be pushy in this situation; in fact, this was a situation in which to tread extra lightly and be sensitive to the needs of Sahar Gul.

Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one disturbed by this news story. After I ranted about it on Twitter, I saw that the incredible Wronging Rights picked up the story and had apparently gotten numerous complaints about the article from readers.

There’s a reason the UNICEF guidelines for interviewing children specify that interviewers must “avoid questions, attitudes or comments … that reactivate a child’s pain and grief from traumatic events.”

The risk of retraumatizing someone you’re trying to help is an issue we’ve both grappled with in our work representing asylum applicants. You try to balance the need for convincing detail with the harm inflicted on the client, but that necessarily entails asking people questions that no one should ever have to answer, like “and what were you tied to during the second gang rape?” Questions like that have the potential to do all kinds of terrible things, like triggering painful flashbacks, or causing physical distress, so the decision to ask them needs to be weighed very, very carefully. If they have the potential to save the victim’s life through a successful asylum case, then they are probably worth it. Probably.

Here, however,  it’s hard to know why Bowley needed to interview Sahar Gul at all – he himself notes that the AP had already done so. So he was balancing the harm of re-traumatizing a tortured child who did not want to be interviewed against…what, exactly? His desire not to be scooped by the AP during his first week in Kabul? We can see why that might be a concern for the reporter, but why should Sahar Gul give a toss?

Bravo, Wronging Rights, once again for taking a stand. Wronging Rights also has a great form letter that you can send over to the NYT if you are sufficiently outraged and want to take action. I only hope this incident provides opportunity and space for news outlets like the NYT to take a critical look at the training provided to journalists reporting on particularly sensitive issues like this one.

No related posts.

David Cameron has announced he wants forced marriage to be made a criminal offence. However, not everyone agrees that this will help the victims. The government feels that the signal they send out to not criminalise it is a bad one – sometimes using criminal punishment is needed to reinforce persuasion against it.

However, some feel that prevention rather than prosecution is best for the children involved in forced marriages. In developing countries many girls are often pulled out of school and forced to marry.

There is a finely balanced argument among those who support the victims and the government. At the centre of the debate is the question of whether a new criminal offence will actually encourage the girls and young women involved to disclose the nature of the abuse and coercion they have suffered mostly at the hands of their own families, or whether they will work harder to hide this abuse.

Many victims hope to still reconnect with their families and they will only seek help if this isn’t jeopardised in the future. Criminalising forced marriage may in some cases discourage victims to speak out.

Some poor families in developing countries choose to marry off their daughters in exchange for things, such as livestock. In the UK, families imposing forced marriage are from overseas where it’s practised. This is usually down to family honour – it can come down to an overprotective family feeling that adolescent girls need to be safeguarded and kept away from public places – peer or family pressure, strengthening family links, financial gain and care, particularly of girls with disabilities.

Some communities in developing countries have agreed to end early forced marriages. But this can take on average 6 years for the entire agreement to be met by everyone in the community. The worry for those currently working to prevent forced marriage is that the government will feel their job is done just by making it a criminal offence. Many feel that this alone isn’t enough and we still need to work on preventing forced marriage and helping the victims.

In particular, many of those involved in this field believe that families would continue find ways around the legislation in the UK, especially by the simple expedient of taking the potential victim abroad. Those working with the victims argue that investing in prevention, protection of victims and the provision of support services will offer better results.

Do you think forced marriage should be criminalised? There are valid arguments to support both sides, but the difficulty governments are having facing culturally sensitive issues shouldn’t outweigh the rights to protect these children.

Help to campaign against forced marriage.

About the author:

Ross Stevens is a content writer on behalf of Plan UK, who enjoys copious amounts of tea while writing topical blog posts for various sites on the Internet. Plan UK specialises in charity work for various campaigns, such as “sponsor a child” and “because I am a girl”, which work to help children born in the poorest of countries.

Related posts:

1. A primer on human trafficking {Guest post by Arrianna Marie Coleman}
2. Law matters in our daily work – Guest post by Bwalhuma Isaac
3. Guest Post: Why should we care about human rights?

When I first started MIT, I stood in awe of fellow freshmen who were taking 8 classes a semester and getting ready to do graduate work in math and physics. And I rambled on to my parents and whoever would listen about how unfathomably smart these kids must be. I was obsessed with this idea of the genius MIT student that I clearly wasn’t.

My dad told me something that I wasn’t able to appreciate until much later — that it’s not about being “smart”, but about sustained focus, dedication, and discipline. I didn’t believe him. I figured that some people are just born smarter, and there’s an upper limit on your intelligence that holds you back, and that I had hit that limit. No doubt some people are more predisposed to certain kinds of achievement. It’s very very easy to blame your intelligence than your motivation when by all accounts, you are busting your ass, killing yourself spending 20 hours on each analysis problem set and those guys are spending less than 5.

But then I started thinking about those kids I idolized. Some of them had been doing programming or math competitions since they were in elementary school. One of my friends would tell me things like “I’m thinking of going through a complex analysis book this summer and going back through my notes to review my topology.” Now this was a guy with /focus/ and /dedication/! I thought to myself: until I spend that much time doing focused work, how can I expect to be as good?

I realized that “genius” is overrated. It is rarely just there. You have to focus and keep pushing yourself to get there.

I relate so, so much to this. Growing up, I too was confronted by incredible “genius” kids in my high school who skipped many grades, were doing college level math and science courses in 9th grade, and eventually ended up getting into Harvard, MIT, and Columbia. I often felt hopeless; compared to these geniuses, who seemed to get everything instinctively, I had to struggle to do well in even regular Physics and Chemistry courses. To get an A, I had to work that much harder than these kids. And I didn’t get into my dream college like they did. I chalked it up to just not being smart enough.

When I started undergrad at Northwestern, again, I felt frequently intimidated by many peers who just seemed…smarter than me. I somehow found myself in an advanced mathematics and social sciences curriculum. In my first quarter, I was thrown headfirst into advanced micro and macro economics – and I had never even studied the subject before! I spent every waking moment studying that quarter and in the end I survived – but my spirit was crushed. There I saw students around me seeming to understand these concepts innately, while I had to spend hours cracking a problem set. I knew the program wasn’t for me, and I dropped it. Immediately, my grades shot up. But still, I remained convinced that some people were just smarter than me – and that perhaps I had reached my breaking point. Maybe despite all my hard work, I could never match up to them.

But, now looking back, I realize that math/economics/science was never my skill (or my passion). In hindsight, I also realize that other students who seemed inherently smarter than me, perhaps weren’t. Like the MIT student I quoted, it’s likely that my peers who excelled were much more prepared than me. Perhaps starting in middle school, they had a dedicated focus on learning math. And maybe in high school, they took economics and math courses at their local university. It’s possible they put in a lot more effort than I did. Now, I believe that their success was likely product of their hard work and dedication over the years.

On the other hand, I didn’t dedicate that much time growing up to math/economics/science. Barely any, actually. I spent my free time writing and doing web design, because those were things I was immediately drawn to. I read voraciously. I wrote poetry, creative fiction, and novels; I filled up countless journals and decorated my walls. It was my creative mind I was strengthening, not my logical brain. It is then, wholly unsurprising that in college I did much better in my political science and humanities courses. Reading hundreds of pages and writing long essays? This, I could do. Economics and math? I had never put in the dedicated focus to truly excel at those subjects.

I wasn’t born smart, and probably neither were the genius kids I admired growing up. It was about putting in hard work. That’s why I liked “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell. The 10,000 hours rule he coined is now a concept deeply ingrained into popular culture – most likely because it rings quite true. We have to put in about ten years of really high-quality effort to become very good at something.

And this is also why I enjoyed Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” I don’t agree with many of the tactics she used to force her children to practice piano/violin or study — but I do understand the premise underlying her parenting approach. She believes that you have to put in the hard, dedicated work to be really good — at anything. Music, art, sports, writing, science. Her children may not have been child prodigies, but they started putting in the hours at a very young age. Now, they are certainly talented, smart, and capable individuals who are going to the top schools in the U.S. and will surely succeed.

Obviously, intelligence isn’t everything. There is much more to life. But it gives me hope to know that if I work hard enough and put in dedicated focus, perhaps I can come closer to the people I most admired growing up, and those I admire now. It gives me hope that by pushing myself, I can do great things too. There are no limitations. There are no boundaries. And to me, that is truly empowering.

Related posts:

1. Activism and alienation; the gift and curse of empathy
2. Balancing connectedness and mindful focus

This infographic was created specifically for my blog; the statistics and data come from this Sociological Images blog post on the CDCP report and the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010 Summary Report.

No related posts.

Giifa is a website that will serve as a platform for crowd-funding jobs in non-profits. Member organizations will be able to post new jobs on Giifa, that they are creating by employing currently unemployed people. It will allow donors who support either job creation by donating small amounts of money to the people they choose. Once a person is fully-funded, they are employed by the particular organization. One can donate as less as $20, to help a person get employed. You will also be able to help create jobs for organizations you currently support. Giifa’s mission is to make donations more transparent, while empowering every individual to create jobs, and help the US economy recover.

Through this new website, non-profits – especially small, grassroots organizations and startups – can begin raising funds for staff salaries! Having worked for many non-profits, I know that one of the biggest hurdles we face is getting the funding for “core operational costs” such as staff salaries. Donors and funders, including individual donors and foundations alike, simply prefer to donate only to “program costs” and not staff salaries. Well, guess what? Non-profits can’t operate effectively without staff to run their programs well. Staff salaries don’t have to be exorbitant of course — but non-profits do need to pay a living wage to their employees to not only run their programs effectively, but also motivate staff and keep their social justice ideals. No donor wants to spend money on staff salaries, but it’s not sustainable to rely on volunteers and unpaid interns forever.

This is a simply brilliant idea, though I hope that international non-profits can participate in the website as well. I think this will be an especially valuable tool for startups and small organizations that simply have difficulty getting funding for salaries through other means. Not to mention, as they say, this is a great tool for strengthening the economy & creating jobs. Crowdfunding has been used successfully through many new initiatives, such as Kickstarter, but I think this is a truly valuable use of a crowdfunding platform, and I’m super excited to see where this will lead. Love it!

No related posts.