eightsixty

So the need is still out there.

And Opportunity International are continuing with a great series of new and innovative events. Our last official event of 2008 was 'eightsixty', a beautiful exhibition of photography by Rick Carter, taken on his last trip to India with Opportunity.

http://www.eightsixty.org/

I was at the VIP night a couple of weeks ago with Dom, and I thought it was a really atmospheric event, totally in tune with Opportunity's position as an organisation that offers something different, and full of care, attention and respect - something that's also embodied in Rick's photos.

The book is still available to buy on the eightsixty website. All proceeds from the book will go to Opportunity International's India program.

Dom loved the event too and had a few stories of her own, from a trip she took to India a few years back. Four months of travelling and painting as a single woman in India sounds rather adventurous to me, but led to a successful exhibition of paintings in Melbourne. Maximum respect.

In times of need.

All picture in this update are from a visit to the 2008 Sculptures By the Sea exhibition last Monday.

One view of the world.

It’s 2008, turning into late 2008. Markets crash, then countries crash. Your workmates suck their teeth and tell you that the ASX has fallen 10%, then your friends invite you to share their disbelief – ‘haven’t you seen that the ASX has fallen 20%?’ – and then your mum tells you that the SAX has fallen 40% and so you reckon you’d better start following this ‘credit crunch’ yourself.
So you start reading the business news section of the newspaper. But by this time the business news has become front page news.

It was bemusing when large banks with vaguely familiar names bit the dust. It was downright alarming when your bank went bust. Now it’s nothing short of bizarre – are you reading that right? The government is buying your bank and you’re about to become your own bank manager...?

Who’s going to pressure you to cut your spending when you’re your own bank manager? Well, no need actually. Peer pressure will do that alone.

The Australian last weekend ran their ‘Melbourne Cup Fashion Tips’ article. Headline – ‘how to look like a million dollars on a hundred dollar budget’. Frugality is this season’s flair.

If cutting back has gone beyond need and is now fashion, it's time to ask what to cut first? Well the mortgage payments might be falling (the one plus-point of the credit crunch so far) but they’re not crashing. Maybe the holiday will have to go, or it’ll have to be 4 stars again, not five. And maybe it'll be another 6 months before it's time for a new car.

One cut tends to be implicit though.

Charity.

Why? Well, in the hard-nosed economic view of the world 'Discretionary Spending' is the first thing to be cut when times are bad. In this context, discretionary means optional, expendable (or non-expendable!) – essentially… ...non-essential.

And if there’s one thing that’s not essential, then surely it’s giving money to charity.

One view of the world.

Another view of the world.

What role for the poor in all this? The credit crisis is hitting us bad, but what about the poor? After all, they don't have shares, or pension funds, or banking jobs.

Inflation pushes up the price of food - the poor spend 75% of their money on food, compared to 15% for Australians. The economic slowdown is reaching even the developing countries now, with growth in India stalling and interest rates rising. And those interest rates affect the poor too, through their impact on the Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) the poor rely on. The credit cruch has pushed through the roof the rates that MFIs borrow money at, and this affects the interest rate that the MFIs pass on to their clients.

Even in good times, life is hard for the poor in India. Half of children under 5 are stunted or too short for their age, 20% are too thin, 43% underweight. 7 in every 100 will die before the age of 5.

When times are good, most fair-minded people expect that there will be some effort to spread the wealth around, as Obama would say. Implicit in this is the idea that when times are bad, that charity will dry up.

But I hope that won't happen this time. I hope that crashing markets and shrinking investment funds will bring about a more fundamental shift in people's attitudes to charity. I hope people will see value in other things aside from a new car and a fancier holiday.

What greater achievement than to help end poverty.

And finally…

A recession is when your neighbour loses his job, a depression is when you lose your job. Is a credit crunch when you go broke without even losing your job?

Talking of which, where are all those job losses? Does anyone know anyone who’s lost their job yet? Well obviously we’re told that the financial sector is ‘hard-hit’, but surely a depression means more than financial sector job losses?

I think they’re coming. It will get worse before it gets better. But if this is a chance for a fundamental shift maybe better could be much much better.

That’s something to hope for.

The economy might be off the rails, but I truly hope it's not the end of the line yet for charitable giving...

10^100 - The SEWA Ashram Video

Our application for the Google 10^100 project is in. And thanks to our friend Christa, we also have a rather great 30 second clip of the work of the Ashram to accompany our application. And here it is:



Hopefully, with a large slice of good fortune, this video will be seen by thousands, come January.

10^100 (Ten to the Hundredth) - SEWA Ashram

There's so much going on in the battle against poverty just now, including a couple of particularly innovative ideas that have come across my radar - 10 to the Hundredth, and Blog Action Day. Read on to find out more.

As part of Google's 10th birthday celebrations - must surely be the wealthiest 10 year old in the world - they have put out a "call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible."
(http://www.project10tothe100.com/intl/EN_GB/index.html).

My colleague Stephen and I can't think of a much better idea than SEWA Ashram, and we've put together the following application. With a bit of good fortune, we hope we will be one of the 100-strong shortlist. Expect a very excited post here, with a link to our youtube video (being put together as we speak) if that happens!

What one sentence best describes your idea?
To provide shelter, healing, education and training to the most destitute in society through a new form of community that will become a model for rehabilitating the extreme poor.

Describe your idea in more depth.
Two hours north of Delhi, SEWA Ashram is a small volunteer-run community that for the past 8 years has provided shelter and healthcare to destitute individuals who have been found on the streets of Delhi, abandoned by society. It’s budget is $4 a day. But many of those who are helped fall back into destitution, as they have no skills or opportunities to integrate themselves into society when they leave the Ashram.

The current Ashram can only house up to 150 individuals so with a larger site and the introduction of education, training projects and microfinance, SEWA Ashram plans to extend the work it does to truly re-connect the most destitute into society. It will grow its community to around 750 people.

This project would build a bridge between the most destitute, excluded individuals, and one of the most innovative developments in the not-for-profit sector in the last 30 years: microfinance. By providing shelter, healthcare, training and – ultimately – microfinance opportunities in one community, this project could provide a model for rehabilitating the most destitute.

The aspiration for SEWA Ashram community is to provide a model of society in miniature, tackling many social issues we face today. As such, this idea could equally fulfil any one of the 10^100 categories:

- It provides shelter and healthcare to the sick, through loving, non-judgemental treatment. One in ten current patients have HIV, and around 50% have TB.

- Through education and livelihood projects, it provides individuals with the capability to help themselves.

- As a purpose-built community it provides a platform for clean energy solutions. Through its scalability across the world’s second largest country and beyond, the implications for the environment could be profound.

But most of all, this idea is about community. A community is literally built for those who have none.

What problem or issue does your idea address?

In urban Delhi, 100,000 people are homeless. Many of these people leave behind family and have no local support networks to turn to when trouble arises.

Javed was born 33 years ago. His family home was made of mud and grass. His father left the family when he was 3 months old. He seldom had clothes and was always hungry. He ‘left home’ at eight, jumped trains and begged until he was 13.

Eventually he escaped to Delhi, where he lived under a flyover for 5 years. Uneducated of the dangers, he contracted HIV through his drug use.

When Sewa Ashram found Javed, he had infected wounds, TB and was seriously ill. He was in a coma for 8 days. After hospital, Javed came to the Sewa Ashram. The early days were difficult.

The Ashram gave Javed the chance of a new life. This project gives more people that chance.

If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?

It will benefit the most destitute in society; those – like Javed – whos’ lives have been tougher than we can imagine, lacking hope, love and opportunity. Many of the poorest are capable of doing much to help themselves and others. Sewa Ashram encourages this capability.

However, it is not just those who are helped who will gain from this project. This project gives all of us the opportunity to understand our fundamental similarities, and explore how we can overcome society’s most intractable problems.

Javed grew whilst in the care of the Ashram and discovered a talent for painting, which provides him some income. He met and married Jyoti, another Sewa Ashram patient. They have now adopted Jyoti’s 14 year old niece.

Javed still leads a life that most people would shudder at. But for him, he has “made it”.

Our idea is to make more stories like Javed’s a reality.

What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground?

Implementing this project and testing the SEWA Ashram model will require significant resources, both human and financial. These are the steps that will make the SEWA Ashram model a reality:

- a draft detailed business plan has already been developed for a community village for the destitute that will provide a financially and environmentally sustainable solution to the problem of the destitute homeless in Delhi. It’s feasibility needs assessing.

- this village will be built on a site outside Delhi, incorporating medical services, family homes, school buildings, livelihood training projects as well as other community initiatives. This will cater for a community of 750 people and will cost an estimated US$3m for the initial 12 month period.

- 12 months after the Ashram launch, the community acts as an inspiration and model for communities across India and other countries.

Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it?

With the support of the 10^100 project, we will develop an innovative and cost-effective solution to the problem of extreme poverty in urban India.

Impact is not measured simply by the number of people helped, but by whether and how their lives have been transformed and the sustainability of the solution.

The project mission will be to take the homeless, impoverished and sick, and heal them, give them shelter and ultimately give them the capability to move forward with their lives and become part of society again. We would measure success by the numbers of people who successfully complete this process.

Success will be measured by meeting people like Javed and listening to their stories on how they “made it”.

This posting was created for Blog Action Day 2008.

http://blogactionday.org/

In Her Footsteps

I've been busier than ever at work recently, and I'm not the only one. Opportunity has been very busy working on some exciting projects. And, there’s one big first that Opportunity wants to tell everyone about!

On Wednesday 1st October, “In Her Footsteps”, received its world premiere at the Dendy Cinema Opera Quays, in front of an enthusiastic audience of about 250 people from Sydney’s business and entertainment world.

In Her Footsteps is a feature-length documentary about a group of women from Australia who travelled to India in early 2008 to experience the reality of poverty in the developing world and the potential of microfinance as a solution to the indignity of poverty.

After the very warmly received premiere, the film was shown again the following night, and another 200 people, including myself, had the opportunity to catch a glimpse of what represents a pretty interesting and novel departure for OIA.

First off, though I’m bound to be biased, you can take it from me that the film is a real triumph. It’s very professionally done, it holds the attention throughout, and it does exactly what – I presume – was the intention: to show the depths of poverty in India and how unsolvable these situations can appear, and then to show how Opportunity’s partners are helping the poor to help themselves out of poverty with the aid of microfinance.

After getting over the shock of seeing my big head on screen – in a mercifully brief non-speaking role at the start – I settled into the story of the group of women travelling from Australia to India. Told in the words of the women themselves (and those of Anita, the Opportunity tour-leader), we saw poverty through their eyes, and heard them describe in very personal terms their impressions on being confronted with the slums of Delhi.

What comes across in the first half of the film, as we follow the women on a day trip to one particularly deprived area is that these trips can have a profound impact on both staff and participants. Being confronted by the squalor that some people live in, by simple consequence of where they are born, gives rise to feelings of anger and disgust. That people – who are patently very much like us – have to live with so little in conditions we wouldn’t consider fit for our pets, is inhumane. For many people, seeing extreme poverty first hand brings out a personal determination to do something to make a change.

The first half of the film can be difficult to watch, focusing as it does on the extremes of poor peoples' lives, but it’s when the women visit one of Opportunity’s partners and meet Indian women who are using microfinance to transform their lives that the film really grips us, and gets across the message that we are powerful, we each can – and should – do something about poverty.

I’m sure everyone will be personally touched by something in the film. For me, I was reminded how easy it is to assume that poverty is “too big a problem for me to do something about”. Before I first tried doing some charity work in Belize in 2006, I did very little to help with poverty, believing I couldn’t have any impact. There was a real personal growth for me when I turned that idea on its head. Today I make my own very modest contribution. More importantly, I can’t imagine ever again not doing something. I know the women in the film now have the same feeling.

In Her Footsteps will be shown again in Brisbane on , 29th October and – I hope – many more times after that. I hope this film becomes another powerful medium for the message of microfinance. My big head notwithstanding.
http://www.inherfootsteps.com/

I wore a suit for the premiere, and at some cost to my personal comfort! Sydney is experiencing some exceptionally unseasonable weather at the moment. On Thursday, the temperature hit 30C, an incredible temperature considering that we are still closer to winter than summer. This was only to be outdone the next day, with Friday’s high reaching 35C by some accounts, 38C by others. That’s at least 15 degrees hotter than the October average. I am going to be very careful with my skin this year.

For once though, the good weather couldn’t hold out over the weekend. With the Parklife music festival to go to, and the biggest racing day of the Spring Carnival, I would have paid good money for sun over the weekend. Instead I was shelling out for an umbrella. Still a great weekend though and photos of Goldfrapp, Dizzee Rascal and Keith and I in our Sunday finest will appear shortly.