Egos and Philanthropy. February 16, 2006

Egos and Philanthropy
The below message was one I sent back at the beginning of the project, where we went around and around for weeks about picking a damn name. At the time I felt very strongly that people were using this effort as an outlet for their own personal gain and creativity and my frustration and anger came through on this email. In retrospect, it makes interesting reading. -Phil
-----
Ok ok...I'm the odd man out again...
This isn't a brand we're talking about, nor some useless .com (which I also have experience in)...it's helping people! Branding ourselves I see motivated by ego. That and self promotion are fundamentally incompatible with philanthropy folks. Ask yourselves, if you weren't able to tell anyone else in the world what you've been doing with Madiha and Kirk and Jason, would you still have come?
If we need to resort to catchy-name or over-sexed-marketing efforts to raise money, than we should re-evaluate what is it that we are trying to accomplish...because the mission statement of "improving living conditions through the creation of a sustainable and eco-friendly local tourist economy" doesn't require branding...it requires awareness and communication...Francesca knows this better than anyone after arranging all this with a bunch of passionate emails/convos and a few toothy smiles! Now selling inflatable sheep on the web or funding Sally Struthers' rehab trips to Africa...that requires every trick in theook.
Many volunteer projects, including one major one on which I have worked, don't have the benefit of web designers, videographers etc.....and the fact is, the projects get done. Now I'm not tooting horns, I'm just providing a data point...For the village in Nepal, we've raised over $250K and spent it on things like tele-teaching, inter-village networking, fish-farming, duck incubators, 2 telemedicine installations and a brand new high school for 200 people, all without worrying about a domain name, a team name, blogs, business cards, or a documentaries. All donations were raised by a) well placed phone calls or conversations followed by b) quantitative and highly detailed proposals with explicit budgets, time-lines and resource constraints. The latter was far moremportant to the aid agencies (WHO). Donated dollars are not spent on promotion, and whenever volunteers show up, they are put to work. When promotion is done, it was done by those volunteers who wereff-line/site in response to a specific Request For Proposal (RFP) from a possible funding agency. Priorities dictated that all local hands wereeeded for building houses or connecting wires...every dollar went directly to necessary material cost...labor was provided free from volunteers who paid their own way.
Nuff said, I've never needed to call myself anything or have been part of a catchy team to make a difference. I am very proud to be working with so many creative people in this project...I just think we all need to counter-balance our natural tendency to gravitate to areas in which are experts with the bigger list of priorities. In my case, there areany more important things to be done other than developing our IT infrastructure, most of which I have only the slightest idea about how to accomplish 8-), thus I need to spend my time on them.
So instead of abstaining, I vote to leave it as it is...ScubaPOP, even thought I have been overheard saying it sounds 'gay' 8-)...in the hopes that we'll get back to other work.
-Phil
P.S. If you care or are interested....
www.nepalwireless.net
www.himanchal.org
February 16, 2006
Donation for a Boat Ladder!
So some news, which you may have already heard. But Indika got us this dutch guy who we took diving from the shack. He did 2 dives, each of 3 guys on the boat made 800 rupees and the shack made about that also. Hey had such a good time and, since he was a philanthropist himself, he donated 200 euro to us, waving us down as we were speeding off in a tuktuk. (To fix the flat tire of the bike and do some other bits in town.) He said to put it towards a boat ladder, which we will, as well as other needs of the shack. I've already bought the stainless steel and met with a metal smith, courtesy of indika's help of course.
Last night, Mahesh took the money from us (400$) for the engine. SO it appears a done deal. I was told by my sources that he went out and spend 1000 of it on a Arak party...of course. Anyways, we know have a solid engine and it's the fastest on the beach. This latter point is actual a source of grief, since the boatmen seem to have no concept of the word 'throttle'.
Tomorrow I'm supposed to go on a boat trip with Roshan 'up the
river'...one of the activities of the shack is bird watchin' and croc spotin'. We'll see if it happens...These guys do not have calendars and as such, 2 days from now may as well be next year.
That's all for now.
Phil
February 16, 2006