linking, for some doubtless-scattered thinking.
Today, the big picture and my reactions to Half the Sky, by Kristoff and WuDunn.
I originally came up with the (brilliant! everyone should have one!) idea of a Digital Parking Lot when I was completing a graduate degree, fitting my studying in bits of time between ferrying three kids to three different schools, working part time, supervising homework, and (er, sort of... something has to be the priority that comes in last) managing a household. I found, then, that it was helpful to keep track of certain types of assignments, and even to DO certain types of assignments, on line, so I could pick them up from various computers at home, at school, at work, at the various libraries I dipped into, and at my kids' schools and work on them even for just a few minutes at a time. By parking in the Vast Interweb Ether, I always had access to the thoughts and words that were otherwise distributed on hard drives, notebooks and post-its that inevitably I'd Left Behind, somewhere.
I finished all that, and my Parking Lot sat unused for quite a while.
Then I decided to use it as a travel planning/dreaming tool. It's good for that, too, because filing links electronically is easier, and more cross-linkable, and useful, than writing them down on post-its (post-its being my other primary, um, organizational tool) and sticking them into guide books.
The beautiful thing about personal parking lots is: you can put any dang vehicle you want, in there. Run-down red minivans with 170K miles, malfunctioning passenger doors, and no air con... Spiffy Lexuses with big old macho engines... itty bitty red Priuses (I'm negotiating, down from the aforementioned minivan -- so done with being a minivan mom, here) or convertible red Saabs (I can dream). Red Vespa, even (though of course I'd never... well, at least while I had kids at home...)
So, now I think I'll use it now for a bit of thinking-out-loud on a different subject: charitable giving.
We do give, of course. But if I'm honest with myself (which I try to be, at least two or three days out of any given year), I'd have to say we give much as we live: mostly reactively. Without much thought either a priori or post hoc about where we give and why. The overwhelming majority -- I would guess more than 90% -- of our giving goes to our house of worship and to our children's schools. A bit of it goes to a few large organizations that we think are well run and doing critical work (like Doctors Without Borders and Heifer International), and to a slew of tree-hugger organizations who send me near-daily appeals. The rest of it goes to organizations with whom our friends and family have some sort of connection -- they're on the board, or they're running the benefit, or their child avails of services, etc.
There's nothing wrong with any of that. But I've recently read several books in quick succession, which together have challenged me to raise the bar a bit. Both to increase the total amount of our giving, and also to be more intentional in how we go about allocating it. I think I will write about them in order of Eureka! (rather than the order in which I read them-- because I'm still processing how they converge and what my overall takeaways should be). Today's is:
Half the Sky, by Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The focus of the book is, as the subtitle puts it, "turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide." As such, it devotes chapters to subtopics including sex trafficking, rape as a tool of war, honor killings, genital cutting, maternal mortality, and girls' education.
In a prior life, I worked in development, so I had some familiarity with many of the issues they cover. But the book does an extraordinary job channel-surfing between Sachs-Sen style overviews of how big picture policy, socioeconomic and cultural frameworks really do affect lives (for better and worse), and New York Times style features on individual human beings. Most writers -- most people, maybe -- focus either Big, or Small. Perhaps because they co-write, Kristof and WuDunn manage to do both.
Anyway. I've already found several takeaways I mean to add to The Things I Carry.
1. Don't let perfection be the enemy of the good, in trying to work out How To Make A Difference. While they profile a lot of local organizations that have accomplished a great deal of good, they also discuss a number of well-meaning efforts whose results were disappointing. What they remind us is that development is really, really hard; and failure is part of the process. We expect that of start-up businesses in the US; we expect that of stock market investments; we expect that of new interventions we attempt in school districts. Why are we so disappointed when it happens in development?
2. There are a lot of really great organizations out there, and Highly credible people are already vetting them for us. Many organizations are directly profiled in the book; the authors feature a number of very effective local organizations doing God's work throughout Asia and Africa (neatly profiled and linked in an appendix). Kristof regularly features more in his blog. They also point us to monitors such as Charity Navigator to help us with locating and understanding other organizations. The points are: 1) we don't have to limit our giving to big-name, big-picture organizations if we care about administrative efficiency; and 2) we don't have to re-invent the wheel trying to figure the smaller ones out -- other people are doing a good job with that for us, already.
3. There are simple, efficient ways to give directly to individuals in need. This gets back to the Big vs. Small orientation issue; the desire we have to give directly to individuals in need (as opposed to large organizations) connects to several of the other books I've been reading (and will discuss shortly). Kristof and Dunn tell us how to do it: through opening an account with Global Giving or Kiva. Both are people-to-people (meaning they link us directly to a person in need overseas); Global Giving focuses on grass roots projects in education, health or disaster relief; while Kiva provides microloans to entrepreneurs.
Over the next few days, I'll write more about the other books still churning around my head:
Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder
Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert
The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell
The Road of Lost Innocence, by Somaly Mam
Monday, September 12, 2011
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