When Lucy Gent was only 10, she traveled with her family to Nigeria. She describes one experience that particularly stood out for her:

I distinctly remember the night-time drive away from the airport and seeing frequent and evenly spaced piles of burning trash where there would otherwise be street lamps. Even at age 10, I knew that burning plastic was very bad for humans and for the environment, although it didn’t seem like any of the people there understood that. When looking at first-world countries, I see that there is plenty that needs to be done to change our habits, but when I look at third-world countries, I see that there is not even a basic understanding that plastic disposal is different than organic disposal; plastic bags are called “papers” and everything is burned.

Twelve years later, Lucy has finished her first summer of Go Green Africa, where she taught about environmental sustainability issues in Cameroon. Lucy had four classes of 20 to 40 8th and 9th graders, 120 students in total. Her curriculum focused in on basic tenets of environmental education, including the basic science of global warming (where she used sections of Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” to help explain some concepts). As early as her second lesson, Lucy drilled down to the issue of plastic bags, directly challenging her student’s attitudes. She explains,

My second lesson for all of the classes was one in which I held up a thin plastic bag and asked the class, “What is this called?” Most people responded, “Paper!” but others said, “Plastic Paper!” I told them that what I held in my hand was nothing even remotely similar to paper, that what I held was a plastic bag and should not be confused in property or function with paper. We then proceeded to investigate why it was called paper (“Is it opaque? Can you write on it? Is it made of the same things as paper?”) and to ALL of my students’ surprise, I told them that plastic is a PETROLEUM product. I told them about how alarmed I was at age 10 to see burning plastic, and how I continue to worry about the practice of boiling food traditionally prepared in banana leaves in plastic bags.

This became a central part of Lucy’s curriculum. Every single student ended up writing a letter to the Minister of Environment and Nature Protection in Yaounde, sharing the new information with him and asking that Cameroon be like Rwanda, South Africa and 21 other countries around the world that have banned thin plastic bags. She personally deposited all 120 letters to the Minister’s office on the day she flew out of the capital.

Lucy’s first summer was an enormous success. She was able to able to directly challenge some students’ assumptions about the environment, pique their interest and inspire them to take action. By the end of the summer, some of her students were stopping by her apartment with friends and relatives. They wanted to continue the course into the school year. They wanted to carry out some of the theoretical environmental campaigns they discussed in class. They were genuinely concerned about environmental issues, global warming, and protecting their natural resources. And Lucy’s project had accomplished all this with minimal resources and a lot of motivation.

Every new project faces challenges. Grantmakers often look for a track record of previous accomplishments. Social entrepreneurs see their most ambitious goals run up against the realities of limited resources. Lucy applied and competed for funding from many sources, ranging for grants for recent college graduates, to online social entrepreneurship competitions. Finally, she received the Ruth Dietrich Tuttle Prize from Smith College, her alma mater. It was just enough to cover her airfare to Cameroon, leaving Lucy to fund the rest of her project from small gifts and donations from friends and family. Lucy had made some connections in Cameroon from her previous summer’s work as a Kiva.org fellow. Actually setting up her classes was simply a matter of talking to the administrators at the two high schools in Bamenda and then continuing the dialogue with them over the months preceding summer break. Lucy was able to teach her classes as part of a pre-existing program of holiday courses, giving her access to students without having to recruit them independently.

However, minimal resources and other constraints presented challenges for Lucy.

I was way too ambitious about what I planned to accomplish. I had screen-printed 110 t-shirts with the Go Green Africa logo on back and title on front, but was only able to take 80 because of weight restrictions. As I mentioned before, I had 120 students, so not only were there too few shirts, there were too few funds to transport the students and take field trips. I was frustrated with the class-sizes because I wanted to be able to take students to affected sites (like the un-regulated stream of contaminated water coming out of a soap factory) and into nature to identify native species. As a result, we spent all of our classes inside, except for a special field trip with about 10 of the best students from both schools.

In spite of tough competition for grants and donations for projects like Go Green Africa, Lucy remains impressed by the number of resources available to new projects and social entreprenuers, especially young ones. She explains,

One thing that worked to my benefit was that I am still under 25, which makes me eligible for youth grants. I was amazed by the number of grants offered to young people when I began the process of looking for funding. It’s something that that I’m really grateful for, that with the grossly unequal wealth distribution in our country, there are still philanthropists and people who care for the greater good. There are also those corporations like Mountain Dew who are surely doing it to improve public relations, but I’m still grateful. While I didn’t win most of the money I applied for this year, I truly believe that the people who won deserved it more and I just need to refine my own objectives.

With one summer under her belt, and photo and video documentation of her work, Lucy hopes to be able to expand the scope of her project. Having successfully developed and implemented a curriculum gives her project credibility, and makes it replicable and scalable. Lucy is considering expansion into other African countries, as well as recruiting college students to spend their summer vacations teaching about environmental issues. With success with her first group of students, the possibilities for growth are many.

If you want to learn more about Lucy’s Go Green Africa project, follow her on twitter (@lucygent) or email GoGreenAfrica [at] gmail [dot] com.

(Photo provided by Lucy Gent)

This may not seem unique or surprising, until you learn that most of the guests at Miriam’s Kitchen have been homeless for a year or longer, and many suffer from severe mental illness and/or addiction. As Ashley explained, they try to have a “Starbucks” feel to the space; a cozy, colorful and welcoming environment where everyone is treated as equals (and expected to do the same for one another). The result is that Miriam’s Kitchen is a safe and comfortable place; sometimes the only place the guests have been able to relax in years.

At Miriam’s, guests can come for a balanced, homemade breakfast Monday – Friday, lunch on Wednesdays, and will soon be able to eat dinner there during the week as well, but Miriam’s is much more than just a kitchen. Along with the food buffet and coffee bar, there is a table with small donated “door prizes,” clothing, and groups of guest engaging in art and writing projects, group discussions and more. Miriam’s does not ask anything of their guests (not even their names as they come in), but if a guest is so inclined, he or she can join the “After Breakfast Program,” where activities are expanded to include yoga, geography classes, a monthly “spa day” with manicures and facials, and anything else the volunteers connected with the kitchen are interested in offering. Miriam’s additionally offers the guests the option of a variety of more traditional services, such as a P.O. Box, voicemail services, law help, connection to public assistance, psychiatric evaluation and care one day a week by a licensed practitioner, and professional case management services.

The ultimate goal that Miriam’s Kitchen has for its guests is to move them into permanent housing. However, as Ashley explained to me, working with such a vulnerable population, the steps forward are slow and small, but they celebrate every one; be it coming inside for the first time in years for a meal, the decision to sit down with one of the case managers, or actually finding an apartment. And as they work with each guest through that process, they hope to at least be a comfortable place where everyone feels safe and at home.

If you are interested in learning more about Miriam’s kitchen, you can find them on the web at www.miriamskitchen.org, or call them at (202) 452-8926. Miriam’s is always looking for support by volunteers and through donations!

(Images from Miriam’s Kitchen Flickr Photostream)

Covalent is a start-up social venture that serves a number of purposes. It’s a center for American donors to learn about philanthropy, aid, and Africa. It’s a place for grantmaking to African-run charities. It’s an information resource for charities in Africa. It brings organizations like Julius Okutu Astiva’s adult education center tools and funding that help them serve their community, and shares information with American donors that makes their grantmaking more effective. Covalent holds a pretty unique position in the world of philanthropy and aid; rather than deciding who gets funding and who doesn’t, they see their role as an intermediary. They collect information and share it with potential donors, and enable donors to make informed decisions.

“The important part is to just do it”

Jason started Covalent after traveling to Kenya, where he witnessed post-election violence and its effects on society. He saw thousands of Kenyans displaced from their homes by violence. He witnessed a man being beaten over a debt of about 30 dollars. Jason met with community organizers and charities – over 350 of them – while he was in Kenya. Kenyan community organizations were providing the support that no one else was, at a time when it was most needed. They were educating people, organizing them, encouraging them to be entrepreneurs and community leaders. But many of them had little to no support. Jason had been preparing to go to business school at the time, and as he explains “what I found was that the people I admired most were those that took the biggest risks and often didn’t follow the traditional route to business school. On whole it seemed they were more successful and accomplished, irrespective of whether their big risk paid off, compared to their counterparts. This showed me that the important part is to just do it.” So he just did it. He started working to figure out how to help these organizations share information, get information, and gain access to funds from American donors. And started looking for people to help him do it.

Jason brought Greg Snyders and Paul Allen into the project early on. The three have worked as a team to develop a network of community organizations in Africa, meet with philanthropy and aid experts in America, expand Covalent’s web presence, and design and build new technologies. Their next year will be focused on fundraising, expanding their governing board, and building the technologies and systems they will use to share information and facilitate grantmaking as the organization grows.

One of Covalent’s new technologies, called PamojaConnect allows people in Africa to connect online and reach social networks, including Twitter, from their mobile phone via text messages. Using this system, charity groups across rural villages, urban slums and remote areas without internet connections can can communicate, share information, and seek information from other users. Covalent plans to continue expanding PamojaConnect, creating a better user experience and adding new functionality like voice messages.

Changing giving

As I’ve learned more about Covalent, one thing that has become apparent is that the organization doesn’t assume to have all the answers. Instead they act as facilitators, as resources for their networks of American donors and Kenyan charities.

They don’t tell donors who to fund. Instead, they see the donors they work with as a university class, composed of many independent decision-makers. They explain that “diverse opinions and critical perspectives are not washed away through aggregation or organizational group think. Rather, Covalent Global and its donor-base are dynamic, renewing itself every spring and fall with each new class.” Covalent seeks to build and maintain a network of alumni who can share experiences with new donors. In a way, Covalent aims to create a community of American donors who collaborate, share information, and carry on a much-needed conversation on what kind of aid and philanthropy is actually effective – essentially changing the way American donors approach international giving.

Covalent does not tell community organizations in Africa how to run either. As Jason puts it, “I will not tell them what they have done wrong. I will not tell them what they need to do. I don’t have the solution to improve their lives, their communities, their country. They do. I am here to see that they have the opportunity to improve society from within, with their own solutions.” In a philanthropy and aid industry dominated by developed-world organizations that dictate how developing-world organizations and institutions should look, this is a refreshing point of view. It respects the ability of community organizations to create the solutions that work, and sends a clear signal to American donors to do the same.

This openness, this trust that Julius Okutu Astiva has a good sense of what his community needs, and how to create it, lies at the heart of Covalent’s mission. Given the right tools and resources, community organizations like his may have a chance to create real change.

To learn more about Covalent Global Capital, please check out their website.
(Photo of Julius Okutu Astiva provided by Jason Higbee)

Something is tactile when it’s tangible, when you can put your hands on it and understand it by how it feels to the touch. This project tries to take all these imaginative and innovative ideas we’ve all been tossing around and peg them down to something concrete, or show how someone else has done just that through their own work.

Almost everyone that reads this knows someone who’s doing something really new, really creative and innovative with their life. We invite all of you to talk to them, hear their story, and write about it. Tactility seeks contributions on virtually any topic, from anyone, anywhere. If you’re interested, please contact us at info [at] tactility [dot] net. Thanks!