We had a few things happen these past few weeks. The first was the Hill District community walk, led by Terri Baltimore of the Hill House, when members of GB visited the Hill and got a little background about the neighborhood they would be working with. Everyone walked away from it really enthusiastic to begin our service projects in the area, so these community walks are highly recommended! The second was Pitt Make a Difference Day, or PMADD. We always like to discuss PMADD every time this event rolls around. Picking up trash is an important task, but how sustainable of a volunteering project is a one-day event? Who picks up the trash in these neighborhoods the other 364 days of the year? We decided to do something a little different this year. This year, we worked with Mama Africa's Green Scouts on an urban gardening project. The linked interview presents their mission and vision statement: "The mission of Mama Africa’s Green Scouts (MAGS) is to provide African descent youth with the necessary skills to learn the importance of diverse greening sustainable customs. Mama Africa’s Green Scouts vision is to teach our youth in under served communities, environmental justice, urban farming, financial literary, community organizing, green jobs, African culture and fair urban sustainability justice in our communities." It's an organization that grows out of Homewood, driven by the people of this particular community towards the goals of self-empowerment and education. Finally, if you came away from Sunday's meeting realizing how little you knew about geography and other countries, here are some links for you to explore:
Can you name the countries of the world? How big are countries, actually? this SNL skit perfectly parodies the white savior complex Spot the Africa with Trevor Noah and Jon Stewart
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We’re getting ready to dive into our local initiatives, namely, cultivating our connections with the Hill District in Pittsburgh by collaborating with community partners on projects that will work towards the revitalization of the Hill. Before we do that however, it’s essential that the volunteers in Global Brigades are familiar with a few key concepts that will start to pop up the more we get involved in volunteer work. Sunday night, we did exactly that-- discussed some of our favorite terms like voluntourism, savior complex, privilege, sustainability, and more.
Those who are interested in reading more about these concepts and terms can refer to links provided below, gathered from a variety of voices and sources: Privilege: 1, 2 Holistic development: 1 Voluntourism and the white savior complex: 1, 2, 3 Why is it so important that we educate ourselves on these issues? Because volunteers who work on community-based projects-- whether they be local and global-- aren’t isolated to themselves. Our decisions, our actions, our attitudes-- they all have consequences on our surroundings and the people and places we come in contact with. This holds true when Pitt students go out and volunteer for the annual Pitt Make a Difference Day, it holds true as we pursue our more focused projects in the Pittsburgh neighborhoods, and it holds true when we bring our presence abroad each year. Think about your own individual volunteering efforts in the context of sustainability and privilege and savior complexes. How ethical is your impact? How often do you make mistakes? How often do you admit you’ve failed? Part one of last Sunday’s meeting was an imaginary “Choose Your Own Adventure” storyline, Global Brigades style. We started out with a community that’s facing a shortage of workers as a result of illness, and as well-intended foreign volunteers, we pondered two options-- in this hypothetical situation, should we send medical kits and supplies, or should we set up a temporary medical clinic in the area? Choose the kits full of medication, and you’ll find that the people who receive them don’t know what to do with them because they’re unfamiliar with the supplies. Instead, they sell them for money as a means of financial relief. What if you helped connect them with local doctors? Good idea, but spending money to travel to the city and make appointments still leaves people sick and in debt. The final alternative is to choose the other option, the temporary medical clinic, which works, but is only temporary, after all. As you progress through the story, you learn that the mysterious illness is due to poor water quality, and that the proposed solution to this problem is to set up public health and water projects in the community to improve the water filtration systems. Once again, you are faced with a decision: should you charge community members for the expenses associated with the projects? Your moral compass tells you no, because isn’t access to clean water a basic human right? You then learn that over time, since the community members have no reason to maintain these projects set up by foreigners, they have dug up the pipes and sold them. And so on and so forth. What’s interesting to note is that these complex issues are actually based on real-life problems that Global Brigades and other NGOs in the development sector have encountered in the communities we work with. For example, temporary medical clinics can’t be the end-all solutions to health problems. And people didn’t care about the water projects set up in their communities unless they were financially invested in it. We wrapped up the meeting by showing this TED Talk, What Happens When an NGO Admits Failure. It’s a compelling title, addressing something that we don’t often like to talk about but that more people really should. Development work is complex stuff-- how do we tackle all these questions, which decisions are the right ones, and how do we avoid making mistakes? When Pitt Business Brigades went to Panama a few springs ago, they found that the inventory and bookkeeping system implemented in the store of a small business owner wasn’t exactly the most efficient system. Working together, they devised a new system that was much more helpful in allowing her to keep track of the items sold in her store. Though this achievement was different from the project they had initially meant to pursue, by identifying a past failure, Business Brigades was able to rework a system to more effectively solve a crucial problem. So what is the role of failure in aid and development? Is it something we must avoid on an ethical basis as outsiders who are trying to “help?” Or is it necessary in order to improve our projects and strategies? As David Damberger suggests in his Ted Talk, have we simply “not failed enough?” There's not always a set, clear cut, right or wrong answer. And so we think about it, and we talk about it, and we learn.
To play our Choose Your Own Adventure game, click here. |
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