One of the things quite a few of my colleagues know about me is that when I joined GlobalGiving, I didn’t really know how to drive. Okay, in complete honesty, I could drive but I just couldn’t reverse. So when I finally learned to drive properly and reverse, it was truly a moment to celebrate!I always have managed to live without a car for the most part and frankly I thought I would never learn or need to learn. However, after I learned to drive, it gave me a new sense of freedom and mobility. This feeling was one that I have always taken for granted. Sadly, in some parts of the world women are not being allowed to drive, such as places like Saudi Arabia. In fact, I was in Riyadh when women took the roads to protest the refusal to let them drive. There is another movement again that has started to continue that 1990 protest to let women drive and we’re all hoping that happens. As one woman puts it in this interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor:

“I don’t even like driving,” says Ms. Aishah el-Mane, who received death threats and was forced to leave her home and job in Riyadh. “Even if I could drive now, I wouldn’t; I much prefer to have a driver. It’s about female empowerment and mobility. Women need incomes, they need jobs, and they need a way to get to those jobs,” she says.

International Women’s Day in on Saturday, March 8 and I wonder which project I should support in honor of International Women’s day. This year I think I will go with Livelihood for 500 Tribal Women in Gujarat that teaches women how to drive so that they can sell their crafts in markets. It is a pretty cool project and by teaching just one woman to drive, this enables her to teach another 500 women to drive.

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 I love getting an unexpected gift or “added bonus”.  Anything from the fortune cookie with my Chinese take-out, to the two dozen beautiful roses that arrived at our office from Organic Bouquet thanking us for connecting them with great projects to support through their sales. 

One thing I wasn’t expecting was learning about the amazing, exemplary human resources practices of one of our project leaders in India.  When I went to visit Anshu Gupta, Director of Goonj, at his office in Delhi, I was expecting to see a lot of hard working committed people.  They do, in fact, process (wash, sort, mend, and in some instances create from recycled cloth and disburse to those in need) 6,000 kilograms of textiles per year, everything from a sweater that goes to a 35 year old in Bihar that has never worn a woolen article of clothing in his life, and had to dig a pit to sleep in when the weather turned cold, to sanitary napkins for girls who previously had to miss school during menstruation.

Yes, I did find committed, hard working people. 

I also found a manager with human resources practices that I found innovative and made me love his project even more.  In a former life, I worked at the Corporate Executive Board in research of best practices in human resources for large companies.  A recurrent challenge of all the savvy human resources executives that I met was inspiring loyalty of their workforce and retaining their best employees. 

Anshu Gupta seeks to employ people that are poor-in debt from buying basic necessities (food, electricity).  All new employees receive an interest free loan to pay off their debts, no questions asked.  The result?  Zero defaults.  Committed workers. No disgruntled employees. A successful organization.  A lot of benefits to people that really need them.

Watch a great video about Goonj.

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Mike Kubzansky is a Global Account Manager in Monitor’s National Economic Development and Security (NEDS) practice.  He is currently leading Monitor India’s work on “Market-Based Solutions” to development challenges, a multi-sponsor study to identify the most promising commercially viable approaches in India.

Instead of coming home for the holidays my family - my wife and my two kids, ages 6 and 8 - and I visited western India (Goa, Mumbai, Rajasthan).   Despite the amount of international travel my wife and I do, prior to this trip, my children’s entire experience of life outside the U.S. was two days in Montreal. 

So, India was a real eye-opener for them in terms of seeing a bigger world, understanding that the US is a fairly unique and affluent place, and seeing real poverty and privation for the first time up close.  As it turns out, they loved it, and had a great time.  We even got my six-year-old son into a few Jain temples, despite the lack of interactive computer buttons to be pushed.  Naturally he preferred the auto-rickshaws on the streets of the old city of Udaipur.

The most compelling moment for us happened when we were in rural Rajasthan, about 25 km outside Udaipur.  Although we stayed at a high-end luxury hotel, we spent time exploring  so we could see life in a rural Rajasthani village.  Two things struck my kids the most: (1) the poverty of the kids there - some with no shoes and very ragged clothes and (2) the schools. The government school was small and run down - even the UNICEF-supported school was small and very basic. 

My kids go to school in the Washington, DC public schools so they are hardly used to the most luxurious Andover/Exeter conditions, but this clearly struck a nerve, with my daughter in particular.  My daughter, 8 ½, had decided in advance that the best thing to do was to make a donation to an organized, reputable group that was doing good work, rather than give away money on an individual basis. 

After seeing all this, we got out my laptop and searched for projects and organizations in Rajasthan.  My daughter selected a GlobalGiving project which was helping with non-formal education for tribal children, and is contributing some of the savings from her allowance to this (alas, she’s also keeping some to give to Heifer International). 

While this may not solve the immediate problems of the villagers we saw and met while we enjoyed ourselves in our hotel in their village, it was an amazing thing for my daughter to be able to come back - having met the issues face to face - and feel like she was doing something to help.  We felt, in a very small way, that we had, at a minimum, not let the problems go unrecognized.

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This time last year I was bundling up the kids to walk home through the snow after Christmas Eve candlelight church service, Silent Night still echoing in my head. Never did I expect my next Christmas would be in New Delhi instead of New England. Funny what life throws at you.

I’ve had a lot of blessings this year (it’s hard to have even a Christmas in India without thinking of one’s blessings). A big one of which is that I started a job at GlobalGiving. With a little more than six weeks of work under my belt I couldn’t resist the opportunity to check out some of these amazing projects I have read so much about and meet the impressive people behind them. Having spent the better part of my career in international development, I easily become frustrated with the short descriptions of the projects on our site. They give the basics, but it is hard to really feel the difference they are making. I want to learn so much more about them. What makes these people want to start such projects? What is an example of a story of someone’s life that was completely turned around as a result of this project? What was a failure, and how did that project leader learn from it and, as a result, improve the program? And, the biggest question of all- SO WHAT?? I don’t ask this in a callous manner, but rather–what is the greater good that this project is creating—what is the systemic change? Such big ideas are hard to sum up in a 200 character paragraph, and even if the project leader wrote diatribes of text, would we really read it when there are 450 other projects on the site to explore? So, I’ve come to India to help us at GlobalGiving become better storytellers and help the project leaders learn how to tell their stories more effectively.

Here I am, with my lovely colleague Saima, the ideal traveling companion who speaks Hindi, has memorized almost all of the GlobalGiving projects and does not snore, which is important during a 14 hour flight. Today we visited two projects. Sharan is in a difficult situation. Although the organization’s programs for adult drug abusers (started 20 years ago) are successfully gaining funds and becoming integrated into government services, their program for child drug rehabilitation is closing due to lack of funds. Rajiv, the Director, expressed his sorrow that these children who have such a complex set of challenges are losing the only sense of home and family they have. We met the last five boys still living at the center, and were moved by their accomplishments of seeking to get off drugs in the first place, surviving detox and the reticence they are now experiencing about leaving the center. This project is now seeking funds to place these boys with other organizations to finish their schooling and develop skills for the workplace.

More tomorrow, in my Christmas Day post.

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Earlier this spring, I had the opportunity to visit some project leaders in Nairobi. I was so impressed with their enthusiasm and eagerness to learn about GlobalGiving and how to appeal to GG donors. I have to say, some folks from that batch have turned out to be real rockstars!

Towards the end of December, GlobalGiving will have the opportunity to meet some Project Leaders in India, Indonesia and Pakistan. We’d love to learn more about the leaders behind these projects and find out about the work they’re doing. We plan to host a few workshops to bring them together and to answer their queries!  Here are just a few of the people we’re planning to visit:

• Home for 100 Banda Aceh Orphans, PUSPEM in Indonesia
• Educating 100 children in earthquake hit areas, The Citizens Foundation in Pakistan
• Ecological Restoration in Tribal Villages of India, Seva Mandir in India

However, as a GlobalGiving donor myself, I wondered, “What would I want to learn from the donor perspective?”

So I would pose this question to you-have you supported any projects in Delhi, Udaipur or Chennai or Indonesia and Pakistan? What more do you want to know?  What else would you like to see? Do you want more project photos?  Interviews with the people behind the project?  Be creative!  Send us your thoughts and questions, and we’ll try to answer as many of them as we can while we’re there.

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As most of my friends and colleagues know, one of my favorite columns of my favorite online publication is The Dismal Science column on Slate. And I muse often–and out loud–about how women do (or do not) behave differently at work than men, or whether they have greater chances at happiness today than before, because I’ve come to a feminist consciousness late in life and I feel like I need to make up for lost time. And I love the science of economics, despite not having chosen it in college or in graduate school–again, making up for lost time.

So this latest article from Slate started talking about how when legislative mandates forced more women into leadership positions in village councils, the delivery of public goods increased (and the quality of such goods stayed as high as when men were in leadership positions) but residents of villages headed by women were actually less satisfied with the public goods, I thought I’d hit the trifecta. [Icing on the cake: the Slate article cited the work of Esther Duflo, whse work at the Poverty Action Lab at MIT I have really admired over the years.]

My trivial little delight at finding an article that was as relevant as any Google ad served up to me in my Gmail account using entirely analog searching techniques aside, this finding really makes me pause. Because the implications are startling. Either we have really not understood the nature of public goods (and they aren’t really good for people), or we have hardwired biases against being able to perceive objective reality (which means those biases are extremely difficult to overcome, or …

It’s something I actually often wonder about international development. There’s a small group of people in the world (and I hang out with them all the time, so my own perspective is warped) who have the privilege of knowing about, and participating in, the adventure that development can be. How we can communicate the drama and the incredible high that comes from hard-won success to people who don’t know about it–and perhaps even have a bias against learning more about it?

But I’m a liberal at heart–I do believe human nature can change. After all, if I can gain feminist consciousness and an appreciation of the dismal science late in life, why not?

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