Volunteer Voices

Duncan McNicholl

• Publisher: Practical Action Publishing
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781780449432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Do you want to want to spend time on the other side of the world, seeing how people in developing countries live, and doing something to 'make a difference'? Do you want to get first-hand experience of grassroots development as you start a career in international development? Volunteer Voices is a guide for the critically minded volunteer and early career development worker. It is designed to help aspiring young change-makers engage with the complicated environment of international volunteering from a hands-on perspective that can help them to benefit and contribute as much as possible from the experience. Beyond technical expertise and factual knowledge, creating change comes largely from our own mind sets and attitudes. By sharing stories, mistakes, and lessons learned in this collection of short stories, the book guides readers to reflect on their own work and how their own practice might improve. Each individual and experience is unique, and no blueprints are offered. Providing stories and concepts for reflection instead allows readers to consider how particular ideas relate to their own contexts and then to determine how to proceed. This process is crucial to the development of an effective volunteer, and this book provides practical support.This book is essential reading for gap year students, volunteers, and early career professionals embarking on work in grassroots international development projects.

PART I

Working with Yourself

This section focuses on the volunteer as an individual. It explores how we understand and address our own needs in our work and grapple with challenges of ambition, motivation, success, and other internal challenges while working abroad.

Key words: challenges volunteering abroad, lessons learned, understanding ambitions and motivations, managing personal needs, persevering through difficulties

CHAPTER 1

It’s not about me: mistakes from being too personally ambitious when supporting a small agricultural business

Duncan McNicholl

I have always been ambitious and determined. It’s part of what led me to work overseas in the first place, and part of what helped me persevere as time went on. Unfortunately, these traits can be a barrier to doing good work when ambition becomes ego-fuelled irrationality or when determination becomes stubborn adherence to personal conviction. It is all too easy to be wrong. Somewhat paradoxically, the effective change maker must check personal ambition and determination to ensure that the best approach can emerge – even if it doesn’t come from you.

We become part of wherever we participate, even if only temporarily. Somewhere in this mix is yourself, complete with personal ambitions, needs, hang-ups, and the many other fallible qualities that make us human. Most days, if I’m attentive, I can learn a thing or two about my needs, and see how these vie for attention amidst the needs of groups or what is really required for an initiative. An experience facilitating a team discussion on different strategic options once brought to surface the extent to which my need to be valued by a group was stifling my ability to hear good points that team members were making. It wasn’t the first time that my own ambitions and determination got in the way of clear thinking.

I spent my first internship overseas in Malawi supporting a small cassava flour operation to grow its business. It was about halfway through my placement, and my colleague and I were frustrated by the lack of movement in the project. The business owner, Mafayo, had little capital to begin with, and cash-flow issues were hindering his ability to buy cassava and get it to market – an essential test for the viability of the business. Eager to get things moving, my colleague and I stepped in to loan money from our living stipends to support the business.

The initial results were good. With the funds, Mafayo managed to purchase roughly a hectare of cassava for processing, and hired a few people to assist with processing the flour. Ox-carts are devastatingly slow, especially when heavily laden; yet some of my best memories that summer came from the thrill of riding on stacks of cassava steadily towards the factory under a crisp blue sky. I was a development worker! I was making things happen!

Back at the factory, my sleeping area, consisting of a reed mat and bed roll, had to be covered to protect it from the dust. I was more excited to see things moving than to fully realize the inconvenience of sleeping next to a few hundred pounds of processed starch. Within a couple of weeks, we set off with Mafayo on a hired truck to deliver the shipment to the capital, Lilongwe. Although sales were not as high as expected, enough revenue was collected to keep the idea alive. I returned to the factory with Mafayo, while my colleague remained in Lilongwe to meet with the visiting co-CEO of our organization.

It didn’t go well. My colleague returned with disappointing feedback that our efforts were not commended. The CEO had said something to the effect of: ‘A couple of young educated minds with money? Who couldn’t make that work?’ I was crestfallen by the truth of this. We hadn’t really proved anything through subsidizing factory operations and having two of us thinking about the business model for months previously.

The problem was that we badly wanted the business to work. In principle, this is a great motivation to have. In practice, it became misguided when we tried to force a proof of concept through the unsustainable means of our foreign subsidy. We wanted to get things moving and did not think through the implications our actions could have on proving whether or not cassava flour could sustain a viable business, or how this might affect our partner organization. In the end, the business was not profitable, and my early ambition and determination to get things moving blinded my ability to see clearly.

It is much easier to write ‘it’s not about me’ from the comfortable perch of a kitchen table in Canada where I feel little pressure to deliver on anything other than my next cup of tea. Of course, part of our work is about ourselves. It has to be. That’s what keeps us engaged, motivated, and invested enough to bring out the best in what we have to offer. We cannot abandon the need for ambition or determination.

Instead, we need to reflect on the part of our work that is about ourselves in order to better understand our own needs and ambitions. As we begin to see these more clearly, we can know when our own personal motives are getting the better of us, and when they might possibly be in the way. My ideas are only sometimes the best ones. My desire for action can cause me to overlook risks. That is fine when I can recognize it, and I can compensate for those characteristics. What matters at the end of the day is that the effort put forward is the best possible and not limited by drive for personal success.

Reflection for change makers

What are my needs in this work? How might they get in the way of doing what is really needed?

CHAPTER 2

Pursue the art of being humbly radical: my choice to try and solve the hard parts of climate change problems

Mike Kang

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether I’m delusional, ignorant, or just too dogmatic about what I want to see change about the world. In those moments, I feel that it must be one of these; otherwise, I’d have to succumb to the uncomfortable notion that I might simply be courageous, smart, or otherwise ahead of the curve. The truth, I suspect, is somewhere in the middle of these extremes. I’ve learned to look at this tense dance between opposite character judgements as an ongoing dialogue; a search for a balanced sense of self that allows me to be, on average, a conscious achiever, rather than a self-conscious overachiever; or worse, an unconscious underachiever. This is my best attempt at mastering the art of being humbly radical, and I’m still learning.

Holding radical views about what needs to change often comes off as naïve or arrogant, particularly when they come from people such as myself who’ve grown up with immense privilege. But sometimes, the radical view is the right one. I see this constantly through my work in the area of climate change.

In December 2015, the UN-led international process to tackle climate change reached what is arguably the best possible outcome available to them given their political constraints. They reached an agreement about limiting global warming to 2°C, or preferably 1.5°C, involving an unprecedented number of parties and relatively aggressive emissions reduction pledges. Though unprecedented, the result was unequivocally insufficient. Those emissions pledges fall short, by a factor of two, of the actual global emissions profiles needed to reach the 1.5°C or 2°C goals to which the same group agreed. It’s almost as if everyone in the UN Conference of Parties has taken crazy pills.

One could conclude from this, as I suspect most involved in the process do, that this gap simply means that the process has made strides and has further to go. I see it more as a fundamental failing of their approach, which is, at its core, politically driven rather than science driven. Implicit in this agreement, and in its celebration, is a stamp of approval for the world’s polities to keep believing and acting as if solving the emissions problem should be painless and smooth. Science tells us this is not the case. Keep consuming, soon we’ll have electric cars and more solar panels. Don’t get worked up about Shell, they’re investing in carbon capture. Go ahead and march in the streets of New York, but make sure to do it on a Sunday so as not to disrupt traffic. No need to start a revolution; the existing regime has this under control.

From what I’ve seen, radical perspectives are both natural and necessary to confront things like this. Being truly willing to entertain revolutionary visions is a prerequisite for being a genuine contributor to systemic change. Without such perspectives, we’d never be able to admit that the outcomes we want are precluded by the systems we currently have. We’d never be able to conclude that a total renewal, rethink, or revolution is what’s needed, even if all the evidence indicates that this is the only way forward. If we’re not willing to really think in revolutionary terms, we’re unable to see that the politics and attitudes surrounding the UN process preclude its ability to achieve the required emissions reductions.

If this perspective smacks of naïve arrogance to you, you’re not alone. Who am I to indict the regime in this way? Sure, I’ve done research in this area and spoken to dozens of people involved in the UN process about this, but I’ve never had to make these decisions. Whether I like it or not, there are almost always ‘good’ reasons that things are the way they are. Such factors may not be ‘good’ for everyone, and they may be unjust despite being perceived as perfectly fine by those who benefit from the status quo, but they are still there and we need to pay attention, no matter how righteous your radicalism might be. I think this constraint should be relaxed when the radical ideas are coming from the marginalized themselves. Often, if they don’t stand up and fight, nobody will. They have a right to be radical without humility. But someone like me – who will not bear the greatest costs of failing to address climate change – has a responsibility to find a balance.

My balance between humility and radicalism was tested strongly in 2014. Having spent years working with a variety of teams and leaders trying to get their heads around systemic change, I was at a crossroads in my career. I was offered a position by an old boss to manage a portfolio of ventures aimed at linking new, environmentally friendly electronics technologies being developed in universities to the electronics industry, which pays billions of dollars in fines each year due do something important and make a tonne of money at the same time.

I reflected, and I chose to decline the offer. Why? Because, in some ways, I felt it was too easy a problem to solve, and that I wanted to invest myself in tougher problems. A well-resourced growth industry with a huge economic incentive to green its technology meets a well-resourced research and development sector with similar incentives. Human systems are extremely good at adapting to situations like that, when fundamental values aren’t really at odds and everyone stands to benefit visibly and immediately from change. What I wanted to do was work on the kinds of problems human systems are bad at solving, but are very important. The kinds of problems for which social and economic power structures are not geared towards producing the desired result. The failures of the global climate change regime. Solving the political impasses between aid and governance models in the developing world. Helping move forward Canada’s story of Reconciliation with its indigenous peoples without having to rely on government or industry for funding.

Was my choice to decline this offer and focus on more radical change just my ego running amok? Or was it a healthy choice to follow my passions? I’m not sure, but I do know that I am happy with my decision.

This juncture in my life was a challenge to both my humility and my inclination towards more radical change. And it was good practice. Being humbly radical is an art, not a science. I’ve found that it’s a balance that needs that kind of practice. As with any art, you never get to perfection. All you can do is keep improving.

Reflection for change makers

Is my perspective on change radical, and should it be? If so, how can I be radical while retaining my humility?

CHAPTER 3

Know how you expect success to feel: a time in Malawi when feeling good about work was not the same as doing good work

Duncan McNicholl

Most people aspiring to create social change naturally want to succeed. I am no different. Depending on the initiative, there are different types of expectations I might have about what success will feel like if it arrives. Perhaps it is some kind of watershed eureka moment in a policy forum where participants make a key realization. Perhaps it is the celebratory cheer of a community that regains access to water when a pump is fixed. Whatever it is, there is probably some expectation of how that success feels, and that need to feel such success can influence one’s actions.

For me, I think I wanted to be part of a breakthrough. Something exciting that would be recognized as a success, from which further successes would flow. During my first internship overseas, I was collaborating with an agricultural extension agent from a large international organization. He was making rounds on his motorcycle to visit communities, to understand their needs and constraints, and to try and link them to the cassava flour factory I was supporting. Our first collaboration felt like a mild success. With a small amount of funding sourced from his organization, we were able to arrange for farmers from surrounding communities to visit the factory and learn about it. They were able to interact directly with the owner, and hopefully develop some trust in the business.

It felt good at first, but it became apparent that trust issues between the community and the business remained. Farmers remained unconvinced that cassava was worth growing for a small start-up factory that might not be a reliable buyer. We brainstormed further and hit upon the idea of engaging local leaders from the villages through a meeting organized by the senior chief. There, further questions might be answered, and an endorsement from local leaders might help the business get off the ground. The senior chief accepted the idea and agreed to call a meeting of the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributing Authors
• Introduction
• Part I – Working with Yourself
• Part II – Working with Others
• Part III – Working with Issues
• Further Reading