Kjerstin Erickson is the founder of FORGE.
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Forging Ahead
Kjerstin Erickson was 20 when she launched FORGE. She didn't have a business plan. She didn't have a revenue model. She didn't have connections. And she didn't have a penny. But she now works in three refugee camps in Zambia, helping 60,000 refugees build better lives. This is her story.
2008-12-01
Why copying the internet fundraising sensation may be dangerous for your (fundraising) soul
This entry is from Curtis Chang, CEO of Consulting Within Reach (CWR). CWR has recently agreed to provide pro bono services to FORGE. As part of this experiment in radical transparency, Social Edge and Kjerstin have invited Curtis to regularly share about the experience in this context.
The love affair with Kiva Like just about everyone else, I love Kiva. I first started following their story and Matthew Flannery’s blog here on the Social Edge at the end of December 2006. Their approach of raising funds by connecting individual lenders to micro entrepreneurs seemed like a revelation to me at the time. As I’ve described elsewhere, going to the Kiva site has even become a small family tradition. On Christmas, we peruse the site and my two young daughters get to choose entrepreneurs and the loans our family will make. It was no surprise to me that they’ve become the toast of the town, so much that Time recently named it one of the 50 best sites in the world. It’s become one of the definitional social enterprises of our new online era. That’s why Kiva has become so dangerous for so many young social enterprises like FORGE. One program officer at a leading foundation for social entrepreneurs related to me how often she hears individuals enthuse about how adopting the KIVA model will radically improve their prospects. I also hear this constantly from clients and potential clients wanting to do the same and hop aboard the online fundraising train. But copying success can be dangerous. A brief cinematic digression on copying success In 1977, I sat as a 9 year in the darkened movie theater of the Golf Mill shopping center rin Niles, Illinois, watching the final flickering scenes of the triumphant victory celebration in the rebel hideout and hanging on to the final echoes of Chewbaca’s celebratory roar. I thought the world had changed forever. Coming from a Chinese immigrant family, I hadn’t seen very many movies at that point; I’d only been recently allowed to go to the theater without my parents. So after Star Wars, there was this tickling anticipation in me of the wonders to come. What fantastic stories of space adventures would be next? Here’s what came next: - Flash Gordon (1980)
- Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)
- Krull (1983)
- The Last Starfighter (1984)
- 2010 (1984)
Bombs. Not just bad movies, but budgetary disasters. Studios invested huge sums in cutting edge special effects technology, directors built exotic sets replicating all manner of space vehicles and extraterrestrial locales, and there was a run on midget actors who could fit into robotic outfits. Yet I couldn’t understand why these movies all failed to capture for me (and for everyone else) the allure and magic that was Star Wars. Everything about Star Wars seemed to be there. And wasn’t. Channeling my inner Roger Ebert now in my middle age, I’ve now come to see that what those Star Wars wannabees had copied was the technological shell of Star Wars. But what couldn’t be captured was the soul of that landmark film. Star Wars wasn’t just a special effects driven space adventure. As creator George Lucas has explained, the soul of the story lay in his deliberate borrowing of some ancient archetypes of the Western storytelling tradition, especially as depicted in writings of the theorist Joseph Campbell. Moreover, in its cinematic nature, Star Wars brilliantly fused the soul of several classic genres. It mixed in motifs like the American Western (and Japanese samurai) theme of disparate individuals coming together for a mission – and threw in elements of the classic romantic triangle. It played out Neil Simon’s Odd Couple relationship between the neurotic and the practical: the fact that Felix Unger shuffled about in gold colored metal and Oscar Madison only beeped and whistled was secondary. Most of all, in the cynical and shrunken spirit of the post-Watergate era, it reignited our sense of the grand epic of good versus evil. The technological shell of Star Wars was important and even necessary for its blockbuster status. But it wasn’t sufficient. The high tech shell wasn’t a recipe for success, as those subsequent movies proved. The Soul of Kiva My point in this digression is that when you look at Kiva, you have to look at the soul behind the technological shell. The soul of Kiva, in my view, lies in the fusing of four elements: - the fact that it is asking for loans that get repaid (and potentially re-loaned), not for donations
- its model of regularly humanizing the need to the tale of a sympathetic (i.e. hardworking, enterprising) individual
- facilitating a one to one giver to recipient relationship
- a website that enables the giver to choose the recipient
Of those four elements, I would argue that the fourth technological factor was the least important. It wasn’t unimportant, but it served mainly as the shell for the first three truly revelatory elements. FORGE very self consciously modeled its new funding model on KIVA. KIVA, along with other sites like Donors Choose and Global Giving, were their inspiration. And Kjerstin told me that the team carefully studied the best practices of these forerunners. This year, it invested $30,000 dollars into building its current site that enables donors to choose a specific project to fund. Their hopes for the year was to recoup that investment, and to build on it as a cornerstone of their fundraising in the future. FORGE only launched the site mid year (it has so far raised a third of the targeted amount), so it is too early to pass even short term judgment on the site as a success, failure, or somewhere in between. My concern here, however, is what FORGE can expect from the site going forward in its long term sustainability plans. For the long term, while FORGE didn't expect to be as equally successful from its online strategy as KIVA, it obviouslly did want to emulate some portion of the success. What is the likely size of that portion? You can detect how much KIVA was on FORGE's mind by looking at their respective home pages as both were launched [sidenote: FORGE has been planning to change this shared graphic identity]: Yet that borrowed graphic highlights precisely the aspects of KIVA’s soul that FORGE didn’t – and couldn’t – copy. KIVA’s arrows convey the loan aspect as it graphically depicts the return of those funds. It also conveys this sense that there is an individual on the other end. And it conveys the idea that there will be dynamism to this one to one relationship. FORGE can’t replicate any of these aspects. A donation is different than a loan. A relationship to a project is different than to a person. And the dynamism of a project is different than the dynamism of an individual. FORGE was aware of these differences - it's not like they went into this endeavor as a mindless copycat - but as it plans for its future, it must appreciate just how fundamental these differences are. The Soul of Funding Models When I’ve described FORGE’s fundraising story, some critics have replied that the real lesson of FORGE is that you can’t just build a great site, but you also have to have a marketing strategy to drive people to the site. And that’s been the lesson that Kjerstin herself has voiced. I don’t think that’s quite it, though. Sure, marketing to drive web traffic helps. But it’s not like Kiva consciously executed a saavy marketing campaign to drive their first burst of traffic. They got free marketing in the form of first, a Frontline news piece, and then later on in appearances like on Oprah. Why was media attracted to them in the first place? I think it was because the media could tell a story that had winsome characters, relationships, and plot. The archetypical story of KIVA has extrovert Jessica and introvert Matthew visiting micro-enterprises; Jessica especially wondering how they could connect their friends to these wonderful entrepreneurs; and then Matthew coming back to his job as a web developer. You can fill in the rest of the plot and how everything connected. In almost every free marketing news exposure, that story got retold. And in many ways, their funding model served as a natural invitation to the audience to participate in the soul of that story. That convergence, I believe, is what made the funding model so brilliantly successful. A nonprofit’s funding model is not just a purely tactical decision to maximize revenue. Its strengths or flaws can’t be just the product of marketing. And the coolest website can be soulless. A fundraising model works best when it is a natural extension of the essential qualities of an organization: its founding characters, narrative, relationship to its audience – all that makes a great movie and story. Recapturing FORGE’s fundraising soul This doesn’t mean that it was a bad idea for FORGE to build its new site. It has the potential to be a useful tool. But all tools are only useful within their limitations. And a tool is not a soul. Interestingly, FORGE’s original funding model did have a very distinctive soul. Its archetypical story is of Kjerstin Erickson as a 20 year old junior dropping out of Stanford to go work in refugee camps. She rallies other college students to the cause. Soon, FORGE is filled with other young, idealistic college students doing the same – and raising some key operational funds to keep FORGE growing. And when those students were fundraising in their home communities or in their dorms, what kind of story were they telling? I bet that many of them at least mentioned Kjerstin’s story. I also bet that there were parents making donations to their kids (while worrying desperately about their safety), just like Kjerstin’s parents financed the organization for a number of years. And when these students returned from their overseas stint, they also repeated Kjerstin’s narrative as they told their college friends and recruited more to the cause. And when you read the original free marketing news coverage of FORGE, the media repeated that narrative link from Kjerstin to FORGE’s current crop of students. Now, as I’ve written already, I think from a social impact vantage point, FORGE made the right decision to stop using college students as primary staff in the camps and replace them with the refugees themselves. But I wish I could, with the benefit of hindsight and Obi Wan Kenobi like powers, go back to the point where Kjerstin is staring down the barrel of her funding decision and whisper, “Kjerstin, use the soul, use the soul.” What would that have meant? Well, for starters, it would have meant moving more slowly and gradually. Organizational souls don’t change very quickly. An organization built on a culture of rallying and recruiting college students isn’t going to develop overnight the skills and instincts needed in the increasingly complex world of web marketing. FORGE certainly needs to expand its donor base beyond college students. But it has to be realistic about how fast it can move and how much it has to learn. A mixed funding model might have been a good way to experiment. Even as organizations evolve and mature, the soul of an original funding model, like The Force, can still live on in other incarnations. It would have been wise to think if their student network could still have been given a meaningful role to play in fundraising. I’ve been advising Kjerstin to tap aggressively into that network these past few weeks. We’ll see if they can still come to the rescue. I’ll also examine some possible options in the final report. For now, however, let me be clear: I’m not claiming that if I had been in Kjerstin’s shoes, in the rush and tumult that is the life of a social entrepreneur, I would certainly have had that wisdom. FORGE isn't alone in this: the rush to emulate KIVA is palpable in the nonprofit world these days. It may be that one of FORGE's biggest contributions to the sector in all this is its willingness to serve as a live case study exploring the limitations of that trend. And who knows, maybe FORGE's site will turn out to be wildly successful beyond my expectations. To borrow from another favorite science fiction series, "Dammit Jim, I'm a consultant not a prophet!" I hope no reader will too glibly point fingers, especially if you haven’t done it yourself. Even if you have done it successfully, there’s no guarantee that you’ll continue to do so. Even the blockbuster franchise who is raking in all the dough today could find one day that it has lost its soul. And KIVA, if you don’t believe me and you're reading this, I have three words for you: Jar Jar Binks 
2008-11-24
The following entry was written by Abby Speight, FORGE's Programming Director, who has been with the organization for the past 3 years. She just returned from a trip to the refugee camps where FORGE works, and shares her perspective on FORGE's situation below...
I just got back from a month in Zambia, where I visited all three of the camps where FORGE works. As I visited our projects and spoke with our staff, it became abundantly clear what’s at stake here. The irony, as Kjerstin mentioned, is that our programming is stronger than ever. FORGE’s ability to make concrete, lasting change in the lives of these refugees is palpable, and I’ve never been so impressed by the expertise and passion of our refugee staff. Yet, I’ve never been so scared that FORGE might not make it through all of this. It’s bittersweet to be knocked off your feet with progress that you know is in real danger of being seriously stunted, or stopped altogether. More than ever (and that’s saying a lot) I’m convinced that FORGE’s presence in these camps is making a critical difference in refugees’ lives and that shutting down our projects would be a crippling blow to these communities – both immediately and in the long run. In Meheba Settlement I met with Anthony, the refugee leader of one of FORGE’s first projects planned by the refugees themselves. For the past six months, Anthony has been working with his community to develop the FORGE Health Service, a project that will provide basic health treatment and health education to a community that has been without a clinic for almost six years. Typically a quiet man, Anthony’s excitement when he spoke of the project was contagious, and his pride of all that he and his community had accomplished was inspiring. He spoke eagerly about the valuable leadership and business skills he’s acquired throughout this process and the respect and trust he’s gained in his community. But, most strikingly, he felt totally prepared and confident in his ability to spearhead future community development initiatives – next time without FORGE’s help. Anthony is determined that he can – and will – use the skills he learned to solve problems in the future, rather than relying on outside help or guidance. The impact extends beyond even that. Anthony proudly related to me the importance of his role in the community. He said that by listening to the community and turning their input into action, he had empowered the people of Meheba to speak their mind. He is now approached consistently by his peers who want to discuss their ideas, opinions, and concerns. Because of Anthony’s work through FORGE, the community is suddenly vibrant and proactive, and people are thinking about possibilities rather than problems. He says they finally feel like they have a voice – and they’re using it. The trip was not all inspiration and progress, though. Part of my mission on the ground was to work with our Project Managers to cut project budgets in half for the next four months. After a few agonizing days, we came up with a plan that will allow the projects to survive on the limited funding FORGE has available in the short term. We had to lay off many valuable employees (more than half in one camp), and supply budgets are shockingly low – most projects in Meheba settlement have less than $20 a month to spend on materials like notebooks, pencils and chalk—the modest resources that keep projects running. The community was hit hard by the news, partly because of the cutbacks, but mostly out of a fear that FORGE is preparing to leave. Refugees are no strangers to abandonment and broken promises. They have seen too many nonprofit organizations come and go. When we told them that the budget cuts were meant to keep FORGE in the camp and not as the beginning of the end, they were, as whole, relieved. “We understand budget problems and lack of resources,” Wakilongo, the Kala Community Driven Repatriation Center Project Coordinator told me, “We just fear FORGE leaving. We can make it work as long as we can work together.” My thoughts exactly. - Abby Speight FORGE Programming Director www.FORGEnow.org
2008-11-21
Quick update on our fiscal progress:
Since announcing our budget shortfall, we've received over $18,000 in new gifts (toward the $100,000 deficit). We've also received several pledges and committments that we are waiting to see formally materialize. Its been a good start. In an exciting turn of events, a family foundation has come forward to offer $10,000 once we have raised $20,000 from our past donor base. So far, we've raised over $10,000 of the required $20,000, and we are confident that we will raise the rest. Once this happens, we will be at least 40% of the way to closing the immediate gap that will allow FORGE to continue our work in 2009. It's my belief that the first 40% is the hardest, as it is the early donors who must take the largest risk that we won't make it. There is still a long way to go. But we've got our nose to the grindstone, and we'll keep plugging away... -Kjerstin Erickson www.FORGEnow.org
2008-11-14
How should potential donors conceive of FORGE’s financial situation? Is it still a worthwhile investment?
This entry is from Curtis Chang, CEO of Consulting Within Reach (CWR). CWR has recently agreed to provide pro bono services to FORGE. As part of this experiment in radical transparency, Social Edge and Kjerstin have invited Curtis to regularly share about the experience in this context.
Social Return on Investment There are so many different ways to look at whether a nonprofit is a worthwhile investment for donors. A hot metric being tossed around in the nonprofit world is Social Return on Investment (SROI). SROI is an attempt to quantify the social impact per dollar given. Actually quantifying SROI is incredibly difficult. What is the SROI when an at risk child gets mentoring? What calculations do you run? The total cost of illiteracy, incarceration, welfare, and other public costs multiplied by the statistical likelihood that a child without mentoring falls into those outcomes? As you can imagine, there are innumerable ways to cook the books to arrive at any figure you want. I believe a metric like SROI is better used as a lens, not as a ledger. A lens is valuable to the extent it enables us to look at an organization with fresh insight and lines of inquiry. In FORGE’s case, SROI is really trying to get at the question: “Is FORGE seeking the highest return?” Or put more suspiciously, “Is FORGE wasting money?” Is FORGE wasting money? Let’s tackle the suspicion first. FORGE’s annual budget is $400,000. This is for an organization that operates in 4 refugee camps, runs over 60 projects, and benefits 60,000 refugees with just the libraries FORGE has started, not to mention its other projects. FORGE employs 12 international (mostly Western) field staff who work essentially full time for a year in overseas locations under incredibly difficult conditions. Incidentally, the next year’s crop of these staff is what is most immediately threatened by the current budget crisis. The salary for each of these international staff? $250/month. FORGE also now employs over 150 refugees themselves to conceive of new projects, provide entrepreneurial leadership and then manage other refugees. They are given a rare commodity in these camps - an actual paying job – at a pay rate that is the highest FORGE could offer without distorting the local economy. The salary for each of these leaders? $50/month. I’ll describe in my next post about FORGE’s US staff costs. But as a sneak preview, let’s just say there’s not a lot of fat there either. I believe I’m not succumbing to client bias here in saying that I know of few – if any – international NGOs that are running leaner than FORGE is. Is FORGE seeking the highest return? As I said, the value of SROI for me is that it provides a helpful lens, particularly on whether an organization is making decisions to get a higher social return. It’s an important lens because nonprofits don’t automatically do that. Nonprofits can easily prioritize maximizing fiscal well being. And this impulse is completely understandable. A nonprofit is like any organism. It has to battle mightily to diverge from Maslow’s hierarchy in its decision making: feed itself first. An organization can prioritize feeding itself by designing programs to fit foundation guidelines, even if those programs aren’t optimal. They can open an office in an area that a wealthy donor wants them to, even though someone else might already be on the ground and is better suited. The list goes on… Now, the interesting situations that the SROI lens helpfully magnifies are ones where there is a tradeoff between social return and immediate financial return. What the metric helps to highlight are decisions an organization makes to maximize social return at risk to its fiscal self nourishment. And that exactly describes what FORGE did. Paradoxically, the financial decision that is most responsible for FORGE’s current financial plight is precisely the one that most increased its SROI. FORGE got into trouble because it shifted from having college students run their development projects to paying refugees themselves. On the fundraising ledger, this cost them dearly as each student had to raise $5K for FORGE – a big chunk of the organization’s operating budget. On the SROI ledger, it is a great play. Society gets greater returns in the incredibly rare commodity of refugee leadership empowerment, in more organic project design, in credibility among the camps, and more. These returns defy quantification with a dollar figure, but they are real nonetheless. And I can't imagine any other single move that FORGE could have made that would have as dramatically boosted its SROI. Moral Hazard Now, could Kjerstin and FORGE have better managed this move so as not to jeopardize its survival so profoundly? Yes. They could have moved slower, built more fundraising infrastructure, been less optimistic about their online efforts. But it’s not like they didn’t know the risk. And in their own way, they tried to plan accordingly. Those are all issues I’ll address in my final report. But when the “Could they have better managed it?” question arises, I feel like another lens is coming into play: a moral perspective. That lens is trying to highlight key moral questions: - “Did FORGE screw up?”
- “Aren’t they to blame for their woes?”
- “Aren’t we just going to reward incompetence by bailing them out?”
In economic terms, this is called “moral hazard:” the danger that in rescuing someone from the consequences of their actions, we will encourage further such actions. Thus, anyone who cares about moral hazard is implicitly making a moral judgment: Which kind of actions do we want to encourage and reward as a society? So what do we want to encourage and reward in our sector? Cautious adherence to Maslow? Or willingness to bet one’s organizational survival on social return? I know I’m setting up a theoretically false dichotomy. But we’re living in an age of dichotomies. Read today’s paper. We as a society are now seriously contemplating plowing billions to rescue the US auto industry, a sector comprised of some of the most mismanaged, self-preserving, cautious, and socially irresponsible organizations around. What are we saying if we as citizens consent to cleaning out the national treasury – which is rightly our money -- to rescue these organizations…and not at least consider tossing a penny in FORGE’s direction? Where does the moral hazard really lie?
2008-11-10
If you saw Curtis’ last post, you’ll see that he took me to task for focusing too much on FORGE’s long-term vision rather than on our more immediate deliverables. And I think he's right - we need to improve how we talk about the value we provide. The question of messaging is one we’ve always struggled with. We want to communicate both our immediate impact and the leverage that the impact can have in the future. We want you to know that your $10 gift can place 10 books in a library, but we also want you to know that a library in a refugee camp is more than just a library – it can be a place of hope among desperation, of learning among idleness, and, yes, of peace-building among conflict. We believe that this leveraged impact, outlined in my last post, is both what makes FORGE unique and what makes our continued existence so important. It’s what keeps us as staff so devoted to the cause. However, in a time of crisis, is it more important than ever to be talking about the specifics? I get that, and it's a point well-taken. It’s a funny tradeoff – right now, I’m very concerned about the tens of thousands of people who may soon have to live in a camp void of any constructive activities, feeling abandoned by the international community and growing in their frustration and desperation. Yet at the same time, I’m perhaps even more concerned about the hundreds of thousands of current and future refugees whose lives FORGE will never touch if we don’t make it, and how their experience in refuge will shape their own futures and the future of their communities. In the end, FORGE needs to learn more about what works when we communicate with people – which messages stick, which messages make us stick out, and how can we adequately communicate what we do without oversimplifying and sacrificing the core of our unique strategy and vision? Curtis will continue to work with us on answering these questions and refining our messaging, but I’d love to hear what you think. If you’ve read any of FORGE’s messaging, what sticks out to you? Which parts get you revved up, and which parts make your eyes glaze over? This feedback would be very valuable as we plot our proverbial course. Thank you, Social Edge community, for supporting me through this admittedly harrowing time. - Kjerstin Erickson www.FORGEnow.org
In this crisis season, Kjerstin needs to focus her public message on promises she can credibly deliver.
This entry is from Curtis Chang, CEO of Consulting Within Reach (CWR). CWR has recently agreed to provide pro bono services to FORGE. As part of this experiment in radical transparency, Social Edge and Kjerstin have invited Curtis to regularly share about the experience in this context.
Grading Kjerstin's answers So in that same classroom spirit, I’m going to grade her response from my perspective. I do so partially in jest. It is certainly not because I ultimately think of myself as her teacher or superior (any consultant who conceives of himself as either of those roles for his client is both arrogant and a poor consultant). In fact, the more I get to know her and her achievements, the more I am in awe. But I’m going to grade her response because I want highlight this critical issue: how FORGE must communicate its indispensability, both during this crisis and in the near future. Kjerstin and I have already talked about these points over the phone and she essentially agrees with my perspective. So, I'm sharing this here as part of our ongoing commitment to let you in on our working relationship. Overall, I’d give her effort a “reluctant “B.” “Reluctant,” because there is so much of her vision that is brilliant and deserves a sheer A+; but in the end I think she only half succeeds in what she needs to do. The essence of FORGE is inspiring and paradigm shifting: to turn refugee camps from "warehouses of misery" into "incubators for social development." This is just the kind of bold thinking needed in Africa. It is the job of any consultant to respect and nurture that kind of boldness. But it is also my job as a consultant to take that bold vision and – without quashing it – discipline and translate it into organizational effectiveness. And even though I haven’t gotten deep into my research on FORGE's sustainability plan, it is already quite obvious to me that more effective communication of its message will be critical. There’s a lot of work that FORGE will need to do in terms of the mechanics of communication that I’ll discuss this in the future. But for now, I want to concentrate on the effectiveness of the message itself. Promise vs Hope I set up the "exam" as one in which she had to show why FORGE was deserving of a collective bailout. The two questions were: - What damage to the collective are we averting with a collective bailout of FORGE?
- What collective good – even if it is in the future -- are we seeking by working for FORGE’s survival?
A simpler - and probably more elegant - way to frame my twin questions was that I was asking her to communicate what she could promise us right now and what we could hope for in the future. I feel that Kjerstin’s piece was a good at hope, but weak on promise. And it didn't need to be that way. Promise and hope are twin ingredients of any successful marketing. For instance, Nike offers the promise of a high performing shoe, and the hope of becoming a high performing athlete. The iPod offers the promise of an elegantly designed device, and the hope to become that cool, hip hopping, kaleidiscope colored dancing figure. Promise is what you can deliver. Hope is what you can inspire. As a social entrepreneuer, you need to communicate both. And sometimes, you need more of one than the other. But to be persuasive, you need to distinguish between the two and reassure the audience that you haven’t confused the two. That’s why the classic Nike ads of Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon were so effective: they parodied the notion that you can “be like Mike” by wearing the shoe. In the process, they disarmed the customer’s suspicion that Nike was overselling its claims. The ads kept the distinction between promise and hope – brilliantly, because it did so while still keeping hope out here in mid air (in the back of our minds, we felt even more that it must be so cool to be like Mike and be worshipped by hip figures like Spike Lee). The central premise of Kjerstin’s case was that FORGE offers a way out of the structural factors causing civil war. This claim belongs in the hope category, not as a promise. I won’t dissect her piece in detail, but I don’t believe she can make the case that she can deliver on ending civil war in Africa. Her regression analysis is nice, but is a very long way off from showing that. Anyone familiar with Africa knows that the true causes are incredibly complex: ranging from ethnic tensions to competition over scarce resources to decades of corrupt political culture to inadequate state structures and beyond. Most of the refugees in her programs aren’t returning to their homelands for a while, and when they finally do, it’s going to take decades to measure their impact on civil strife. The message "we end civil wars" (yes, simplified from what Kjerstin actually said, but that's what happens to messages when they go public) oversells by a very long shot. What FORGE can promise Even worse than the risk of overselling, talk about ending civil war distracts from the many wonderful promises that FORGE can credibly deliver. Right now. Right now, the crisis of the Congolese refugee is making the news headlines. My wife heard about their case on NPR, was moved greatly, and wanted to know what she could do. She can’t very easily give to the UN agency running the camps (exactly who would I make that check out to?). Our sector doesn’t offer many other alternatives for people to engage with this crisis. But she could give to FORGE, knowing that it is not some bloated governmental bureaucracy but rather a lean and nimble organization. A big problem about the refugee crisis is that it is largely inaccessible to the rest of the world. Any cause that gives people like my wife and me a way to touch that crisis has a good argument for indispensability. Right now, the UN and other Western relief organizations treat refugees as objects of pity. The Westerners deliver food, shelter, and aid and the Africans receive them. The longer they remian merely recipients, the more disempowered and depressed they become. Most of these refugees will be there for 5-10 years. A culture of dependency will grow like a cancer on the culture. We need to reverse that slide immediately. FORGE is the only NGO (according to Kjerstin) who has a plan to do that and has a track record of execution. In fact, FORGE got into this financial shortfall in the first place by becoming one of the few (only?) NGOs to actually employ the refugees themselves to come up with their own solutions. That empowerment approach to the refugee crisis, I believe, is indispensable to the sector and worth preserving. There’s more that I can say – check out Forge’s web site for more specifics – but my point is that FORGE doesn't need to talk about some far off dream about ending civil war to make its case for why it qualifies for a sector wide bailout. What potential investors are looking for I’m emphasizing this promise versus hope distinction because Kjerstin needs to be very, very long on delivering specific promises and short on inspiring hope right now. If things break her way, she’s going to get air time before more and more audiences the next couple of months. Her real audience in all those cases will be potential investors. For potential investors evaluating FORGE these days, hope is heavily discounted. They want specifics. They want deliverables. Indeed, the suspicion that Kjerstin has to combat among potential investors is that FORGE somehow got into this deficit by being unrealistic, dreamy eyed, recent college grads. The more she talks about lofty, seemingly unreachable hopes -- instead of the real concrete achievements happening in the field right now – the more I’m afraid she’s going to confirm that suspicion for this crucial audience. Which would be tragic, because I believe she has so very much to talk about.
2008-11-07
So – I’ve been asked to answer the question of why FORGE’s continued existence should matter to the world. As I wrote about below, I think this question is essential – it both excites and frightens me.
Now, I could go two ways with this: I could give you the pull-at-your-heartstrings stories about the people’s lives we touch and where they’d be without us, or I could give you the intellectual break-down of why what FORGE does is so important, groundbreaking, and yes, indispensable.
I’ve decided to go with what does it for me – the back-up-my-claims breakdown of why FORGE matters. I’m a big-picture person, and FORGE is a big-picture organization. And while I was pulled to the cause by the heartstrings, my brain is what has kept me stuck to it. And ultimately, a logical argument is the only kind I really know how to make. So if you’re up for it, and you won’t get turned off by the citations, here goes:
The Critical Problem:
In the past 60 years, over 13 million people have lost their lives to conflict on the African continent – the equivalent of the Holocaust.[i] Beyond the loss of human lives, these wars do an estimated $18 billion dollars of economic damage each year – the equivalent of the total annual aid from major donor countries.[ii] On top of these financial and human costs, these wars have secondary set of victims: the hundreds of millions of refugees who have been forced to uproot their lives and flee their homes due to the threat to their lives and livelihoods. At the end of 2006, there were over 9.4 million people displaced by war in Africa, most of which are civil conflicts.[iii] And as we’ve seen in Sudan and are seeing in Congo right now, these conflicts have yet to go away. They are still taking millions of lives, are one of the great challenges of our time.
What's Causing the Problem?
Looking at the data, many conflicts in Africa share similar risk factors: extreme poverty,[iv] income inequality,[v] weak governance structures,[vi] and economic instability or dependence on fickle weather conditions.[vii] Once started, these wars are hard to stop – they often continue in cycles for years and even decades. My own regression analysis shows the years of war that the country experienced since independence and whether the country experienced a war for independence are both strongly linked to the re-emergence of civil war. It also shows that there are several socio-economic indicators linked to civil war which can be used to strategically minimize the chances of war’s re-emergence.
What Is Currently Being Done, and Why Isn’t It Enough?
Currently, the dominant paradigm of peacebuilding focuses almost exclusively on a top-down model: improve governance structure, negotiate cease-fires and peace agreements, open up markets, and the rest will fall into place. And yet, these approaches have been heavily problematic, as without the tools to hold government accountable, African people have suffered through what often seems like a revolving-door of corrupt or inadequate governments.
In response, FORGE’s bottom-up model of peacebuilding prescribes interventions that address the root causes of war through the building of economic opportunity, stability, and a healthy civil society. This bottom-up approach is designed to equip local leaders and communities with the tools they need to solve their own problems and “the instruments to hold political leaders accountable."[viii] Our primary focus is on relieving the grassroots tensions, problems, and shortcomings that lead a nation’s people to accept and/or participate in the outbreak of war. Thus, FORGE works to build vibrant post-conflict civil societies with adequate economic opportunity and social protection – which many scholars have proven to play as much of a role in the social stabilization process as do the larger political structures.[ix]
Refugee Populations: An Overlooked Resource in the Peacebuilding Process
Beyond our commitment to the bottom-up approach, FORGE has found a specific resource that is often overlooked in the conflict resolution process: the large refugee populations gathered in camps outside the warring country’s border. Refugees, though often viewed as helpless victims of war,[x] are in actuality dynamic social and economic actors who use numerous strategies to control their own lives, livelihoods, and futures.[xi, xii] While FORGE is the only organization to have decisively taken advantage of it, the fact remains that African refugee situations provide a set of characteristics that makes them a particularly appealing target population for peacebuilding interventions. I bullet-pointed these characteristics in a recent post.
Returning to the regression analysis that demonstrated the statistically-significant ties between several socio-economic indicators and the risk of war, it’s easy to show that refugee populations can be leveraged to address many of these underlying causes of war, and that FORGE is currently doing just that. And yet, under the current aid-based system, refugees are taught to be dependent recipients of external assistance, and either lose or never build the capacity to be self-sufficient agents of their own futures. This dependency syndrome bodes poorly for the futures of refugees upon their return from exile – after spending unconstructive years completely dependent on external actors, how will they transition to rebuilding their own lives and the lives of those around them?
In the UN refugee agency's own words, “A refugee…is prevented from enjoying those rights – for example, to freedom of movement, employment, and in some cases, education – that would enable him or her to become a productive member of a society.” And thus, “the consequences of having so many human beings in a static state include wasted lives, squandered resources, and increased threats to security."[xiii] And yet despite the recognition that long-term solutions are more desirable than short-term fixes, UNHCR currently spends a full 40% of its budget on “Care and Maintenance” of existing situations. Yet it admits, “spending on care and maintenance, rather than solutions, is a recurring expense and not an investment in the future. It can only ensure that situations are perpetuated, not solved."[xiv]
FORGE changes all that. We turn refugee camps from despair-filled ware houses for stateless persons into incubators for positive community-building. We offer a singular alternative to the aid-dependency framework that centers around the opposite principle: capacity building for self-sufficiency. Rather than providing them aid into perpetuity, FORGE’s self-sufficiency framework helps refugees regain control of their lives, livelihoods, and future prospects. These are the interventions that, while slower and more complex, are designed to address the root causes of war. FORGE offers and has actualized this new framework for conflict management - one that treats refugees as a positive opportunity to build the necessary conditions for peace, rather than a burdensome result of war. We don’t know of anyone else that is doing this.
If FORGE dies, the world will lose a powerful model and voice for holistic peacebuilding: the only nonprofit we know that focuses on the ways in which refugees can positively impact the future prospects of their nations. Without this voice and this growth in impact, the international community may be missing out on a valuable and practical opportunity to create the necessary conditions for lasting peace and stability on the African continent.
[i] "Death Tolls for Man-Made Megadeaths." Historical Atlas of the 20th Century. 3 May 2008 <http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatx.htm>.
[ii] Oxfam. “Africa - the Cost of War." Africa Research Bulletin (2007).
[iii] UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2006: Trends in Displacement, Protection, and Solutions. UNHCR. Geneva: UNHCR, 2007. Annex pg. 90
[iv] Elbadawi, Ibrahim, and Nicholas Sambanis. "Why are There So Many Civil Wars in Africa? Understanding and Preventing Violent Conflict." Journal of African Economies 9 (2000): 244-269.
[v] Cramer, Christopher. "Does Inequality Cause Conflict?" Journal of International Development 15 (2003): 397-412.
[vi] Hegre, Havard, Tanja Ellingsen, Scott Gates, and Nils Petter Gleditsch. "Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Civil Change, and Civil War." American Political Science Review 95 (2001): 33-48.
[vii] Miguel, Edward, S. Satyanath, and E. Serengeti. "Economic Shocks in Conflict: an Instrumental Variable Approach." Journal of Political Economy 112 (2004): 725-753.
[viii] Daley, Patricia. "Challenges to Peace: Conflict Resolution in the Great Lakes Region of Africa." Third World Quarterly 27 (2006): pp 317.
[ix] Hemmer, B. W., J. L. Graham, P. Garb, and M. Phillips. Putting the "Up" in Bottom-Up Peacebuilding: Broadening the Concept of International Negotiations. The Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Apr. 2005, Palmer House Hilton.
[x] Rajaram, Prem Kumar. "Humanitarianism and Representations of the Refugee." Journal of Refugee Studies 15 (2002): 247-264.
[xi] Jacobsen, Karen. The Economic Life of Refugees. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian P, 2005: pp 25-30.
[xii] Dryden-Peterson, Sarah. ""I Find Myself as Someone Who is in the Forest": Urban Refugees as Agents of Social Change in Kampala, Uganda." Journal of Refugee Studies 19 (2006): 381-395.
[xiii] Protracted Refugee Situations. Executive Committee of the High Commissioner's Programme. Geneva: UNHCR, 2004.
[xiv] Protracted Refugee Situations. Executive Committee of the High Commissioner's Programme. Geneva: UNHCR, 2004.
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