Beyond the Tipping Point

Two years ago I had a number of conversations with my friend Martin Lafontaine about "tipping points" (Martin was volunteering with Project HOPE UK in Munsieville at the time). We would sit together having a meal at the end of a long day in Munsieville dreaming of the day when bringing this great new concept to birth would no longer feel like pushing a giant boulder up a mountainside, because it had now reached the place where it would roll forward through its own inner momentum.

Over the past three months, The Thoughtful Path: Munsieville has, in many ways, reached a crucial tipping point! More and more people, both locally and from around the world, have seen the importance of the project and joined forces with us to realise its true potential. Our Children's Embassy has opened, making a huge statement to the community. The House of Young Ambassadors has been launched, placing children at the heart of the process of delivering change. And the Thoughtful Path Leadership Academy is steadily equipping the emerging "movers and shakers" of the township as agents of transformation. As we welcome the programme's new-found momentum, we also recognise that it needs to be maintained and managed. A boulder rolling uncontrolled down a hill can be very destructive! And what happens when the boulder comes to rest at the foot of the mountain? Is that it?

The energy of pushing, shoving, influencing, advocating and cajoling to bring The Thoughtful Path to where it is today has been shared with a number of incredible people who, over the past two years, have come as volunteers and interns to the project. The recent, highly-significant push, leading to the "tipping point" has been made possible because the efforts of our permanent team have been multiplied by the sheer professionalism, passion, sacrifice and perseverance of Carola Michielsen from Holland, Alyson Krucher from the USA, and a band of 11 doctors, nurses and health and safety professionals, all of whom were gifted to us by our corporate partner, GlaxoSmithKline.

But the fact that all except Alyson have now finished their assignments (and Alyson only has another week in Munsieville), poses a couple of very important questions: will the current momentum of the project simply peter out? Will the good things they have initiated be sustained?

Well, in all honestly, it would be imprudent to answer definitively. Clearly, in the harsh reality of an undeveloped South African township, only the strongest and best ideas survive. "Good" is never enough; only "great" will cut it! But, where the activities of these and other volunteers succeed, there is always evidence of much "sitting under the mango tree" with the local community. And none of the volunteers has just whisked through Munsieville like the Lone Ranger - they have all planned well, felt the Munsieville "vibe", listened to the community, and worked, not to deliver change, but to equip the local community to deliver change!.

Project HOPE UK has benefitted from our volunteers and interns more than words could ever adequately describe, and we want all these friends to stay engaged. They all have so much more to offer. That's why earlier this week, we launched our "Directors' Circle". This is an invited group of special friends of The Thoughtful Path: Munsieville, who have expressed their desire to stay with us until we see the project reach its objective of being an influential, world-class model of excellence in community-based care of orphans and other vulnerable children. Now we have strengthened our support-base with a growing band of trusted advisors and consultants, all of whom have first-hand knowledge of the project, so they can comment from a position of real understanding.

Yes, it has taken supreme effort to bring The Thoughtful Path to the tipping point. But now, as momentum builds, the Directors' Circle will mean that progress is controlled and maintained. After all, to succeed in Munsieville, we will need to reach many more tipping points along the path!

View from The Appalachians

IT IS NOT HARD TO SEE THE ATTRACTION OF JOHNSON CITY, Tennessee, USA, especially in what Americans call “the fall”. The bright, optimistic, energetic city nestles between the tree-covered Appalachian mountains, boldly displaying the full panoply of rich autumn colours. The air is clean, rivers full and the bears, like the people, have a spirit of enquiry, sometimes venturing from their safe haven to investigate the riches beyond.

I am writing this blog from Dulles International Airport, Washington DC, en route for London after a few days as the guest of the Public Health College of East Tennessee State University (ETSU), in Johnson City. And for me, it was an experience far richer that the glorious scenery. I was there to cement friendships with the Dean, Randy Wykoff, Tim Baylor, who does an incredible job in placing students in locations including Munsieville, as part of their studies towards, bachelors, masters or doctoral qualifications, and students like Megan Quinn and Twanda Wadlinton, who have worked with us in the past and become true friends. I was also in town to deliver a public lecture as part of their “Leading Voices in Public Health” series, entitled “The End of Disempowerment and Dependency: Rethinking the Path for Africa’s AIDS Orphans”.

Why do we sometimes limit ourselves to the expected, though, when life blesses us with so many unexpected treasures, too! I fully expected a rewarding experience with the ETSU friends who have already demonstrated their commitment to The Thoughtful Path: Munsieville. What I had not expected was the many new doors of opportunity that opened up with many other parts of the university community.

Meetings with leading charitable foundations in the area; question and answer sessions with students in the Health Administration department; a meeting of minds with the Director of the University’s groundbreaking Graduate Program in Storytelling, to learn more about the evidence of the effectiveness of storytelling in the care of people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa; discussions about how we can work with students and faculty to develop targeted garden solutions for South Africa that can be developed so that shack-dwellers can grow specific crops to enhance the health of pregnant women, or under-fives; creative exploration into how to enlist the university’s best brains in the quest for a way to turn the garbage problem of Munsieville (and similar locations) into a resource-enriching opportunity .... it was a rare opportunity to be with a community of people who personify the truism about many Americans that they are people who will strive to discover a 100 ways to make something work, as opposed to a 100 reasons why it won’t!

But (and I am conscious is the irony of using the “B” word in the context of such thrusting optimism!!), such opportunity also presents its challenges. Martin Lafontaine, a good friend and previous volunteer in Munsieville (courtesy of his employers, GlaxoSmithKline), has constantly encouraged me with his belief that The Thoughtful Path would almost inevitably arrive at a “tipping point” – a place where we will no longer feel like we are pushing boulder up a hill, when it will have its own forward momentum. This visit to Johnson City is yet more evidence that if we have not yet reached the tipping point, at least on an operational level we are pretty close. The new and existing ETSU opportunities stack up alongside the invitations and requests coming into our UK offices almost daily, from people and organisations who “get” The Thoughtful Path concept, realise its huge potential for changing the landscape of orphan care in Africa and want to “be the change”. The downside, however, is that the financial and resource tipping point is lagging behind, so the whole management structure supporting the work in Munsieville is creaking at the seams.

I promised that my blog would be an honest, “warts and all” account of the process of creating a new paradigm for the care of Africa’s orphans and other vulnerable children, so hear you have it – on the one side, an avalanche of encouragement from those who can see that what we are doing holds the prospect of providing effective new models that challenge the bankrupt “status quo” of international charitable and governmental programming and replacing it with something that energises destitute local communities to provide transformational change that results in their most vulnerable children having the opportunity to grow into healthy, productive adults. And then on the flip side of the coin, real frustration that lack of human and financial resources mean that we are unable to seize some of the opportunities presented to us.

I am utterly convinced that The Thoughtful Path is the right path. I also believe that we will win and that the financial tipping point will be reached when partners and investors will see that the tiny amount needed to bring this venture to reality is just a drop in the ocean of the massive and sustained returns that such investment will generate. But for now, the struggle remains; the struggle that is akin to that of the leader of a string quartet who sees a percussion section being added, then woodwind, then brass and so on until, unexpectedly, he finds himself conducting a full orchestra, and then two, and then three orchestras .... all trying to play the same symphony.

All I can say is – we urgently need more brass!

Introducing The Director's Blog

My name is Paul Brooks, the Executive Director of Project HOPE UK, a well-respected UK-based NGO that is passionate about the long-term health prospects for children in developing countries.

Although, over the 17 years since we were founded, we have run successful health programmes in dozens of countries across four continents, in recent years, whilst honouring the commitments we have in other places, we have chosen to concentrate our resources on one of the world's biggest health challenges - the health of orphans and other vulnerable children in sub-Saharan Africa, where the United Nations estimates there to be 53 million orphaned children, and millions more, rendered extremely vulnerable due to their proximity to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Evidence from the communities in which we work suggests that statistically, children who are orphaned through AIDS have a tragically short life expectancy and are unlikely ever to contribute more to their society through taxes and productivity than they will take from it in social benefits and health care.

Traditional Western-led NGO initiatives, whilst achieving some short term benefits for the target communities, are rarely truly sustainable; charities and governments claim that they are, but the evidence is that most major programmes, unless supported by locally-generated funds, will collapse after the initial international grant has ended, typically after between two and four years. Furthermore, the old adage, "he who pays the piper calls the tune", means that, however it is dressed up, real authority, responsibility and control remains in the hands of the Western NGO or its funders, militating against the "empowerment" of the local community that oozes from the press-releases and annual reports of the organisations promoting the activities.

Something has to change! Firstly, there simply is not enough money in the system to provide the levels of care that 53 million orphans (plus the other vulnerable children) will need to overturn their poor prognosis and become healthy, productive adults. Secondly, because the old-style approaches of the West simply perpetuate a disempowering new-style colonialism, working against Africa's courageous attempts to take responsibility and emerge from oppression and poverty.

The Thoughtful Path is an initiative that unashamedly seeks to develop the sort of dynamic, international, culturally sensitive partnerships that will re-write the rule book and inspire genuinely sustainable solutions that will offer a real future for the children of Africa and beyond.

This blog is intended to offer comment and insights into some of the struggles involved in working with communities to effect transformational change, leading to marked and measured improvements in the long-term health and well-being of orphans and other vulnerable children, and inspiring others to think again about entrenched, ineffective operational structures that can perpetuate poverty of the mind and spirit, as well as the body.

This will not be a platform for charity "spin", but of honest, warts-and-all reflection on the path to a better future for the children of the world - the Thoughtful Path. I will share honestly and openly, a very personal view of the joys and frustrations of swimming against the tide, and hope that through it all, we can discover how we can, in the words of St Paul, "look not only to (our) own interests, but also (and especially) to the needs of others.