Scaling Ecosystems, Not Organizations

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Community Development, Dissent, Scale and Diffusion

Published August 20, 2009 @ 11:58AM PT

After 18 months of traveling, Shawn Rubin, a teacher from Providence, RI, and his wife Laura Westberg had seen the world. They had visited with NGOs, been a part of service learning in numerous countries, and most of all, had been inspired by two of the local social entrepreneurs they had met. As they returned home, they knew they had to stay involved.

This is how Longitude, a nonprofit that supports the work of developing world social entrepreneurs, was born. Shawn and Laura came back and began writing letters to friends and family, telling them about a school for secretarial work in Ghana providing opportunities for women that just weren't normally available, and about the work of a human rights advocate who would travel to Indian villages and let members of the lowest caste know about their rights.

In the four years since, Longitude has raised over $100,000 to support the work of these groups and has placed numerous volunteers abroad with them. It's run on an entirely volunteer basis, and has more or less remained focus on it's personal relationships with the two organizations that first inspired it's founding.

Recently, Longitude founder Shawn had a "15 Minutes of Fame" moment when he was awarded the Eli Segal Award at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service. The award is the highest honor an Americorps alum can receive, and as Rubin found himself in the green room filled with political and entertainment celebrities waiting to speak, he had the presence of mind to hand Arianna Huffington his business card, a move that resulted in an invitation to write a blog post responding to President Obama's trip to Ghana that appeared on the front page of the popular news site.

Longitude is a great organization that feels a lot like other, small great organizations I've run into. It was born of relationships developed in person with specific global organizations that had a lot going for them, but perhaps not access to resources to more fully achieve their mission. It's been focused not on creating a brand new, innovative model for social change, but instead on investing deeply in a particular set of relationships.

In some ways, this is the model that has led to the growth of international NGOs in recent years. International travelers meet incredible local projects, recognize the great things they're doing but begin to wonder if they could - with the help of friends and family - better meet some of the resource constraints that hold those local innovators back.

There are many potential downsides of this approach. International development work is a difficult and complicated field. People get degrees in the field for a reason. The best of intentions (and even the best of intentions combined with advanced degrees, it should be noted) often don't produce results, or worse, produce unintended harmful consequences.

Yet there is also something profoundly right about the idea of people helping people who they've been inspired by and developed a relationship with. Done right, this sort of international partnership can produce work that is much more community driven, and if isn't a solvent for all the root causes of global inequity, can be one of the best ways of addressing ongoing challenges.

I've had a complicated history with that sort of work. When I was first introduced to community based organizations and local NGOs around the world, my "problem-solving-centric" mind quickly began to think about specialization, efficiency, and other jargony academic concepts.

What I've come to appreciate is the simple notion that it takes all types. The community organization or local NGO can provide vital local knowledge and perspective too easily trampled by technocratic policy. Their international partner volunteers can provide basic lifelines for support, as well as validation and a sense of connection every bit as important as money. Together, these groups can help support, challenge, and customize the models of innovative social entrepreneurs.

But it takes a different sort of focus to maximize these sort of ecosystems than it does to scale the work of a single organization or model. One of the things that's so exciting to me about the internet is that the mass distribution of information can be leveraged to form better lateral connections and networks of these small by dynamic organizations to share best practices and lessons. I also think that taking the ecosystem view implicates the need for universities and governments, which can be vital to enabling the sort of conditions where small changemakers can thrive.

So when you look at a group like Longitude, think about the other groups you know like it and how you can best contribute. To learn more about them, visit their website or check out the video about their Ghana partner, PROFESA, below:

Photocredit: golongitude.org