Invisible Suffering

Last week I spoke at a support group for unemployed persons organized by the Catholic Diocese of Rhode Island and hosted at a church in Cumberland, RI.  Originally intended as an opportunity for me to speak about the products and services offered by Capital Good Fund and the process for accessing them--which I did--the meeting ended up opening my eyes to the extent to which low to moderate-income Americans are suffering, and how invisible that suffering is.  The attendees, numbering around 25, were all unemployed; some had not had work for years; others had recently been laid off.  They shared painful stories of mistreatment by employers, the bleakness of the job market, and the feeling that no one is advocating for them or doing anything to improve their lot.

As I discussed strategies for increasing income, including entrepreneurship, budgeting, resume building and taking online or other courses so as to build skills, I came to a painful realization: whatever the attendees might do to get a job would be at the expense of another person seeking that job.  Given the state of our economy, a job search is truly a zero-sum game, and without broader, macro-economic changes in the American system, that paradigm won't change.

Leverage in the Fight for Social Justice

There are only so many hours in a day, days in a week and weeks in a year; we cannot squeeze more time out of the fabric of the universe without resorting to the extremes of relativity.  Yet the problems of poverty, racism, environmental degradation and other forms of injustice seem to demand more of the individual than can possibly be given.  As the Executive Director of Capital Good Fund, for instance, I am keenly aware of the dissonance between the amount of time and energy I possess and the demands placed on me by my work.

Over the last four years, however, I have come to two powerful and fundamental conclusions about the nature of the fight for social justice: first, that there is a tremendous difference between delivering a program or service and building an organization that can deliver that program or service, and second, that only through leverage can we ensure that the arc of history bends towards justice.

Consider the difference between volunteering at a soup kitchen, ladling soup to the homeless, and starting an organization that creates employment opportunities for the homeless.  While there is no doubt that, for those without a place to eat, a soup kitchen is an essential and, indeed, live-saving place, the fact remains that anyone can ladle soup into a bowl.  Those of us with the means to truly make a difference must ask more of ourselves; we must think about systemic change, about how to leverage every action, every idea and every hour into greater and more sustainable impact.  True social change does not come from the warm fuzzy feeling of ladling soup, nor does it come from occasional volunteerism.  Rather, social change happens when ideas people meet people with a knack for logistics, people who understand finance and operations...and when these people get together to build an organization, greater than the sum of its parts, that can tackle a problem until it is solved.

Take, for instance, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), one of the key organizations that led the fight for civil rights in the late 50's and 60's.  While the majority of Americans can identify Martin Luther King, Jr. and understand the impact of his work, far fewer recognize the role that the SCLC, the NAACP and other organizations played in advancing civil rights through legal action, coordinated protests, nonviolence training, fundraising and voter registration drives.  In other words, the success of the civil rights movement was as much the product of MLK's soaring speeches as well as his, and myriad other people's, ability to build an infrastructure that could engage the masses and force an end to segregation.

Had MLK simply been on his own, and not part of a broader movement, his brilliant speeches would have reached but a few ears and his life would not have become a pivotal part of American history.  The unsung heroes of social change are those that execute on the ideas of leaders; those that bring to their work a businessman or woman's attention to finances, operations and management.

So whether you are a leader or employee of a social change organization, it is imperative that you think about how to leverage your actions so that they have an impact beyond the reach of your arms and the sound of your voice.  An hour spent disbursing a loan to a woman in poverty is not the same as an hour developing the policy and procedures for how to effectively and consistently provide equitable financial services to the poor.  When I first started Capital Good Fund, I spent all my time answering phone calls and serving one client at a time; obviously, when we had no staff and were still trying to figure things out, that was the role I had to play.  But now, everything I do is about building systems, processes, policies and procedures that can transmogrify the vision I have for the organization into the actual impact it can have on the lives of thousands of human beings.

I encourage anyone that cares about social and environmental problems to consider how they spend their time and money addressing those issues.  Think about your actions as a kind of pulley that can lift up society; imagine how you can connect your passion with the community of people who share your passion.  Finally, I want to be clear that I am in no way demeaning the importance or power of volunteer work such as ladling soup at a soup kitchen.  Instead, what I am saying is that, given the choice between an hour of working at that soup kitchen and an hour building an organization that can deliver soup to the homeless day after day, there is no doubt in my mind where one's effort should be focused.  Indeed, when we consider that the community of people working for social good is far smaller than the forces that perpetuate injustice, we must recognize that the only way we can hope to see justice persevere is if our impact is multiplied through the judicious use of our time, our energy, our and our ideas.

Dreams and Realities

We all have dreams that fiercely flicker in the darkest depths of our being; they envelope us like string made of sunlight, spilling through a forest canopy to recover something precious from the Earth.  But always we awake to sights and sounds that take us away.  We rise, we wash, we eat, we travel, we work, we worry.  And always there is that something, that compost composed of all that humanity has discarded because they did not believe it could survive.  And because we did not believe in its survival, this precious something seemed to die.  And all around us there was injustice: a billion people living on a dollar per day; wars raging in jungles, in deserts, in mountains; millions of human beings languishing in jails for drug addiction, dying from curable disease, despairing of tomorrow, their today filled with sorrow; hundreds of millions lacking access to clean air, clean water, information, health care, good governance, good schools and hope; an environment stretched its limits, struggling to satiate a boundless hunger...

Oh, but even though we thought it dead, this precious something had instead been accumulating beneath our feet.  The rivers, streams, beaches, oceans, and even the pavements, the parking lots, the abandoned plots of land strewn about the world, all contain the soil of hope, of justice, of love, of beauty, of truth, and from that soil can sprout the world we all have sought.

It is so easy to acquiesce to the illusion of death, to the passing of time that wears and jades the purest of souls; it is so easy to bow to despair, so hard to smile at opportunity.  Wherever we laugh at death we delight at life. Freedom does not make one free to live, but rather liberates one to die.  And when we are free, we know that no curtain can fall on the masterpiece of our lives before the audience (oh, and there is always an audience) glimpses the poetry embedded in our actions.  And this poetry contains our immortality and our morality, the knowledge that though we come and go we always stay; that though we face both friend and foe neither knows where after death we go.

So let us rejoice in our freedom, in our humanity, in our wisdom and our ignorance.  Beyond the deepest reaches of our thoughts and our telescopes and our spacecraft and our submarines, there lies a terrain no mortal has trodden.  We glimpse it through love, through art, though wisdom, and somehow we sense that though there will come a time when we will see it fully, our eyes must be so full of the beauty of today that our feet stay rooted to the warmth and gentleness of where we stand.

Oh yes, let us do battle with illusion, let us sever the head of those shadows that fall short of our dreams.  Let us reach down at our feet and collect our hopes so as to recover our true selves.  Let us refuse to accept that there is a difference between somnambular wanderings and lucid wallowing, and in so doing, let us build a bridge of sunlight between who we are and who we wish to be.  Oh, and this sunlight will reveal our folly, for every time we shrug our shoulders or turn our backs, the perfection of the present dissolves into the pain of the past--the horrid whoosh of potential whipping past us, leaving us behind like a train whose destination we desire, but do not believe in.  Oh, but facing the light, facing ourselves and each other, not only can we calm our fears, but we can bring on the day when nighttime and daytime, dreams and realities, will meld together into one glorious stream of humanity, creating, seeking, despairing, loving and living in peace upon this planet.

Our Commitment

Director Andy Posner sent this email to the board, staff and interns of Capital Good Fund.

William Blake, the great 19th century British poet and mystic, once wrote that "if the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see anything as it is: Infinite."  When it comes to working for justice, we must maintain that sense of the infinite: infinite possibility and an infinite ability to innovate, problem-solve and feel compassion and empathy for others.  Unfortunately, the ubiquitous nature of injustice--poverty, corruption, environmental degradation, etc.--can so easily cloud our mental skies, obscuring our belief in our mission and holding us back from our true potential.  

When we work, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, to bend the arc of history towards justice, it is inevitable that setbacks and seemingly insurmountable challenges present themselves to us.  Borrowers fall behind on loans, events are poorly attended, processes and systems fail...all these things take their toll on us.  So our commitment must go beyond the mission; we must also devote our passion, love and intellect to the constant adjustments that must be made to solve seemingly intractable problems.

See The Trees AND The Forest

This morning, as I planted the above tree in my yard, I started thinking about the saying "you can't see the forest for the trees," which refers to someone who is so caught up with the details that they can't see the larger picture.  The saying felt especially pertinent as I have spent last week working on how CGF is going to go from 3 loans a week, to three loans a day, to 300 hundred a day and, so on.  As I've pondered the challenges associated with achieving such significant scale, I have also kept my focus on those three loans a week--the loans to the low-income entrepreneur, to the disabled woman in need of a special chair, to the parent seeking to purchase a computer to help her child with homework--and so as I planted that beautiful little tree, as I showered it with water, with love with care...it occurred to me that when it comes to social good, you must see the both trees and the forest.

What I mean is that, when you plant a tree, or when you empower another human being, you are doing a wonderful thing.  However, if all you do is serve one tree, one person at a time, then you are ignoring the scope of the broader problems facing earth and society, and you are also ignoring the broader social conditions that have disenfranchised the person and damaged the forest to begin with.  In other words, even as you work, one gesture of kindness at a time, to better the world, you must also think about how to replicate, scale and increase the impact of your actions.

So when you plant a tree, think about the late Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Green Belt Movement, which has planted over 47 million trees in Kenya with the goal of preventing soil erosion, improving environmental quality, and empowering the people of Kenya to move out of poverty and fight corruption and dictatorship.  Each tree was planted with immense love and care, yet the Green Belt Movement has had tremendous impact because, in addition to that love and care, Wangari worked hard to build an organization with the infrastructure to enable thousands of people to plant millions of trees, take political action and take control of their destiny.  Wangari once said that "for me, one of the major reasons to move beyond just the planting of trees was that I have the tendency to look at the causes of a problem.  We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the problems once and for all."

In the same way, every loan that CGF disburses makes a tremendous difference in the life that borrower, his or her family and the community in which he or she lives.  But that is not enough.  I do not work 80 hours a week in order to serve a couple hundred people a year, for I know that, through the simple mechanism of leverage, those 80 hours can be used to create an organization that makes a significant dent in poverty, and the structural causes of poverty, in America.  I also know that if I pursue the path of scale and social impact with an authenticity and militancy of moral purpose, combined with a determination to solve the seemingly innumerable barriers to growth,  I can turn my obsession with ending poverty into the reality of drastically reducing, if not eliminating, poverty in America.

I think it's essential that those of us in our late teens and 20s--the generation that has grown up empowered by technology and the open-source and social entrepreneurship movements--to think about scale, for it is time that we grab injustice by the scruff of the neck and expunge it from the face of the earth;  or, to paraphrase Muhammad Yunus, we must work to poverty in the only place it belongs--museums.  After four years of working to create an innovative business model at CGF, I have come to see that developing that breakthrough business model--which I truly because we have finally figured out--is only 10% of the battle.  The other 90% has to do with all the details: building systems, policies, procedures, funding plans, staffing plans, sound financial practices and projectons, etc.  Another thing I've realized is that there is a tremendous difference between creating programs and creating an organization that delivers programs.  Building the organization means that you are creating something sustainable, something that can take on a life of its own and grow over time.

So my challenge to all of us looking to better the world, however we want to go about it, is to be sure to see both the trees and the forest--both the suffering of the individual and the structural barriers that allow that suffering to take place.  And once we see that, we must work to allay that suffering and knock down those barriers.

An Interview With Dr. Muhammad Yunus

Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, co-founder of Grameen Bank and "father" of microfinance, recently came to the US for a speaking tour. This interview highlights the moral and ethical force with which he speaks about ending poverty and bringing human dignity and respect to all.

Addition vs. Duplication in Social Entrepreneurship

I think that one of the most important things for any social entrepreneur to ask him or herself--and, by extension, any social venture, be it non-profit or for-profit--is whether the work they are doing is additive or duplicative.  There is no shortage of good-willed people, and organizations started by them, in this country; instead, what we lack are organizations that build upon the work of other players--governmental, for-profit, non-profit, community-based, faith-based, etc.--rather than duplicate that work.  In our case, when we started thinking about how to tackle the $100 billion/year predatory lending industry, we realized that we could never replicate the brick-and-mortar infrastructure of payday lenders, check cashers, pawn shows, auto title lenders and the rest of the gaggle the preys on the poor.