Learning Occurs through Critical Reflection: International Education, Service-Learning, Life

The data is clear: without systematic reflective guidance, students' international education or service-learning experiences can lead to haphazard or even negative learning outcomes. Time and again, this has been demonstrated through articles in the Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, and via John Dewey's historic concern that learning without reflection can be miseducative, reinforcing stereotypes about others. But how can one support reflective practice and reflective learning (particularly in experiential immersion programs)? That's the topic of a guest blog post I did recently for Melibee Global Education Consulting: Reflection, Reconsideration, and Reconnection: Moving Beyond Re-entry. Please take a look and please share your thoughts. I look forward to hearing (or reading) them.

What Brangelina Should Have Known Before Going to Africa - and What You Should Know Before Your International Service

International service is popular and accessible. One might—at first glance—imagine this is a good thing. Yet the risks are extreme, for individuals in the communities “served” and for those who engage in service.

To engage well in service across cultures (even domestically) is to strike a profoundly delicate balance. Read the full text of this article I wrote for International Educator here. 

Posting as a Guest Today on "Good Intentions are Not Enough" - Take a Look!

Please join the conversation at the Good Intentions blog! Many thanks to Saundra for the guest post opportunity!

NY Times "Volunteer Tourism ... on a Budget" Misses the Point

Last week the NY Times ran Budget Excursions for Volunteers in their Travel Section. The article, from the title and throughout the text, takes the wrong angle. If you're interested in "doing good" while on vacation, there are a set of crucial questions to ask long before considering cost. These questions include:

1. Can the organization demonstrate long-term relationships in the community?
2. Can the organization demonstrate clear and systematic processes for (a) getting and (b) listening to community direction on several important questions, from selection of the volunteer project to and through project evaluation? 
3. Is the organization clearly cognizant of international development history and aware of potential macro-effects of volunteer groups (for example, the possibility of displacing local workers)? How does the organization address these challenges?  
4. Can the organization articulate its theories of development and community partnership? 
5. Is the organization a transparent and accountable nonprofit organization or does it use another organizational model (business or less-than-transparent nonprofit are two common structures that offer less clarity for volunteers curious about where the funds go). 

There are other important questions to ask - many of which will be mentioned in the blog post I'll have on Monday on the Good Intentions are Not Enough blog. I hope you'll share your thoughts about the issues raised here and the post there once that goes up on Monday. 

My apologies for the lull in posts: travelling around the world, moving across the country, starting a new job, and addressing a whole set of family changes and challenges keeps a person busy! Thanks for the notes in the interim. If you like the content and conversation here, please follow the conversation by inserting your email on the right --- or re-post or tweet! Thanks for reading!  

Kindness in Kayanga

“Mr. Erici? Are you here, Mr. Erici?” – the Swahili-speaking custodian, grounds manager, watchman, and chicken-slaughterer called through our room door, adding the final “i” that is customary for adopted English words. “Yes, James, I’m here,” I said as I opened the door. He had brought a gift – one pineapple and one papaya – presumably because I gave him a small amount of antibiotic ointment (antibiotic-i) a few days ago when he nearly sliced his finger off. I’m sure the cut deserved stitches. I’m sure James is as deserving of basic health care as I am, but instead he’s left showing his thanks with gifts from his garden for a small amount of antibiotic ointment. The people of Kayanga (town), Karagwe (district), Kagera (region) are continuously kind and welcoming.

Earlier today I went with a small group of students to learn more about a regional outreach effort to support people with disabilities. In short, the challenges are these: people with disabilities have long been marginalized as presumed burdens; children with disabilities do not typically attend any school, because those with physical disabilities cannot manage to walk to school and those with mental disabilities have no support services; there is a severe problem with rape of women who have disabilities, along with ensuing pregnancies for women who may not be able to care for the children.

Into this sea of challenges steps a network of dynamic community-based organizations that are making real, if painfully slow, progress on each of these issues. Today we accompanied the Anglican-supported Karagwe Program for People with Disabilities on a village outreach visit. As a special treat, our group included Matthew Mcllvenna, Field Representative for Friends of the Children of Tanzania. Matt is currently on sabbatical from the UN and has been focusing on developing and supporting the networks that work with people with disabilities in this region.  

We drove out of Kayanga, past Omurushaka, onto the dirt roads, off of the energy grid, down continuously narrower dirt roads, until finally we reached the small village Catholic Church that was the center of outreach for the day. Word had spread, and more than thirty people with disabilities had found their way (walking, limping, otherwise moving over miles) to the site. The day began with a prayer – inviting Muslims and Christians to pray as they wished for one another. Immediately after that ecumenical beginning our female facilitator, Upendo, asked the group what they had learned during a previous visit.

Their answers were quick and compelling, “people with disabilities are fully human; people with disabilities deserve equal treatment; people may be born with or may develop disabilities; disability may result from old age…” The answers continued for several minutes. After this educational outreach, the triaging began. The visit focused not on care but on connecting people with the appropriate services. Several people were recommended for treatment by Dr. Angelo, the orthopedic doctor and physio-therapist at the hospital in Bukoba.

Each individual patient’s story was extraordinarily compelling, and their challenges include not only their physical ailments but also the need to pay for transportation to the hospital and to afford food during their stay. I’ll share specific stories as students summarize them in their journals.

And now  a few photos courtesy of Shannon Wheatley Hartman. They are as follows: a Kayanga Village Street (near where we're staying), local entrepreneur and friend Peter Lazaro explaining his screen printing business to us, and WOMEDA Director Juma Massisi sharing information about Women's Rights in the region. 

Returning to old friends; witnessing change; comfort in Kayanga

As the Arizona State-Amizade Community Development course begins, the red-dirt streets of Kayanga are familiar. I’ve spent more summertime here over the past five years than any other place except Pittsburgh. It’s been a joy to return and reconnect. Peter Lazaro has a wife and baby. Juma Massisi is doing very well. Joseph Sekiku’s son Simeon has grown into a young man and his young daughter Anna is now away at boarding school in Uganda. The originally-imagined Amizade-ELCT orphanage project has morphed into a much-needed nurses training center (as reviews of orphanages have steadily grown more critical). This year’s students are rapidly meeting and connecting with Amizade’s network of friends in the area. We’ve noticed that more people seem to know how to say uh-ma-za-gee correctly in Kayanga than in most cities in the United States. 

Amizade’s presence and partnership here has contributed to the development of at least one small business, one nonprofit organization, seven family water harvesting systems and tanks (supporting some 40 people), one USAID grant supporting WOMEDA and renewable through later years, further dialogue and awareness about women’s rights, English tutoring in schools, the expansion of FADECO radio, the creation of a tree and plant nursery at Mavuno, the completion of a village-scale water harvesting system in Chonyonyo, the completion of one-going-on-two water tanks at Mavuno for a girls boarding school that is currently under construction, and the development of water access and wind-generated electricity at the Eden Center, where computer training classes for women currently take place. We are here now with fourteen students; yesterday was the first day of service.

One group is supporting WOMEDA’s most recent data-gathering project, working to provide data for a future grant application that will help address teen pregnancy. Another group is supporting English language learning in the schools, and the third group is advancing the construction of a water harvesting tank that will support the Mavuno girls’ boarding school. The groups will spend several days on each project, cycling through with steady leadership at each location. Along the way, the students are wrestling with development issues, learning a great deal about the reality of regular electricity service, steady and sometimes hot water, travel, and dust. They’re experiencing international borders in East Africa and getting a glimpse of what education systems often look like in rural communities. Most of all, they’re eating an awful lot of matoke (mashed banana).

I find myself at comfort here; the systems of support for the program continue to improve and I’m increasingly familiar with each bend in the road and trail through the banana trees that cover the valley. My main concern as always is how we could do more as an organization and group of service-learners. Organizations like Amizade serve many missions, providing students with educationally challenging and personally rewarding study abroad programs that encourage global ethics while also taking seriously the substantial challenges involved in community-driven development across cultures. I think Amizade does a good job of balancing the pressures at play here: neither focusing too much on students at the expense of community concerns nor jeopardizing students’ experiences, learning, and safety in order to give more attention and resources to the community. How this is achieved will be the subject of future posts. For now: we are all healthy, happy, and pleased to be serving and learning in Kayanga.          

The Itinerary: Study Abroad in Rural Tanzania

I’m preparing to leave once again on a journey that will cross one ocean and a few continents. This time I'm  co-leading an Arizona State University Global Studies service-learning course in rural Tanzania (in cooperation with Amizade Global Service-Learning). While all the business schools and policy wonks are singing the praises of globalization, many Americans still can’t find Iraq and Afghanistan on a map, so let me take a moment to describe Tanzania’s location. It’s pretty much smack in the North-South center of the East African coast. Its coast and outlying islands of Zanzibar and Pemba have long hosted a trade in spices between the Middle East, parts of Asia, and the eastern part of continental Africa.

It’s the birthplace of humankind, home to the famous Serengeti and its Big Five safari animals, and it was a center of hope in post-colonial African nationalism and socialist experimentation. Rock-n-Roll lovers might know Freddie Mercury was born in a Zoroastrian Community on Zanzibar. It’s topography shifts from pale brown, low-lying mountains in the West to the massive, stretching, dusty vegetated plain that is the Serengeti, and along to humidity on the continental coast edged by what is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and unique islands in the world (Zanzibar).

On our journey, we’ll first fly into Entebbe Airport near Kampala, Uganda. That’s no small thing. The students begin in Phoenix, fly all day to New York, get on a night flight to Brussels, arrive in Europe in the morning, and then fly all day to central Africa – Uganda. We’ll step off the plane together into thick, muggy air – Uganda is lush and green with vegetation. At the airport we’ll meet one of Amizade’s local coordinators, who will be with us throughout the program. That night we’ll stay at a hotel in Kampala. Our bodies will be ready for some real rest after effectively two full days of travel, but the students will be learning how to adjust bed nets over their beds, marveling at Kampala’s traffic patterns, and taking in Africa on the ground for the first time. Rest will nonetheless come quickly.

In the morning we’ll pile into vans, secure our luggage on top, and begin the long journey over road south toward the border with Tanzania. We’ll scoot past fields and fields of banana trees, people moving produce on bicycles, markets, and locals hawking food and water to every passing bus and car. On the trip we’ll cross the equator and we’ll cross the border into Tanzania, getting our visas there.

A few hours south into Tanzania, as the road gets closer to Bukoba, the prominent city on the West Coast of lake Victoria, we’ll veer right and head West toward Rwanda. The road will turn to dirt, we’ll pop over a few bumps and ruts, climb several hills, and eventually after one particularly long climb upward, find ourselves in the community that is Kayanga Village. There we’ll stay for three weeks, learning about development issues, developing the most basic of Swahili skills (one of Tanzania’s official languages), tutoring in English (the other national language), assisting with some water harvesting efforts, and supporting the development of a survey relating to computers in schools.  Each of these various service initiatives comes at the direction of community partners there, something I’ll talk about much more in the coming month.

Following our three weeks in Kayanga, we’ll head East to Bukoba, catch the ferry overnight to Mwanza, and go on a safari from Mwanza, across the Serengeti to Arusha. We’ll have one night in Arusha before flying out to Zanzibar, where we’ll be able to think through some of the lessons learned in the previous weeks, go on a spice tour, check out the amazing small city of Stonetown, and relax and swim.    

If you're interested in keeping up with this journey, its relationship to development issues, or the inevitable reviewing and sharing of related books, just enter your email in the box on the right or follow me on twitter. As always, I'm eager to hear your comments and questions. 

NOW "Three Cups of Tea" is a Useful University Teaching Tool

Greg Mortensons’ Three Cups of Tea has become the essential teaching tool universities always wanted it to be. The narrative of hope and attendant fall from grace forces consideration of the important challenges of representation, service, development, storytelling, and advancing human rights. Unfortunately, many voices inside the academy seem as eager to nurture an archetype of Mortenson as thoughtless villain as others were once willing to paint him in bold strokes of perfect humanitarian. The truths are certainly interwoven and overlapping in between. It is our job as university educators to not only see this nuance, but to build our students’ abilities to do so as well. Professors who understand and approach the Three Cups debacle as a teachable moment are dabbling in the real and profoundly challenging work of community-engaged teaching and learning, even if their particular courses do not leave campus. 

There are several debates within and surrounding service-learning in higher education that are highly relevant to the Mortenson scandal. First, there is the assertion that community-engagement has no proper place in higher education (as in Fish's Save the World on Your Own Time, see reply by Dan Butin); that either the promotion of values is inappropriate or that community-engaged work is necessarily less rigorous. Second, there is the ongoing concern with naïve development amateurs – often our students and even professors – who, Mortenson-like, bumble into communities with high ideals and little else.

What professors using Three Cups of Tea as a common text had was a compelling contemporary narrative that stirred our emotions through use of a time-tested American Hero trope in the vein of Wyatt Earp, Luke Skywalker, and even now Jason Bourne: a regular, unsuspecting humble guy is moved suddenly to action through forces beyond his control. Composition and writing professors had (and now have even more so) an opportunity to examine Three Cups for the common tricks of the trade it employs, from hinging on this easy narrative to dichotomizing good and evil and, as Krakauer has made clear, compressing time, dramatizing events, and simplifying cultures.

Of course, we do not use every compelling contemporary narrative as a common text at our universities. What captured the public and academic imagination about this text was that it offered a simple solution to the often intractable challenge of development; it advanced education for all and thereby played upon a common value for most Americans; and it offered Love in a region where many Americans could only see potential for warfare. 

Now that the exposé has hit the presses, we are all – lay and academic alike – retreating to our comfortable spaces. We’re seeing a backlash from development bloggers and academics who study development. They’re critical of Mortenson's seeming naivety and they’re likewise concerned about Nick Kristof’s celebration of the “DIY Revolution” in aid and development.

The academic response of dialogue via critical questioning and concern is underway on the primary Higher Education Service-Learning listserve. In a letter to her colleagues that was forwarded (with permission) to the list, Bucknell University anthropologist Clare Sammells provided a quick and thorough review of some of the concerns surrounding Mortenson's portrayal of Pakistani, Muslim, and Balti people (and this kind of thorough analysis would be a great use of the Mortenson text in an anthropology course). However, Sammell's larger, concluding claim gave me pause. I suspect her words ring true for many within higher education,

“By taking on this book [Three Cups of Tea] as a campus-wide reading, are we committing ourselves to teaching first-year students the history and politics of this region that Mortenson elides?  Are we willing to approach this book as a compelling – but quite probably misleading – narrative about a politically important region?  Or are we going to leave our students with the impression that this is an accurate portrayal of Northern Pakistan and the “Muslim World” that Mortenson conflates it with?

I feel we should present our incoming students with a common text that we feel represents good research, subtle analysis of the complexities of the world, and real insight into cultural difference without relying on oversimplifications. This is our students’ introduction to the “life of the mind;” we should endeavor to make it a positive example of how to approach understanding the world.”

There are different kinds of texts, different kinds of research, and many different types of vast oversimplifications of the world. There are better forms and worse forms, but there are no perfect forms or methods for representing people, cultures, and their places within geopolitics. Mortenson provided (and, I think, may still provide) a compelling narrative that many students could identify with, that includes an accessible pathway into serious discussion about how methodology, disciplinary lenses, and experience informs interpretations. Anthropologists, political scientists, and economists with more than a decade of training on specific methodologies would view the region differently from an emergency room nurse and serious mountain climber (the latter being Mortenson). The political scientist would likely view the region too much in terms of power; the economist likely too much in terms of constrained decision-making relating to finite resources, but each method would offer its insights and be vulnerable to important critiques.

We have the opportunity to sharpen our students’ analysis skills by looking at the types of books they’re most likely to read after they graduate (creative nonfiction having a much stronger claim on the adult reader market than peer-reviewed journal articles), even while acknowledging that those books (and indeed all books) are imperfect. By examining popular texts we are explicitly developing the skills students will need to be informed and deliberate consumers of popular culture in its many forms. We are developing skills required for good citizenship.  

Within this broad understanding of the many potential sources of knowledge and the challenging social and environmental issues we face, what the service-learning community uniquely admits, I think, is that it is always easier to shame imperfect attempts at advancing justice than it is to make a difference. And the community’s bias, while steeped in critical accounts and questioning, is that it is still important to attempt to (hopefully with humility, insight, and real direction from community partners) build a better world.  

At this point it’s unclear whether the charges leveled against Mortenson will prove to be definitively damming for the work of the CAI, but in any case it’s worth reviewing how before or after this specific scandal thoughtful professors have the opportunity to use this and other popular “development solution” narratives to engage in the critical analysis that we are charged with developing in our students. At a minimum, anyone reading the book with students should ask: “What is development?” “What are human rights?” and “How do we know?”

Development is notoriously hard to define. However defined, it sometimes works and sometimes fails fantastically. To analyze the most popular academic writers and books on development (e.g. Sachs’ End of Poverty, Easterly’s White Man’s Burden, Collier’s Bottom Billion, or Moyo’s Dead Aid) one needs not

        

only the ability to analyze the presentation of data and the implicit arguments about human nature, but also the insight to recognize the danger of sweeping narratives. Such works are by necessity ideological commitments that draw on particular facts within the broad sweep of recent history, ultimately combined and presented as comprehensive understanding.

Careful readers will have noticed that I failed to mention the evermore popular Esther Duflo. Indeed, her work cannot be characterized in the same way so easily – and her carefully developed empirical analyses have supported some debunking of the relatively recent “microfinance as panacea” mythology that, pre-Mortenson, permeated American hopes for the developing world. As a recent reviewer suggests, however, the danger in Duflo may be that in putting so much emphasis on carefully constrained social experiments to fight poverty she ignores the real forces of power and oppression that must be addressed. These writers all have strengths and weaknesses in their analysis and due to the limitations of their particular lenses, just as is the case with Mortenson. As an educator, I find it helpful to use popular texts and narratives as entry points into considering how academic writers’ insights help us better understand our limitations and potential.

As professors and students consider the question of human rights they have the opportunity to engage in many other important discussions through review of that many more essential authors. Does education ‘count’ as a human right? Does everyone deserve access to it? How should one respond to concerns that it may interfere with the group rights also recognized by the United Nations? These questions are extremely important for analysis in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, political science, and of course many interdisciplinary areas. They lead to consideration of writers such as Jack Donnelly, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Ignatieff, Arturo Escobar, Gustavo Esteva, and Madhu Suri Prakash. The children and families Mortenson portrays help illuminate the importance and relevance of the human rights construct and attendant debates. 

      

I have already alluded to applications of this story in composition classes, suggested a set of relevant economic development readings, and shared several prominent human rights writers. In each case, I have only scraped the surface of the particular topic area. That admission calls attention to strengths and weaknesses in community engagement: it is inherently interdisciplinary, it examines issues in their full complexity, and it does not permit tidy and decisive conclusions. Professors currently using the Mortenson text should not be “promoting” the text as much as using it as a place from which to permit students to consider how their own values and analytical abilities relate to the Mortenson story.

The process of bringing students through many important relevant texts, asking challenging questions, and leaving students to make choices about important debates that are of course still unresolved by leading human rights scholars (e.g. the debates surrounding education and group rights) is the process of liberal education. Students must ultimately choose. What community engagement does is demonstrate clear relevance and contemporary application. And this set of challenges: making real decisions about contemporary issues in light of compelling moral arguments and current practices, is why community-engaged thinking is ultimately more challenging than traditionally isolated analysis where thinkers may select assumptions and dictate parameters. 

Everyone must make choices. When we as academics choose to emphasize weaknesses in community engagement by pointing to the imperfections that accompany all human efforts, we risk paralysis by analysis for many important initiatives that do more good than harm. Despite the clear missteps Mortenson made, I strongly suspect he has done more good than harm. That suspicion is no doubt based on a culturally contingent bias toward individual human rights that suggests the importance of education and gender equity for all people, in all places. That tentative suspicion of mine may reasonably be construed as imperialistic, naïve, and harmful, but it is nonetheless where I sit after rather thorough review of development history and related texts.

Mortenson’s story points toward many more teaching opportunities that once again indicate how complex these kinds of efforts are and point to one of my original assertions - that this scandal calls attention to the ongoing important concern with naïve development amateurs -  

• The Aga Khan Development Foundation has a strong record of and infrastructure for building and staffing schools in the region. As Duflo’s analyses (and development experience for those who have it) make clear, building schools is never enough. Why did Mortenson act alone, why did CAI pay so little attention to school operations, and when (if ever) is it appropriate for similar “social entrepreneurs” to so completely, perhaps naively, follow their instincts? 
• Clear standards for nonprofit accounting and board oversight exist. Just as business schools frequently use case studies to learn from failures and successes, university community engagement efforts, public administration, and nonprofit management courses should consider this case and other failures
• How much naivety is too much? Any person working in any field today can reasonably state that they began in a relatively more naive position. Policymakers and corporate managers regularly engage in cost-benefit analysis to determine whether to keep or cut programs and products. CAI got a lot wrong, but built many schools and educated many children in the process. Some of their missteps seem to be due to insufficient understanding of the extent of tribal differences in the area. That is, while many communities wanted schools, at least a few had no interest. Still, for the children who gained access to schooling and education, is CAI providing these opportunities at a more affordable rate than large aid organizations?  If so, is their bungling in some communities enough to undermine their total efforts?

These three questions – Why not partner with established efforts? How well-versed in best practices must one be to begin human rights and social change work? And to what extent do missteps by naïve actors undermine their broader efforts? – are the questions that plague young DIY development workers and many service-learning programs. It is absolutely clear that past development efforts have frequently been harmful because of insufficient consideration of these and other foundational rights questions considered earlier. And it’s also clear that many social change movement supporters and leaders were young and naïve when they began their efforts due primarily to viscerally felt outrage at the horrible treatments visited upon “others” in the name of tradition. Universities have an opportunity to recognize these important questions early and expose students to relevant debates often, so that we do as much as we can to sharpen students’ skills as readers, potential development actors, and engaged citizens.

It would be simpler to maintain the traditional university, to forgo promotion of community engagement or consideration of contemporary, relevant books on pressing topics that do not follow academic norms for research, review, and presentation. But we must remember that to do so is to promote the status quo rather than to unsettle students’ expectations and assumptions by engaging them with real and relevant issues. While we must not fall back into the once clear arrogance and paternalism of the university as the center of solutions for others elsewhere, we must also do all that we can within this challenging and difficult world of multiple, legitimate claims to truth, to prepare our students to be builders of a world that continues to improve access to options and basic human rights for all. There it is, of course: that’s my bias again. But to educate with attention to the continent nature of human rights is not to preach so much as to prepare students for critical analysis and awareness of the importance of judgment and questioning in the world as we continue to build it. Mortenson’s story is ultimately part cautionary tale, part narrative of possibility.

As always, I love to hear your comments, questions, concerns, or criticisms. Please, if you agree, re-post, tweet, or sign up to receive posts as emails using the box on the right. 

What Three Cups of Tea Teaches Us #1: Nonprofit Education Efforts Matter

Less interesting than Greg Mortenson's various alleged missteps** is how his story illustrates our (US Public) general misunderstanding of nonprofit organizations, social change, and development. 

This is the first of what will be many blog entries dedicated to this issue. Today, the role of education in nonprofit programming. In the days to come: 

• naive development amateurs, 
• the alleged inappropriateness of Three Cups of Tea for university audiences following the scandal,  
• and the challenge and uncertainties of 'development.'

By now the story has been told and re-told: Climber, author, and philanthropist Greg Mortenson is accused of exaggeration and outright fabrication in respect to his inspiring narrative of friendship, education, and hope for children in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan (On the story: 60 Minutes, NPR, Nick Kristof, The NYT - and Mortenson's response in Outside Magazine). The story itself is important, but what's more vital is what the scandal says about our understanding of development work, nonprofit organizations, and other places and peoples. Mortenson's story demonstrates our simultaneous over-reaching optimism and unfounded expectations for development and social change.

What I find most disturbing about the Three Cups of Deceit narrative is its potential to create the inaccurate impression that development is 'not working.' On the contrary, the world is making progress toward reaching the UN Millennium Development goals and I see change agents among the Millenials, Generation X, and Generation Y marching toward unprecedented appreciation for common human dignity and interconnectedness around the world. To establish a world that better recognizes broad opportunity for human flourishing, however, we must better understand some basic development and nonprofit sector realities brought forward by this most recent controversy. First, there is the importance of education for nonprofit efforts. 

If, as the parable goes, nonprofits are going to rescue drowning children they should at least work to identify the source of the babies in the river. Nonprofits must clarify the structural issues that communities face or at least (as is more the case with Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute (CAI)), help people with access to resources (e.g. US Citizens) see that other humans elsewhere may have access to a greater set of options (education, choices) with a relatively small infusion of resources. To do that nonprofits must educate. 

The problem with education, of course, is that it costs. Mortenson's CAI made many mistakes relating to the real need for education. Most importantly, it did not explicitly communicate that donations would be used to support US-based education and outreach. This could be due to malfeasance, to lax interpretation of nonprofit accounting best practices, or due to an under-developed understanding of how the organization needed to change its funding structure as it quickly grew in size (See related resource on nonprofit capitalization). 

As CAI clearly expresses on its website, its primary purpose is to "promote and support community-based education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan." This would not happen in a broad and sustainable way (at least in the current environment) without an increasingly broad and growing population of developed country citizens and foundations interested in donating to support this cause. Put another way: no book tour, no movement, no schools. 

CAI is actually not being as blunt as me. They're not attempting to defend their education efforts on the grounds that they're an important part of programming. Instead, they're suggesting they can demonstrate that particular restricted funds never supported the book tour. If they can do that, great - then they can continue to compete inside a narrative space that demands nonprofit organizations raise incredible sums, spend little to nothing on their staff members, do not expand education and outreach programs, and figuratively move mountains while otherwise holding up the world. 

We don't expect businesses to introduce a new idea (product) without spending extraordinary amounts to get their vision (buy me / sign-up) across. How can we reasonably expect someone who seemingly cares deeply about children in the remotest parts of countries that most Americans cannot identify on a map to not spend considerable resources educating Americans on (1) the fact that these children really are wonderful, innocent, beautiful children (like all children), (2) these children will not necessarily become terrorists (as many competing narratives might suggest), and (3) that these children are located in a particular place, and we have reason to think that many of them and their communities are interested in better school and education access?      

The CAI absolutely, positively should have been more explicit about how monies were being spent. They should have been clearer about the domestic education component of their mission. And they clearly should have done a better job of clarifying the lines between and among the book, its costs, and its revenues (including speaking fees). Those mis-steps suggest sloppy management and accounting, even inexcusable ignorance, but the public response focuses just as much on the fact that they were involved with education in the US at all. As Krakauer's critiques are recounted in a USA Today article: 

On its website, the CAI says it spends at least 85% of contributions on programs and only 15% on administrative and fundraising costs. This ratio is one reason Charity Navigator gave the charity four stars.

But in an online exposé of the charity published by Byliner.com, writer Jon Krakauer noted that the CAI categorizes the money it spends promoting Mortenson’s books and his travel costs as program expenses. If those costs were categorized as fundraising and administration expenses, he says, they would exceed 50% of the charity’s annual budget.

For development organizations that are broadening a public's understanding of an issue, education is absolutely part of programming. Without education, we have no consciousness-raising. Without consciousness-raising, we have no movements. 

Let me be clear: I do not support CAI's alleged playing fast and loose with accounting. I do not support fabrication of facts. If, however CAI were to act very responsibly, I suspect they would report a significant portion of book tour costs as fundraising but another significant portion of those costs would absolutely be categorized as programming. That education is necessary to meet the mission of the organization.

Until broader percentages of the public understand the importance of education in nonprofit work, arm-chair critics will be able to undermine many important efforts with ease.

Even Krakauer is allowing that Mortenson and CAI built scores of schools and educated thousands of children in this remote region of the world. This is an astonishing feat. Because this feat has been accomplished by a nonprofit organization, we expect the work to be completed more cost-effectively and creatively than government might do it, and with far less invested in outreach and marketing than would be the case if the private sector were developing a new initiative. It could still be the case that Mortenson has done several inexcusable things**, but one set of allegations is based at least in part on the unrealistic expectations we foist upon nonprofit organizations to outperform governments in terms of costs and corporations in terms of permissible behaviors, including the simple act of selling ideas (education).

If you think I've said something ridiculous, I invite your comments. If you think I've said something interesting, I also invite your comments and urge you to repost the blog link please. I will stick with this issue for the next several posts and look forward to the conversation.

Additional interesting resources:

• Humanosphere's ongoing coverage and collection of resources on the topic. 
• Good Intentions Are Not Enough's blog collection of emerging articles. 
• Author and Journalist Daniel Glick offers a unique perspective. 
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy features lessons for charities and their trustees. 

**There are many different parts to the current set of accusations. As I make clear above, I think the allegations relating to the speaker circuit and book tour are over-stated. If, however, it does turn out that Mortenson absolutely lied in reference to his alleged hostage experience (something that many members of the 'gotcha chattering class' are now focusing on with growing fervor), then he has clearly acted irresponsibly and has clearly done so consciously.  Compressions of time, on the other hand, are common in creative nonfiction narrative, making some of the allegations about the narrative arc of the story less damning than a clear finding of fabrication.