Tag Archives: Cooperatives

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Organizational Development, Ownership, Rural development, Territorial Development, Visioning, Well-Being, WPF partners

We Have Grown Together

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ANIDES is an organization with whom Winds of Peace has partnered for the past several years.  It’s a group devoted to lifting up women, helping them to understand and embrace their rights and to explore their capacities as the critical players in strengthening their families and Nicaraguan society.  ANIDES has not only helped with basic living amenities for its women and their families across 34 communities, but has also assisted in the formation of communal banks in outlying villages.  The banks have created access to economic resources, but more importantly have helped to teach finance, cooperative responsibility and the dignity to be discovered in effectively managing such a collaborative endeavor.

Recently, one of the Foundation colleagues visited with the rural cooperative members to talk about their visions, their needs, and the aspirations.  After the meeting and some contemplation about the visit, Gloria Ordoñez- director of ANIDES and the hands-on godmother of the women members- drafted a thoughtful reflection about both the progress of the women and the challenging road ahead.  It’s worth reading, as excerpted with her knowledge and blessing, below:

For some five years we proposed to deal with this challenge in a joint way with the women, using tools for knowledge management, so that they might learn some of their good and bad practices, improving their self esteem, and the importance that the roles that each one performs have for making their organization stronger, working on the recognition of different leaderships that each one exercises within their organization.

For us the application of methodological tools seem important (Results Oriented Management), for their recognition as human beings and through them that they might recognize their skills, abilities and capacities. Likewise that they might recognize the medium in which they can “exploit” or apply those skills. These tools help to recognize what I am now, what I want, a balance in life, the personal values and how through learning to build their path toward the personal and organizational vision.

These tools not only help the growth and personal development, but also the organization, all the members working together to recognize themselves not only as individuals but as organization, the construction of this path toward the vision from the systemic approach helps them to take more ownership over the organization and to work, putting into practice solidarity as a fundamental principle of cooperativism. We know that putting this into practice, or the implementation of a good attitude toward the members, is a long and steep path that we need to walk.  In these years the members have shown an openness to change and are involved in the processes, more and more in a conscious manner.

… So we have grown together little by little, we started with 15 very fearful women that would arrive at the workshops in the company of their husbands or sons; now we have grown in number and active participation; maybe we needed to not move too quickly through stages, so that everyone might participate at the same level….

The communal banks have been the space for learning to set the foundation for the development of trust among the members, strengthening their self esteem, formation and skill development. Making a sieve in order to create cooperatives with the members that show better strengths, identifying and strengthening the common elements of institutionality (system of values held in common for governance).

We see that the role of ANIDES is still very important for STRENGTHENING THE INTERNAL SELF MANAGEMENT CAPACITY of the incipient cooperative organizations. Through accompaniment processes so that they themselves might facilitate them with knowledge acquired in previous processes, GUIDING the comprehension of INSTRUMENTS FOR COLLECTIVE ENTREPRENEURIAL GOOD GOVERNANCE (these documents already exist for each cooperative) in this new stage we will teach their leaders to use and apply them.

Precisely through this we think that strengthening a promoter group of leaders, we will expedite (in a cascading manner) the training process of the different cooperative organizations from within, being accompanied by ANIDES, so that the grassroots cooperatives might be able to continue strengthening themselves FROM THE IDENTIFICATION OF THEIR OWN STRENGTHS AND COMMON IDENTITIES, (like what you call the institution, that has to do with their roots, values and common commitments as women who are living in similar circumstances, learning to get ahead with their families in the midst of adversities).

Thanks for your multiple perspectives and contributions to continue going more in depth to make a different in the cooperative organizations, which is the strong commitment of ANIDES.

This memorandum is a complete and focused organization development roadmap, as holistic, sophisticated and ambitious as any strategic document I’ve encountered.  Its focus includes the health and strength of the organization, its current and future leadership, the well-being of the individual members, a sensitivity to collaborative realities, courage to take on enormous difficulties and a vision which exceeds the boundaries of sight.  It’s a document of hope and expectation, and one that any U.S. business organization would be challenged to achieve and proud to own.

When people occasionally ask me whether there is good news in Nicaragua, whether there is cause for optimism for the future, I will use the words above to state the unequivocal answer, yes….

 

 

Announcements, Organizational Development, Peasant Agriculture, Rural development, Territorial Development, WPF partners

Tilling the Soil

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I wrote in a post here last week about the need for both “planters” and “harvesters” in the development community to reasonably blunt the oppression of poverty in Nicaragua.  My choice of words and analogy prompted a couple of responses which requested some clarification of those terms and funding postures.  (That’s not at all unusual, as my brain and my words don’t always operate in perfect synchronization.)

In considering how to provide that clarification, I recalled an e-mail that was written by my colleague and Nicaraguan Director for Winds of Peace, Mark Lester.  He had written a response to an inquiry from another funder asking about our process and assessment of project proposals.  I revisited the e-mail and, as I had suspected, Mark’s words painted a clear portrait of a development process geared to clients themselves, and how WPF has come to work with its potential partners in a fashion that plants seeds for and is very focused on the future.  That e-mail is excerpted here:

I think the goal of having your grassroots group partners dictate to you what their specific needs and priorities are is a very good institutional goal, and one that we very much share, but our experience is that it gets very complicated when you try to put it into practice. 

Suppose you [identify] a grassroots coop, and they send you a request. That request will reflect the needs and priorities of the coop to the extent that the leadership really represents the rest of the members, and that is precisely the problem that I explained on our Skype call. These leaders [always] tend to be the same people (patron-fieldhand relationship). In this case the only way to know whether something being proposed reflects the membership is if you spend time in the coop; interviewing board members, but also interviewing a diverse selection of members in different regions of the coop, visiting them in their homes. This is the only way to find out what the members really think when there is great power disparity among the members of the coop. Because those with less power in the community will not say things publicly that would reflect negatively on those with more power in a local community. Their situation is too fragile, and their ability to be able to go to those powerful people to help them in times of need is too important to risk by being honest in a meeting.
 But when you have collected that information from private conversations with members, and then in a plenary session with the members of the coop present the findings, the collective is forced to deal with the true reality, because everyone recognizes it is true. But there was never a way for that truth to surface publicly and thus have everyone deal with it. Without this truth on the table, however,  there is no possibility for the coop to move forward for there to be change, and thus there is no change in the territory, because the [individual]organizations within the territory are not changing. 
This is the work that our colleagues have done and are doing with all the cooperatives that we are working with, and this is what the followup workshops have dealt with. We too put a high value on  the people deciding what their priorities are, but as we delved into it more, we realized to do so effectively often meant getting beyond the leaders, because they really were not representing their membership. 
As a result of the ongoing dialogue, and exchange among the coops, a number of coops have told us that they want to be able to export directly, i.e. not have to sell to either an export company or a 2nd tier cooperative. Especially two  coops had determined in their own internal planning – that for the first time was truly participatory, because the interests of sectors that previously were not reflected in the plan (because of the situation I described above) now were – they decided they wanted to learn how to export. In the last workshop we had, we were able to have a number of small coffee roasters present, precisely because the coops told us they wanted to export. In the course of the workshop the roaster said they wanted to buy coffee [specifically] off these two groups, and in the discussion with the roasters about what they needed, these two coops realized that exporting was more complicated than they thought, so the issue is a very hot topic for them.
To be clear WPF does not want any money, we are however interested in that your money (and other international aid) really does help the grassroots people, and not a local elite that looks like a grassroots group from the outside. Because every dime that ends up going to the local elite ends up financing the very people blocking what the grassroots really want and are able to express when they are offered a channel that does not put them at risk.
Our experience and research shows that unless there is a methodology that gets around the unequal power distribution at the local level, the resources are always going to be controlled by the local elites (who to outsiders may look poor, but internally they clearly are an elite). But there are very few organizations that deal with this central issue. That being said, there is another organization in Nicaragua that does this well, but using a slightly different methodology. I can send you more about them as well if you are interested.
The context Mark described above is happening every day in Nicaragua and in many if not most other impoverished nations where the poor work with assistance groups for their advancement, if not their very survival.  In many cases, they have become dependent upon the intervention of funders, and in the process have abandoned both their right and their hope to ever operate in a self-sustaining fashion.  The projects they propose may, in fact, be capable of generating repayment of loans received or accomplishing grant objectives.  But the essential question to be asked is whether the results are transformative or simply stop-gap until the next infusion of support.  That’s the recipe for dependency.
Within the WPF methodology, we prefer to think of ourselves as planters, “in the soil” with the campesinos, tilling the ground until the first shoots of growth emerge, transforming seeds into ways of life, and working toward an eventual harvest….

 

Entrepreneurship, Interdependence, Organizational Development, Poverty, Rural development, Territorial Development

Planters and Harvesters

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I think most people would be surprised to learn the difficulty involved in being a funder.  Most often, when folks learn that I work for a private foundation which provides grants and loans in Nicaragua to really poor people, they respond with something like, “Oh, what wonderful and rewarding work that must be.”  And while it’s true that there is great intrinsic satisfaction in working with our Nicaraguan partners, there are other layers in our labors that one might never anticipate.  It turns out that, like in most enterprises,  it’s not all that easy to envision, plant, nurture and harvest the precise outcome desired.

That reality was impressed upon me again recently in a conversation I had with an acquaintance about measuring end results.  That’s something which most aid organizations are prone to do, because without some sort of results to tout, raising funds from potential donors or justifying actions to a Board of Directors becomes quite difficult. The easiest measurement to take, of course,  is the number of dollars placed during a given year, under the assumption that if an organization is placing lots of money it must be creating lots of impact.  (Which is not always the case.)  During my conversation, a number of additional measures were cited, including number of households served, geographic area covered, number of women included and loan default rates.  We all search for some way to affirm that funds and energy expended have been put to good use and yielded a good result.  We want to look forward to a “harvest” of the good intentions and capital that we have sown.

Understandably, there are many aid organizations for whom the harvest is the main objective and without a reasonably short and certain “growing season,” they won’t make the investment. Harvesters are numerous and they are essential to vibrant development and organizational accountability.  They represent significant funding sources.

But one of the realities of development work learned by WPF over these past several decades is that sometimes germination just takes longer than we’d like, and there is no certainty of anything growing out of a particular investment made.  Risk is without guarantee, and especially when swimming upstream against currents of rural location, prevailing culture, limited education, autocratic governance models and natural disasters.   So occasionally, the exceptionally poor require the presence of “planters,” those who are willing to sow in marginal soil, where possibly the only measurement is whether anything can bloom- not in micro-loans returned or number of houses built, but in whether there are grounds for further accompaniment and relationship.

Planters bring an entrepreneurial appetite for exploration and risk.  They are willing to “get proximate” enough to make a bet on the lives of deeply marginalized people. They not only lend and grant, but also accompany.  Measures are not unimportant, to be sure, but they are less sure. And for planters, that’s OK.  Because eventually planters hope to be harvesters, too.  They just may be willing to wait longer to be so.

Working on development in the rural sectors of any country is not an exact science.  WPF has developed its perspectives and methodologies over thirty years of on-the-ground observation and partnerships.  There is no existing formula for certain success.  If it was formulaic work, more institutions would be doing it, with assurances of success and favorable measurements to share with the donor base.  It isn’t that easy.

We are all members of the development universe in some capacity, whether we acknowledge it or not.  As members of a common humanity, we do have an obligation to one another.  Our actions, whether small or large, create an impact, good or bad.  Harvesters are willing to travel where the path is rocky, but straight, so that they have reasonable expectations of repeating their success.  Planters bring visions and seeds to scatter, in the recognition that neither the path nor the final fruits are necessarily clear; they are less sure of their own viability in the process.  But we need planters and harvesters and every other resource we can muster in order to blunt the disgrace and indignity of deep impoverishment. …

 

 

 

 

 

Creativity, Education, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Making An Impact, Ownership, Rural development, Visioning, WPF partners

Spirit

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My U.S. acquaintances almost always have questions about the work that Winds of Peace undertakes in Nicaragua, and especially they are curious about the people with whom we work.  They are curious to know how they are like us in the U.S.  They desire to know whether they are happy, what rural Nicaraguans like to do in their spare time, and what they may know about those of us who live in the North.  (My answers to those specific questions tend to be along the lines of: yes, they experience happiness in some very different ways from us, they have little spare time and they know a great deal more about us than we do of them.)

During my visit in Nicaragua two weeks ago, I became re-acquainted with a woman I had met several years ago, a grassroots coffee producer and member of a very small cooperative.  She attended an organizational strengthening workshop which the Foundation had underwritten and, in fact, turned out to be one of the presenters.  I want to introduce you to Corina, because she is a composite story of who many Nicaraguans are.

Corina
Corina

When we first met, Corina and her cooperative had found themselves in deep economic trouble. But the cause of the difficulty stemmed from the fraudulent actions of “middlemen” who recognized an opportunity to take advantage of small producers who were too trusting, unschooled and undereducated in the responsibilities  and obligations of organizational success.  In that first meeting, Corina and her fellow coop members faced a likely collapse of their group; she thus faced a similar fate for her own farm.  Without the middlemen to provide market savvy and price negotiation (as well as deceptive representation), Corina felt lost.

But I recall her tenacity in addition to the shyness.  She had not spoken much in front of her North American visitor those years ago, but she spoke passionately and with defiance when she chose to speak at all.  But I remember thinking that the odds were definitely against this small-producer coop which now faced significant debt not of their own making.  Winds of Peace has made annual loans to the coop since that first meeting, and the coop has survived thus far.  But providing funds each year for fertilizers and new coffee plants is neither the road away from dependence nor the key to sustainability.

Corina and her fellow coop members have worked hard.  They have attended other workshops.  The coop has been attentive to understanding exactly what project proposal information is required of them and what donor expectations are.   They’ve been scrupulously diligent in meeting their loan obligations.  While a preference for having others intervene on their behalf still surfaces at moments, a movement toward self-sufficiency is happening.

So I was both surprised and not surprised in seeing Corina before the audience two weeks ago.  She towered over the audience, in a way that very few people less than five feet in height can; sometimes captivation comes from unsuspected sources.  She clutched a handkerchief like a good luck token, but her voice was firm and her resolution fixed on two large papers taped to the front wall.  On the pages, Corina had charted her family’s 5-Year Farm Plan.

Set aside for the moment the fact that many businesses never attempt something as progressive as a 5-year plan.  Corina, with the assistance of her husband and children and workshop facilitators,  had undertaken a detailed description of her business, including its dimensions, crops, limitations, opportunities, improvements, environmental impacts, successes and its future outlook.  There on two sheets of butcher paper was a complete strategic plan, one which in its simplicity and breadth presented her story, both current and future.

As Corina related her story, her voice grew in size and confidence. The handkerchief became twisted with emotion and conviction.  The audience, notorious for its restlessness, now sat rapt in attention, utterly astonished at both the woman and the content of her work.  At one moment, suddenly self-conscious of her standing, she looked to the workshop facilitator and observed that, maybe she wasn’t making sense and that he could explain the process better.  To his everlasting credit, the facilitator turned to the participants and asked, “Is she doing OK?”  The audience erupted into thunderous applause, matched in emotion only by the modesty in Corina’s face.  She continued, with even greater fervor than before.

By the close of her presentation, Corina had communicated details of her life which, under any other circumstance, would never have been shared.  She talked of her children and their work on the farm, after school.  She described the long hours of labor contributed by her husband, who hired out as a field hand elsewhere by day before returning home to tend to their own land.  She talked of her own unending work among the coffee plants, and how she nonetheless was able to achieve the equivalent of her high school diploma, the first member of her family ever to do so.  By the conclusion of her talk, I had a distinct feeling of under-accomplishment in my own life.

I suspect that many in the group felt the same.  At the conclusion of her presentation, Corina was surrounded by many, people seeking more information, offering their appreciation for her tenacity and strength, thanking her.  Several members of a coffee-buying group from North America sought to establish direct links for purchasing her coffee.  She may never have experienced so many photographs taken of her.  Clearly a sense of accomplishment welled up within her, and yet the demeanor of humility and reserve never wavered.

IMG_5372Corina’s example to her fellow small farmers resulted in many such family plans being drawn up that day and in the weeks to follow; indeed, they are still being created.  She had extended herself, far from her comfort zone, in order to provide a basis for others to act.  Her courage on behalf of other producers enabled a development threshold to be crossed, one that may cultivate harvests and benefits for a long time.  But I recall the day in a different light.  I will recall her performance and leadership as a challenge to my own way of life, to look at its content, its yields and plantings and harvests, its potential and its character with a greater sense of needing to do better….

 

Education, Innovation, Making An Impact, Organizational Development, Peasant Agriculture, Research, Rural development, Servanthood, Territorial Development, WPF partners

Body of Knowledge

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I’ve been making entries in this space since the Winds of Peace website came into being; my earliest entry dates back to January of 2007.  I don’t often go back in time to read what was on my mind back then, partly because I’m prone to wince at some of the inexperience and naivete reflected in those early days, but mostly because my views are different today than they were eight years ago.  In fact, the context of the country has changed.  Our partners have changed.   It’s a different world than it was.  The Foundation has evolved.

One of the most significant changes has been the work we have undertaken with Dr. Rene Mendoza Vidaurre.  I have referenced him here many times in recent years, describing the one-on-one work that he has done with our partner cooperatives, Indigenous groups and others.  Rene is a tireless pursuer of healthy development for Nicaraguans.  He is a co-founder and former director of NITLAPAN, the University of Central America entity which is the leading research organization in the country.   He has worked extensively in the rural sectors of Nicaragua, where development efforts are particularly difficult and few resources are available.  He has created and conducted scores of workshops to help strengthen organizational effectiveness and sustainability of the coops.  This year he created and conducted The Cooperative Certificate Program, a six-day holistic, intensive, residential workshop designed primarily for rural producers.  Earlier this month, Rene completed a week-long visit to the U.S. to study organizational strengthening techniques in venues including Springfield, MO, Minneapolis, MN and Boston, MA.

The significance of Rene’s involvement with WPF is that he has brought an intensive research focus to our work.  With more than 30 years of experiences in the Foundation’s history, Rene is synthesizing those experiences with current realities to generate perhaps the most extensive, research-based thinking and writing about Nicaraguan rural development.  In an age of global economic interdependence and enormous economic uncertainties, access to fact and successful practice are more important than ever to aid organizations operating anywhere in the world.  It might be said that, at one time we were primarily placing funds.  Today, we are acting with perspectives of knowledge and specific purpose that are true to the Nicaraguan context.

Many of the recent findings and observations about current context in Nicaragua can be found in Rene’s many weblog entries, featured at this website.  If you’ve entertained a curiosity about the Nicaraguan realities with which Winds of Peace has operated over the past 30 years, you will find Rene’s writings insightful, candid revelations about the challenges and importance of financial aid.  If you work with a foundation or other agency tasked with providing such aid, you will find Rene’s discernments and conclusions to be perceptive resources for consideration in your grantmaking or lending practices, because they reflect the entirety of Nicaraguan realities: financial, historical, political, social, religious.

From time to time I receive feedback on some of my entries here.  I’d be equally interested to hear of reactions to the in-depth work that Rene has undertaken in the name of compassionate research….

 

Announcements, Education, Innovation, Lean, Organizational Development, Rural development

Teacher Education

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I’ve made a point here over the years to highlight the education I’ve been receiving while working with our Nicaraguan partners.  It turns out that I may have far less to teach my Nicaraguan acquaintances than I might have once thought, and that they have immensely more to teach me than I ever dreamed.  In a development activity wherein we have supposedly been the givers and the Nicaraguan people the receivers, the roles can easily be said to be interchangeable.  Indeed, I have gained immense insights about people, the universality of our needs, the depth of human desire and the comparative shallowness of my own journey.

Nonetheless. WPF has been instrumental in helping our partners to acquire new ideas and perspectives about their own circumstances and has thus impacted many  of them in very positive ways.  Concurrently, the Nicaraguan colleagues with whom we have worked closely have proven themselves to be not just good teachers of the rural poor, but great mentors and life-coaches for people who too frequently have had little or no access to such resources.  In short, there has been no shortage of teaching and learning taking place within our work; in fact, it is the essence of transformation.

Nicaraguan education of another sort is now slated to begin in

Rene Mendoza
Rene Mendoza

another week or so, as WPF consultant and colleague Rene Mendoza will travel to the U.S. for an intense week of study and experience on behalf of the rural cooperatives which he has been serving for much of his life.  It’s a learning journey for Rene, who will be studying topics including open book management, continuous process improvement, organizational dynamics, successful cooperative models and more.  It’s also an expedition of preparation, providing Rene with more of the tools to be shared with small cooperatives who are in desperate need of organizational savvy.

Rene will spend four days immersed in open book methodologies, absorbing the best practices of some of the best OBM companies in the U.S.  He’ll then change venues and meet with a real-life practitioner of organizational continuous improvement, or Lean, to gain deeper insights into the sequence and content of teaching newcomers to the concept.  At the same time, we’ll be planning for future Nicaraguan workshops to supplement the Lean materials previously introduced to our partners.  Lean is a subject matter entirely unto itself, but to strategize its absorption and practice by rural farmers (many of whom have received little or no formal education) adds a dimension of difficulty requiring Lean knowledge as well as sophisticated teaching skills.  Finally, Rene will travel to the east coast, there to spend time with Equal Exchange, a cooperative of widespread renown and which strives for mutually beneficial relationships in all of its dealings.  After an entire week of whirlwind experiences, Rene will head back to Nicaragua with a wide range of new experiences and potential strategies, in addition to a need for some rest!

The prospect of Rene’s activities during that week is exciting for him as the main participant, exciting for his WPF colleagues due to the possibilities that such exposures might bring to our development work and exciting to our rural partners who have come to recognize the wide range of enterprise education that exists, and how that might contribute to elevating their circumstances.  The scenario represents “education on steroids,” where practical training meets actual needs, and in real time.

The point of all this is simply that none of us can ever afford to stop the learning, the teaching, the mentoring, the sharing, the growing that lies within us.  We are all purveyors.  We are creatures who possess not only the capacity for development, but the need for it, as well.  Our health, well-being and futures depend upon our openness to it.

In another week, there will be at least one sojourner here who will carry a big load, as a significant pivot for Nicaraguans in need of some friendly leverage….

Entrepreneurship, Interdependence, Lean, Making An Impact, Organizational Development, Reflections, Research, Rural development, Servanthood, Visioning, Winds of Peace Future

Ten Years After, Part 2

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There’s no question but that the modest beginning undertaken by Harold and Louise Nielsen has evolved into something broader and deeper than a funding mechanism for poor Nicaraguan peasants.  Yes, the grants and loans have been exceedingly important to those rural recipients who received them.  But the lessons embedded in those transactions and the fruits which have blossomed from them may hold a much greater value than the strictly financial one.  The impacts can be transformational, and that has the potential to change not only lives, but ways of life.

Looking forward to the next ten years has both precedence and importance.  Years ago, Harold and Louise envisioned a foundation that would somehow help to alleviate poverty and marginalization of rural Nicaraguans.  WPF has likely evolved in ways far different from that initial vision, but the shape of that initial dream has been the base upon which any good results stand.  Nonetheless, it can be dangerous to attempt prognostications.  (I cannot even make a fair prediction about my day tomorrow, let alone a look into the future of a people and their country.)  No one can ever say for certain what the future will hold, whether in terms of natural evolution or human interventions.  But not to dream is a missed opportunity, a failure to imagine better circumstances for the rural poor in Nicaragua and perhaps elsewhere.

What lies ahead?  Our dreams and discussions continue  around the idea of a Synergy Center in Nicaragua, a site in Managua which is the intersection among WPF, Nicaraguan development and an education entity from the U.S.  The Synergy Center concept presents a progressive opportunity for a U.S.-based education institution to become the owner and administrator of a facility that can utilize data and experiences for the real-life learning of its students, as well as for other international visitors seeking to understand and bridge the immense gaps between the Global North and South, for mutual global benefit.  It’s a notion that is bold in light of the frequent tendency of education entities to “pull back” in times of global and economic unrest, the very times when this very sort of personal education presents perhaps the only realistic means of addressing such gaps.  It’s a big initiative for a little foundation, but that is not likely to have stopped Harold and Louise.

The creation of the Synergy Center would represent  a significant boost to education development within Nicaragua, as well.  While the Foundation has funded scholarships for elementary to university-aged students, we will continue to seek additional bridges between opportunity and learning.  The path for rural Nicaraguans to move from poverty is located squarely within education.  The Foundation’s commitment to growing such opportunities was born of Louise Nielsen’s determination that young women, in particular, could become key resources to Nicaraguan society through their education; our continuation will be based on objective data that confirms the essential nature of improved education opportunities at all levels of society.  The Synergy Center can serve as one education “pivot” between Global North and South, an intersection of research and education between the regions.

Concurrent with the establishment of the Synergy Center, the Foundation dreams of collaborations which could bridge the gaps that exist among the various funding agencies which still operate in Nicaragua.  We are all still victims of our own thinking in terms of what Nicaraguans can accomplish and how they will accomplish it.  As a result, there are many development resources which operate in total independence from one another, and sometimes even at cross-purposes.  As is true for any organization, there is greater strength in numbers and collaboration, a truth which still represents a major hurdle for those of us who operate in Nicaragua.  In a curious conundrum, it’s another potential value of a Synergy Center, but only if WPF and other organizations would be willing to abandon a “not invented here” mindset and choose to collaborate and learn with one another.

My own background includes experiences with some of the most important tools for transforming organizations into higher-performing enterprises.  Cultivation of organizational transparency (Open Book Management) in the cooperative’s function and adoption of methodologies which cultivate continuing improvement (Lean Methodologies) are two concepts that will generate transcendent, positive change in both the businesses and the lives of their practitioners.  It’s a movement whose seeds have been planted, and whose harvest needn’t wait for ten more years.  And I can readily imagine rural Nicaraguan cooperatives embracing and applying the tools for themselves as a means to retain the ownership and value of the lands they tend.

Finally, the future must hold one additional achievement, this one perhaps more essential, more transformative, more vital to development of the rural poor (and therefore to the success of WPF) than any of the others.  It’s the awakening of the global conscience to the circumstances of the poor and the terrible costs that we all pay for their plight.  Even if we collectively have no empathy for those who struggle (a terrible supposition by itself), we are inextricably tied to their outcomes.  It’s a sobering prospect to consider.  Those who know and feel it have an exclusive obligation to educate, to touch, to move others who have had no personal connection to draw upon.  That work, too, will continue to be mission and vision of WPF.

The next ten years will pass by like the flash of lightning in a summer storm.  We know this, given the passage of the past ten years.  It is a short term in which to create truly transformative movement in any environment, even shorter when working abroad.  Our aim will continue to be improvement in Nicaraguan and North American lives, by helping people in both lands become more globally literate.

These are visions for WPF, not roadmaps.  Our fuel for change continues to be made up of capital and accompaniment.  But  we will also continue to remind ourselves that better circumstances do not imply greater monetary wealth only.   Indeed, as the adage goes, some people are so poor that all they have is money, and we know that we can aim higher than that….

 

Entrepreneurship, Interdependence, Leadership Succession, Lean, Organizational Development, Peasant Agriculture, Reflections, Rural development

Loans, Leadership and Legacies

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We received a project proposal a few days ago, this one from one of our longer-standing partners.  It’s a cooperative that we have admired for its vision, its holistic approach to the well-being of its members and the progressive leadership of its president.  They plan and act in ways that strengthen their cooperative as well as the communities in which their members are located.  In addition to being a reliable loan partner, the have served as a model, of sorts, to less developed coops who wonder what a strong cooperative really looks like.  We hold a great deal of respect for what they have accomplished, against long odds, and for what they aspire to do in the future: yes, they plan strategically.

When I read the project proposal, I once again noted all of the strengths which drew us to them initially.  But I also noted the frequency with which the charismatic president of the coop was mentioned: in addition to the entire introductory section of the proposal being essentially about him, he was also referenced five other times as an initiator of something good in the cooperative.  Clearly, his humility notwithstanding, he is an important guy within the context of the coop.

His prominence in the proposal gives me pause, however.  As essential and visionary as he has been to the success of this group, I wonder about the longer-term effectiveness of his contributions.  Without question, he is one of the broadest-thinking leaders I’ve had the pleasure to come across in my travels within Nicaragua.  Without doubt, he has carried the progress of the coop on his diminutive shoulders.  But without succession, whenever he ceases to lead, all of his organizational ingenuity is likely to become little more than an aftermath, as opposed to a true legacy.

Despite all of the good things going on here, I’m particularly concerned for the future of this coop.  Ironically, the very strength of the coop- its leader- also may be its biggest liability.  The members’ reliance on their president creates a dependency that will be difficult to manage once their leader is gone.  It’s one of the most noticeable challenges encountered in organizational development: balancing the high impacts of a great leader with the need to institutionalize the good things he/she has brought about.  As the adage goes, not all of one’s eggs should be in but one basket.

As it’s difficult to argue with success, a leader’s recognition of the need to develop the next generation of capable and caring leadership is often subjugated in importance.  The successful leader becomes so engrossed in creating new and successful ideas that there is little time for cultivating the same skills in others.  Sometimes the lack of development stems from a “messiah complex,” an ego in the leader which is convinced that there is no one else capable of governing as well.  Sometimes it’s purely a perception of too little time.  It might be a fear of creating capabilities in others which may eclipse those of the current leader.  Or it may be a lack of certainty about how to develop those characteristics in another, a view that prospective successors either “have got it” or they don’t.  Whatever the reason, effective succession is the most frequent cause of once-strong entities becoming weak.  It’s as true in Nicaragua as it is in the United States. All the greatness of a transformational leader becomes but an historical footnote if he/she has not prioritized succession as the most important piece of his/her legacy.  It’s the difference between giving a fish versus teaching to fish.

The good news here is that this leader, among his other strengths, indicates that he sees the critical need for this development in his organization.  He has asked for help in addressing how to create future, holistic visionaries from a population limited in education and leadership experience.  (This is not hard for him to imagine, as he is limited in his own ability to read or write.)  He has begun to avail himself of tools that can develop such succession thinking, in the form of Open Book Management techniques and Lean Process Improvement methodologies.  He acknowledges both the organizational importance and potential detriment of his role as a high-impact leader of the organization.  These are crucial first steps in a very difficult balance in protecting both the current and future states of the coop, which already exists in a context of significant and sudden changes, whether natural or man-made.

For Winds of Peace, making a loan to an organization which presents reasonable capacity for repayment is relatively simple.  A group that is blessed with strong and visionary leadership is more difficult to find.  But an organization that recognizes the essential need for excellent next-generation leadership is the difference between a cooperative of the moment and a transformational legacy for the future….