No, we haven’t abandoned this project 🙂 we were away for a much needed break. We are now back with lots of thoughts, ideas, stories and motivation that we hope will inspire us all to #startwithsomething.
Till we get things together, we’ll leave you with a great video to watch. A TED talk by Dan Pallotta, it addresses the fundamental problem that organisations trying to do good suffer from. It’s a shame and we should be embarrassed that this is the generic mindset. There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we think about doing good, and it needs to start with us. Now.
It’s such a powerful talk I struggled to choose the most impactful bit; but here’s an excerpt:
“Philanthropy is the market for love. It is the market for all those people for whom there is no other market coming. So if we really want a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation. But it doesn’t seem to be working.
Why have our breast cancer charities not come close to finding a cure for breast cancer, or our homeless charities not come close to ending homelessness in any major city? Why has poverty remained stuck at 12% of the U.S. population for 40 years? And the answer is, these social problems are massive in scale, our organizations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny. We have two rulebooks. We have one for the nonprofit sector, and one for the rest of the economic world. It’s an apartheid, and it discriminates against the nonprofit sector…
…You want to make $50 million selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We’ll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you’re considered a parasite yourself…”
A must watch.
