When I give my money, it makes me a hero for a day. When people in poverty learn different mindsets to replace the old poverty thinking, they see change instantly and they become the hero’s and the authors of their own new life story.
Recently in the UK an evening telethon event, called Comic Relief, was hosted to raise money to help end poverty. This yearly ‘national institution’ is always massively successful, raising over £72 million this year. The programme is charged with heart breaking emotion as we watch film clips and hear stories that illustrate the desperate plight of vulnerable people around the world.
Underpinned with a challenge to the nation to, ‘Beat Last Years Giving’, the viewers are drawn into a race, cheered on hour after hour to pick up their phones and pledge more.
This year, like all others years, that challenge was not only met, but seriously surpassed.
Now the show is over and we’re left basking in the disbelief that such an unbelievable amount of money could be raised in just one night, but I’m left with one question…. what happens next?
What comes after Comic Relief and Famine Relief and Crisis Relief? Let me be very clear from the outset of this blog - I support the DEC (Disasters Emergency Committee), I support MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station), and in times past I have supported Comic Relief.
I do it because I believe in saving lives from the brink of death, regardless of how they got in that situation.
Yet after we’ve given in response to chronic and often unbearable suffering, something needs to happens next, to ensure we’re not back raising money for the same group of people this time next year?
During the Comic Relief programme we watched a little girl walking across one of the worlds’ vast garbage dumps; a place where people are often seen scavenging to stay alive. The camera tracked her bare feet, as she picked her way through broken glass and filth. We watch, feeling helpless and appalled. We see how small and vulnerable she is and our hearts lurch. Then the camera pans away and we lose her from view as a voice entreats us to come to her aid and give. The narrator says that our money will pay to get her away from the dump, to a new home ‘somewhere’ and to a new life.
Who surely wouldn’t want that for this little girl?
How do you actually get her away from the garbage dump and what is needed to make sure that she ends up safe, fed, educated, but most of all, able and equipped to write a different story with her own life than the script that has been handed to her.
Dandora is a community built on the edge of Nairobi’s Garbage dump. It's the size of Central Park, with rubbish piled as high as a 2-story building. The reality of lives of children in and around such dumpsites doesn’t even come close to what we see on our screens… it’s far worse. I have some experience of the reality behind the TV images and some experience of what it takes to change the story.
In most cases children and parents scavenge on the rubbish dump together. Or in other situations the family will beg on the street, hoping that someone will come by and change their life for them.
Poverty and hopelessness appear intractable, but there are some things we need to confront.
The first is that it is often an intergenerational way of being. The child learns to live in the same way that the parents are living and their parents before them. So we have to address intergenerational hopelessness.
Secondly, poverty swiftly moves from the belly to the head of a young child. In the 12 countries that Emerging Leaders has been working in, over the past decade, we see young children running up to Westerners asking for money. When did they learn that the answer to their future comes from the supposedly rich outsider giving them a handout? They learned it by observing the previous generations response to poverty. Even in children, poverty moves to become a mindset very quickly. To end poverty for the girl on the Garbage dump we have to get the Garbage dump out of her mindsets.. The mindsets that say
“I cant’; it wont change; nothing works out for me; “they” need to fix things; I cant be bothered; that's the way I am; I can only think of one solution; its my turn to eat”
It is the daily recycling of these mindsets that ensure that the beliefs, the emotions and the actions of the poor keep them poor.
If we don't change the mindsets the story for this little girl and a billion others will stay the same. Ending poverty must involve ending poverty mindsets and that requires that we get leadership development to every single person caught up in the world’s most vulnerable communities.
We trained a few trainers to deliver life changing, transformational leadership to the women of the rubbish dump of Dandora. When they arrived for the training this is what they said
“Every day we just go to the dump and scavenge for food….and then wait to die”.
But what happened next?
These ladies were taught HOW to lead their own lives, lead their relationships, and lead their finances and a project to benefit their community. They are now running income generating projects and getting themselves and their children out of poverty, to a safe place and a different future. They are getting their child off the dump by getting the ‘dump’ out of themselves and the child’s mindsets.
When I give my money, it makes me a hero for a day. When people in poverty learn different mindsets to replace the old poverty ones, they see change instantly and they become the hero’s; they become the authors of their own new life story.
So here is my question. Why is it so hard to raise money for transformational change, to ensure people learn to lead their lives and get themselves out of poverty?
I will continue to give money to Crisis Relief charities so that a child will live and not die…but I will continue to invest my life in ensuring that children, youth and people everywhere receive training in mindset change, so they don't just survive, but are equipped to write their own unique life story.
“Without mindset change the story will stay the same”
www.emerging-leaders.net/what-we-do