In the Hand of Dante

Interfaith, international relations, food, digital social contract, humanitarian concerns, and tea. Nothing in isolation.

Losing old gods, finding nature

…traditional religions with their beliefs in non-material divine beings are in decline…new forms of spirituality have been filling the cultural niches previously occupied by conventional religions. I argue that the forms I document in Dark Green Religion are much more likely to survive than longstanding religions, which involved beliefs in invisible, non-material beings. This is because most contemporary nature spiritualities are sensory (based on what we perceive with our senses, sometimes enhanced by clever gadgets), and thus sensible. They also tend to promote ecologically adaptive behaviors, which enhances the survival prospects of their carriers, and thus their own long-term survival prospects.

Terrorism, poverty, and violence

It’s not that poverty doesn’t move them, but more correctly it is an interpretation of poverty that radicalizes (and is itself radical).

When I started my studies at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, I made the mistake of joking with a German colleague. We were discussing “terrorism” as a theoretical construct and I parroted the oft-repeated line that views terrorism as an outlet to poverty. This particular interpretation (which, I must be clear, I do not believe), is that for people living in poverty, the promise of money, power, and most importantly, food, can drive people to do horrific things. My colleague’s response to my joke: “That’s bulls***. It’s a fortune-cookie truism, Tim. Too simple.”

Zing!

We now know that petty criminals and regular foot soldiers are definitely susceptible to offers of money, guns, and stability. Look at how successful the Somali pirates are. They provide something to people who don’t have much. But we also know that many high-profile evildoer types are far from poor. Osama bin Laden has some kind of advanced degree. Many of the 9/11 hijackers were no strangers to the classroom. Much of the theory that surrounds extremism in all its forms comes from the halls of academia.

So it is with the Underpants Bomber [because I can] Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who certainly did not come from a life of poverty. For me, the quotation that begins this post is the most telling and complete explanation of the lure of extremist viewpoints in the modern age. Not poverty but an interpretation of poverty is the recruiting tool. I’m reminded of Archbishop Camara of Brazil, one of the central minds of liberation theology, who famously said:

When I feed the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

My Del.icio.us links Dec 13-Jan 23

Religious literacy

US Airways flight diverted after passenger “caught” praying.

How’s that for a headline? Let’s go with our gut reaction – it was a Muslim, wasn’t it?

Wrong.

Those lines are lifted from the news story. What kind of a person wraps straps around his head to pray? Jews, that’s who. Observe:

Yeah. A plane was diverted because the flight crew was concerned that a passenger was praying. As it turns out, Orthodox Jews wrap their arm with a black strap and tie a small box to their heads. The accoutrement is called tefillin, and it’s actually pretty cool. The box contains scripture verses, and the arrangement of the straps on the fingers actually looks like Hebrew letters.

Two important take-aways:

1. I’m sure that the young Jewish man’s response to the flight attendant was “I’m praying.” The tone was probably the same as it would be if I was asked why I was breathing air: “I need oxygen to live.” Such responses should be the end of conversations. Why on earth anybody would be worried about a 17-year-old boy wrapping a leather strap around his head is beyond me. Are we really that scared of the unknown?

2. The more important issue here is something that we refer to in the interfaith education sphere as religious literacy. Stephen Prothero addresses our shortcomings in his book by the same name (Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t). Americans are woefully ignorant of traditions not their own. An incident like the aforementioned “prayer alert” is evidence of this. Also germane to our social, theological, ecological, and political processes, we are woefully ignorant of our own traditions.

Religious literacy looks like a hot-button issue from the air. We are concerned about schooling people, especially young people, about religion in general because it rubs against our wall of separation between church and state. Maybe some of that friction is good – we’d stop having silly incidents like these.

Prayers have power, but they’re not a security issue. We should learn this.

NB: If you really want to read the news coverage of this non-event-event, the BBC and NYTimes both have it.

Five myths around disaster relief

Edward Brown, relief director for World Vision, debunks five myths around disaster relief. I offer my thoughts on each point in place of Brown’s remarks. This came in the form of a Facebook note:

1. Collecting blankets, shoes and clothing is a cost-effective way to help – When I worked with The 1010 Project, we collected things like computers and notebooks for our partners in Kenya. In the aftermath of election violence in early 2008, we were able to provide materiel that aided in reconstruction and job training.
2. If I send cash, my help won’t get there – Sure it will! Even the most incredibly effective aid organizations have to “borrow” off the top of donations to fund operations. In the case of Haiti and other emergency situations, aid dollars are earmarked for immediate use, even if the funds aren’t technically immediately on hand. EG: The Red Cross has raised many dozens of millions of essentially borrowed dollars, but since the actual donations won’t balance for a few weeks, the Red Cross will essentially be working on borrowed money.
3. Volunteers are desperately needed in emergency situations – Yeah! Volunteer, just not in a disaster zone. Many nonprofits operating on the ground in Haiti need help recording donations and processing the flow of other donations. Help them out, or offer to handle other mundane tasks. Vacuuming an office during a busy week can make a world of difference.
4. Unaccompanied children should be adopted as quickly as possible to get them out of dangerous conditions – Unless you are a charity that deals directly with “orphans”, maybe you could just cool it for a little while. Let proper guardians step forward, and if none are available, then activate your networks.
5. People are helpless in the face of natural disasters – Absolute nonsense.  Give a social entrepreneur a dollar, and they’ll stretch it in a dozen different directions. Small-scale aid projects can be carried out by on-the-ground partners while larger orgs debate procedure and directives.

That being said there is still a lot that has to happen in Haiti to make reconstruction work. Let’s hope that we dump the disaster-emergency language and move towards reconstruction-help dialogue.

Philanthrocapitalism – The Year of Giving Dangerously

I saw this exciting piece over at Philanthrocapitalism about…philanthrocapitalism, of all things, in 2010. Here’s a super-good thing to put at #3:

3) Malaria will be the cause of the year, centered on the World Cup in South Africa. The Malaria No More campaign, backed by Bill Gates and a bunch of corporate sponsors including Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, has been gathering momentum in 2009 and its publicity is due to peak around the global media event of the year in the summer of 2010. With the world focused on Africa, political leaders and the continent’s super-rich will be under pressure to show that they are committed to the fight to stop this preventable disease that kills a million people a year.

via Philanthrocapitalism » The Year of Giving Dangerously.

It’s going to be a good year.

Poorism

Ode Magazine, which I once subscribed to, ran a story this past April called “Slum tours: Traveling off the beaten path” detailing the rise of what some have dubbed “poorism”, or traipsing through the slums of this planet for an alternative travel experience. Coming from Ode, I figured that this would be a hit piece – I was wrong. The author actually did some “pooring” in the favelas of Rio. According to the article:

Slum tours offer travelers an authentic, offbeat look at foreign cultures—and locals a new way to make a living.

Authentic? Sure! Offbeat? How can 1/6 of the earth’s population’s lifestyle be considered “offbeat”? To her credit, the author does point out this fact. She doesn’t sound like the kind of visitor to a foreign country that makes many of us cringe, but the tour that she describes definitely gives me that feeling. Imagine the marketing that these slum tour operators must use: Come see the REAL Rio! You’ve seen the Taj Mahal, now see how millions of impoverished Indians live! Hideous capitalist mindsets run amok? I doubt it. These are regular people trying to make a living, and their product is hot.

The photo that accompanies this post is of my “impact assessment team” (me and Mark Mann) from The 1010 Project moving through the Korogocho slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Korogocho was the toughest spot I had seen in Kenya – open sewers, schoolchildren eating and learning in chicken coops, and sheet-metal homes. A few days later, my team went to Kibera. That’s the big one. Smaller in size only to Soweto in South Africa, Kibera is the slum featured in the (awesome) film “Constant Gardener”. In many ways, Kibera was a lot like Korogocho: packed to the gills with people, poor, and dangerous (like any city). But when I left Kibera, I found myself absolutely drained emotionally. That’s not an easy thing to do.

I cannot imagine poorism being a rewarding trip for anybody. Dive-bombing into an impoverished community and moving on after snapping a few interesting pictures can be spiritually dangerous. Having a sustained relationship with the slums and favelas of the world would ameliorate this, I feel, and provide the “locals a new way to make a living” that is founded on up-to-date understandings of humanitarian assistance, compassion, and friendship.

Malaria in the Bay Area – Secret Strategy Document

The following message is a highly-confidential, eyes-only communique from our secret plans to do good.

Some of you know that I am a Faiths Act Fellow with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation. The Fellowship is 30 religiously-diverse young people, based in cities across the US, UK, and Canada, who are building multifaith hubs of action towards the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and malaria eradication. My site-partner Hafsa Arain and I are placed in the Bay Area.

For starters, the phrase “Bay area” is really a catch-all for anything within 50 miles of the San Francisco Bay. From our home office in San Jose, at the south end, we regularly trek all the way up the Peninsula for meetings in San Francisco, or shoot up the East Bay to discuss upcoming events with partners in Berkeley and Moraga. It’s not that the South Bay doesn’t have everything that we need – we’ve simply decided to cast the net wide, as it were.

Here’s the basic idea: “To create a sustainable intercollegiate network of interfaith councils in the Bay Area that can share information, events, and resources to collaborate on UN Millennium Development Goals/malaria work in order to establish or expand each individual campus’s interfaith work.”

Right now, we’re two and a half months in and we meet regularly with Stanford University, Saint Mary’s College of California, University of California – Berkeley, and Santa Clara University. All the schools are at various stages of organization regarding student-led interfaith initiatives, but wherever we are with them, they are wonderful people.

For the spring, we’ve got some outrageous events coming up: A Bloodsuckers Ball (featuring vampires and mosquitoes), a leadership retreat for our student partners, a few service events around the Bay, and many more. Plus, we’re working with the Interfaith Millennium Development Goals Coalition – Point 7 Now (http://www.imdgc.org) to organize the youth side of the “One Voice of Faith” conference. And of course there’s World Malaria Day on the 25th of April. As we ramp up our work in 2010, we’ll eventually begin large-scale outreach to loads of different faith communities to help spread the message of malaria eradication.Questions? Comments?

The rocky coast in Jenner

Far to the right, you can just see the edge of Goat Rock, where my ignition coil exploded in September. Ah…memories.

Playing with the big dogs, on Twitter and otherwise

There is no end to blog posts from experts declaring the need to “separate noise from signal” and “engage your community” while getting out there in social web promotion. As nonprofits, we understand this. No joke. We get it.

I spent 13 months with The 1010 Project in Denver, coordinating fundraising and our social web life. In July of 2009, I left The 1010 Project for a job with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation. I now do a bit of consulting for The 1010 Project along with the former Director of Communication Mark Mann (now heading up Denvelopers), who handled all the coding and web design and SEO stuff. Since leaving, and with the benefit of distance (physical and otherwise), I have realized what we were really aiming for and accomplishing with our forays into the social web. Three milestones (we’ll use that word for now) have enabled me to take a look back and understand how we made things happen.

1. The 1010 Project came in 1st (disclaimer: it was an alphabetical list! ) on Lon Cohen’s list of “26 Charities on Twitter“, which attracted a lot of attention (and followers) on Mashable in April. We were in very, very good company on that list.

2. Follow Fridays have been good to the organization this year. We are regularly grouped into #FF tweets with other luminaries like charity:water, Save the Children, and the National Wildlife Federation.

3. Yasamin Beitollahi, a marketing strategist and Huffington Post blogger, included The 1010 Project in her “Tis the Season for Charitable Giving: 7 Extraordinary Nonprofits on Twitter“. Some of the other luminaries? LIVESTRONG, Habitat for Humanity, and Susan G. Komen For the Cure.

Compared to these other nonprofits, The 1010 Project lags behind in almost every conceivable dimension. Since our founding in 2003, we’ve spent (in total) less than many of these organizations spend in one month. We have (as of December 2009) just shy of 2000 followers on Twitter. How have we managed to play with the big dogs?

We’ve been genuine. We’ve been honest. The quote that begins this post is not so much something that we learned from other bloggers as it is something that came naturally to us, as a community-benefit organization. We simply translated what we would do face-to-face to what we would do digitally. We had conversations (a staple of successful “How to Tweet” posts), we told friends about other like-minded orgs, and we never for a minute harangued about ROI (return on investment) or anything like that.

As a humanitarian organization, we did what we knew was right. We connected with people, albeit through tweets. And those tweets have landed us friends/followers, digital evangelists, and some money. We played with the big dogs because we knew that digital tools are equalizers, and that having a human behind a URL can make a world of difference. By viewing the web as an extension of real life, we made those relationships work.

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