- Provides centralized dispatch for help through Solidarity Network
Juan Carr, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Organization: Red Solidaria
www.redsolidaria.org.ar
Juan Carr has created the Solidarity Network, a new spin-off of the traditional telephone hotline. Whereas traditional hotlines tend to provide counsel or services around specific issues, Juan's hotline acts as a bridge between those who need any type of help and others who are equipped to provide it. Armed with a cadre of over 100 volunteers who work three-hour shifts, the Network takes on the entire gamut of social problems as they arise, ranging from domestic violence to cancer treatment to flood assistance. After listening to the caller and assessing his or her needs, the Network volunteer links the caller with the appropriate agency or organization that can help.
When floods left 400,000 people homeless on Argentina's flat plains several years ago, the Solidarity Network telephone hotline responded in typical fashion by linking those who were washed from their homes with those watching their plight on television. To do so, they united trucking companies, Catholic charities, and thousands of individual volunteers in an improptu campaign that collected and delivered food and clothing to 200,000 people in just one week. And they did it with their secret weapon: the telephone.
This "hands-off" approach to solving social problems allows the Network not only to maximize their number of cases, but also to tap into the vast and often unused reserves of human compassion, and create opportunities for direct encounters between strangers who would not otherwise have become involved in each other's lives.
- Creating a community-managed revolving fund for the emergency relief needs of women's savings collectives
Somsook Boonyabancha, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Organization: Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) and Community Organizations Development Institute
www.achr.net and www.codi.or.th
Contact: codi@codi.or.th
Somsook's network (ACHR) and the Slum Dwellers International network are working closely in setting up three community-managed revolving funds and allocating resources directly to women's savings collectives in Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India. The three funds are for emergency relief and for the restoration of livelihoods, land, and housing. They are concerned that the next challenge facing displaced poor families will be the loss of secure tenure. The ACHR and SDI networks in Asia aim to keep a people-centered process on track in the face of an onslaught of aid offers from NGOs, governments, and so on.
Throughout her career Somsook's first priority has been to develop a practical way land-sharing can be made to work. Only when ordinary squatter communities, officials, and developers can make land-sharing work, is it sensible for her to focus on spreading it.
The squatters invest most of their savings and endless weekends of labor building their own homes. Shacks gradually acquire cinder block walls and expand. However, since they don't have title to the land, their investment is constantly at risk. It certainly cannot be used as security for the non-usurious loans that might start a business or manage a family emergency affordably. This sort of impermanence, of growing uncertainty, gives the squatters a sense of rootlessness, which in turn subtly undercuts their ability to build strong family and community cohesion. If these families are in fact ultimately evicted, everything they have built up—human as much as physical structures—will be swept away in an afternoon.
Although the basic idea of the land-sharing deal is simple, making it work is not. Two of the most complex undertakings in modern society are community organizing and property development. Crossing the two, especially across the deep chasms that separate urban squatters from those focused on shopping malls and office skyscrapers, multiplies the challenge.
Somsook has devoted much effort and enterprise to working her way to a simple, proven approach others could follow. Although each land-sharing process and deal is to some degree unique, reflecting the specific human, physical, and economic realities of each site, successful approaches virtually have to begin by helping the squatters actively organize to articulate and press for their interests, beginning with the right to stay on at least some of the land. Only when there is such an organized group are negotiations with the landlord/developer realistic.
- Trains mountaineers in search and rescue to reach remote survivors
Nasuh Mahruki, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Istanbul, Turkey
Organization: AKUT Search and Rescue Team
www.nasuhmahruki.com
nmahruki@superonline.com
Nasuh Mahruki is an incredibly accomplished mountaineer: He is the first Turk to climb Everest, the youngest person to climb the highest mountains on the seven continents and has scaled what is possibly the world's most dangerous and toughest peak-K2. He was also awarded the title 'Snow Leopard' by the Russian Mountain Climbing Federation for climbing the 5 highest peaks in ex-Soviet Asia. But Mahruki also puts his moutaineering talents to use as a social entrepreneur.
The enormous 1999 earthquake in his home city of Istanbul rocked Mahruki into his higher calling. Heartened that rescue teams, equipment and aid flowed in from 68 other countries in the aftermath of the disaster, Mahruki founded a voluntary search-and-rescue society, called AKUT Arama Kurtarma Dernei.
Now 400 members strong, the society has responded to earthquakes in Greece, Taiwan, India and Iran, and has helped flood survivors in Mozambique.
- Transforms youth development tactics to serve those traumatized by disaster
Sonali Ojha, Ashoka Fellow
Organization: Dream Catcher's Foundation
Location: India
Sonali Ojha, founder of an organization to empower street children, has applied her innovative and participatory curriculum to children affected by the Tsunami in India. The scope of the new project involved merging the various inquiry-based techniques and tools to lead healing conversation with children; leading life affirming conversations over a 13-week, 40-session program; and developing sports leagues and other activities to reintegrate children into regular lives.
Sonali's curriculum, created with the help of street children, uses a participatory, child-centered learning initiative that helps children struck by hardship or disaster to see the possibilities in life and connect to their inner source of worth, strength and confidence. While most organizations working with street children or those affected by disaster address problems of food, clothing, and shelter, Sonali's key insight from working with the children themselves is that, in order to help them learn to live healthy, productive lives, they also need emotional support from the adults who work with them.
Using this innovative and participatory curriculum as the catalyst for change, Sonali trains other organizations working with children in order to bring about a monumental shift in the focus in addressing children's emotional needs.
- Deploys anti-corruption network to monitor disaster fund distribution to survivors
Harlans M. Fachra, Ashoka Fellow
Organization: West Java Corruption Watch
Location: Indonesia
Through his anti-corruption network, Harlans M. Fachra is working on monitoring the disaster fund being distributed to the Tsunami survivors. In support of "One Heart for Aceh's" work, Harlans is starting to identify students from Aceh studying in Bandung who are in crucial need of financial support. This effort is being undertaken in addition to the local government's support to cover educational fees for the students.
- Creating a nationwide movement for distributing to far-flung rural areas vital resources that would otherwise end up as wasted excess in urban and middle-class households
Anshu Gupta, Ashoka Fellow
Organization: GOONJ
www.goonj.info
Location: Faridabad, India
Contact: anshu_goonj1@yahoo.co.in
Anshu Gupta's efforts to involve multiple stakeholders goes beyond the realm of "charity" and plays a crucial role in the development process. Anshu has organized an effective distribution channel for disposing off reusable resources lying in urban, well-off households. Through shifting surplus urban resources to some of the poverty-stricken rural areas, Anshu is making a difference in the lives of thousands who lack the basic resources needed for survival. At the same time, his efforts are bringing about a change in the mind-set of the urban population about the optimal utilization of vital resources through concepts like recycle and reuse.
Anshu has started with the distribution of recycled clothes as an entry point into the movement. Apart from being one of the basic needs of mankind, Anshu has witnessed cases where a few pieces of clothing has freed up meager resources of the poor for more pressing needs, thus saving families from a debt cycle for borrowing to buy clothes before a festival or even as a dire necessity.
Efforts at distributing clothes is often deemed at best a "charitable" act, but Anshu sees such action playing a far greater role, where the necessity for such an outlet lies as much with the donors as with the beneficiaries. His idea tends to bridge the gap between the supply that exists due to urban phenomena like space constraints and rising consumerism on one hand and demands for basic commodities that exists with millions in the country. His aim is to ultimately make large-scale resource mobilization a reality and to further apply his model with clothing to other critical resources, e.g., medicines and books.
Increasingly, Anshu's strategy has also been to focus on disaster preparedness. The idea is to spread the network in such a way that any time a disaster strikes, the local organizations can contact GOONJ for relief material that can reach them at the earliest. The idea is not to store and then wait for a disaster to strike, but rather to work on establishing connections so that by just a single mail or call the network of Volunteers, schools, corporates, supporters, transporters swing into action. The trial run of this worked very well during the Gujarat riots where GOONJ was able to collect truckloads of material within a few days time and support thousands.
- Introducing long-term social security for vulnerable poor communities who are subject to repeated disasters–natural and man-made
Mihir Bhatt, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Organization: All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI)
www.southasiadisasters.net
Contact: dmi@icenet.co.in
Focusing the issue from the victim's point of view, Mihir aims to integrate disaster mitigation with social development at the conceptual, policy, and implementation level of programs.
"Nowhere in the world are such large populations affected and so repeatedly," says Mihir. "There was a big gap between the charity work being done by individuals and the big relief measures (government). I moved into that gap." Disasters, he says, must be analyzed from the long-term effect it has on the community, and that "mitigation is not a separate stage after relief. It must be present in every stage of the disaster cycle." He is therefore changing the dominance of the existing paradigm of keeping disaster mitigation and social security separate, by making a case for the integrative perspective and putting it on the national agenda.
The genesis of Mihir's innovation lies in understanding the government's and other stakeholders' propensity to treat disasters as isolated aberrations that need to be "overcome" so that work can revert to "normal." The emphasis is on the event—floods, earthquakes, accidents or riots—and not on the link to society in normal times. Thus relief measures are far removed from social security or development plans and schemes.
Beginning in Gujarat, which has been subject to repeated disasters like earthquakes, flood,s and communal riots, Mihir's efforts have been to promote community-based, people-centric disaster risk mitigation, bottom up, and reduce short-term dependence on the so-called "relief measures." His focus is on helping the poor in disaster-prone areas create secure mechanisms and institutions as part of a comprehensive approach to disaster preparedness and quick recovery. Mihir then works toward aligning the government, citizen sector organizations, and other national and international stakeholders and agencies around these community institutions.
Mihir works through AIDMI, an action-learning center that incorporates best practices evolved by different government and nongovernment agencies and donors, and most importantly, the local communities. As Mihir observes: "Communities know how to reduce risks. They learn from their losses but cannot always use this knowledge effectively. We facilitate such learning . . . . try to make these insights available from one community to another; from one humanitarian effort to the next and from one disaster to another." The people are treated as "partners" in disaster mitigation and social security and the emphasis is on solutions that change relationships and structures in society and, hence, pave the way for social transformation.
"Local people can take small steps to make a big difference in reducing their vulnerabilities," believes Mihir. Therefore he has adopted a bottom-up, participatory approach, documenting traditional knowledge and then creating strategies that are based on the communities' experience that take into account the cultural, social, and economic sensitivities of the people and the area. It is an ongoing process that enriches and equips the program and the community for the future.
- Mobilizes rural communities
Chamnong Jitnirat, Ashoka Fellow
Organization: Housing Development Foundation
Location: Ubonratchathani, Thailand
Chamnong has been working at the forefront of the community development movement in Bangkok since the early 1980s. Following the Tsunami in December 2004, he provided front-line assistance mobilizing rural communities in the affected areas, not only ensuring their feeling of solidarity during particularly devastating period and after, but also brokering accurate messages about their challenges to the media eager to follow developments.
Throughout his career Chamnong's enterprises have focused on slum communities to defend their rights to education, health services, and stable, sanitary living conditions. Chamnong works from the premise that organizing and mobilizing slum communities—and most importantly, developing the leadership capacity within them—will have significant long-term benefits for the social, economic, and human development of some of the poorest segments of the Thai population. His comprehensive approach to the problem of managing slum communities in more equitable ways focuses on developing human capacity.
A critical aspect of Chamnong's work is his long-term strategy of drawing locally organized communities into a larger national movement on urban community development. He hopes to coordinate the efforts of slum communities in Bangkok with others in outlying provinces to sow the seeds of national legal reform on urban housing issues. To this end, Chamnong employs slum community leaders from his programs in Bangkok as the trainers and developers of future leaders in the outlying provinces where he is now working. The seasoned leaders will share their experiences, help implement known and successful solutions, and create the beginnings of a national peer network of slum leaders.
Chamnong's Housing Development Foundation was one of the first to focus on community development. It successfully mobilized and supported many slum communities in Bangkok and attracted financial support from international agencies. Chamnong was behind the establishment of various coordinating committees for citizen sector organizations concerned with management of poor urban communities in Bangkok. It was during this period that he joined forces with Ashoka Fellow Somsook Boonyabancha—an architect—whose idea of land-sharing between slum inhabitants and land developers, and whose approach to urban planning have created a natural partnership with Chamnong's grassroots leadership development efforts.
- Mobilizes an assessment of phased response to disaster using input from local leaders
Pisit Chansanoh, Ashoka Fellow
Organization: Yad Fon Association (Raindrop Association)
Location: Trang, Thailand
Pisit Chansonoh, whose network of fishing communities in Trang province was greatly affected, has joined a coalition of NGOs called the NGO Court, which is working with the local leaders to assess what needs to be done in the wake of the Tsunami. They are also implementing a three-phase recovery plan that includes short-term, mid-term, and long-term strategies.
In his primary work, Chansnoh is demonstrating how local wisdom and traditional fishing techniques can reclaim degraded coastal wetlands and improve the way of life for poor fishermen and their families. His program assists them in organizing to protect their fishing grounds and in devising strategies to increase their earning power.
Yad Fon (Raindrop Association), assists fishermen in protecting their local fishing grounds and the mangrove swamps which are the nursery of the future catch. Their fishing grounds need protection from trawlers which illegally fish within the three kilometer limit using nets and dynamite. The fishing areas are also seriously threatened by the local charcoal industry and from profitable shrimp farms whose waste fouls marine breeding areas.
Working closely with fisher folk, respectful of their customs and mores, traditional knowledge and techniques, Yad Fon's field workers identify problems and help find solutions. The resulting strategies form a multi-layered approach to wetland conservation and reclamation which relies on traditional technologies, as well as cooperation and information-sharing with other fishing villages, citizens' organizations with complementary goals, and cooperative government agencies or officials.
- Trains communities in disaster response/preparedness
Eko Teguh Paripurno, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Organization: KAPPALA Indonesia
kappala.com
Contact: ekoteguh@indo.net.id
Working with communities endangered by volcanoes, floods, forest fires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, Eko Paripurno is finding new ways for citizens and government to anticipate and respond to nature's sometimes violent mood swings. The Indonesian government's response to disaster is often criticized, but until Eko no one was helping the people plan, prepare, and change the way they understand disasters. Eko has developed a system for early warning, rapid response, rehabilitation, reconstruction, and prevention that shifts the balance of responsibility and authority in crises more toward communities. Eko is also changing local government perspectives by advocating for sound planning in development, construction, and natural resource use—all of which can lessen the damage wrought by unforeseen natural catastrophes.
Indonesia is prone to calamity, from volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tidal waves, to floods, mudslides, and severe droughts. Despite the wide scope and the frequency of disaster, the government does not plan in advance, does not have adequate early warning systems, and does not build infrastructure to respond efficiently and effectively when calamity hits.
Without this foresight, the government ends up responding in only two ways: providing emergency relief supplies and evacuating victims from affected areas. It decides unilaterally which areas should be cleared out, without seeking input from citizens or community organizations. The unfortunate result is that evacuation is usually much broader than necessary and fails to account for different needs and for people's potential to return and rebuild.
Eko has a sophisticated system of early warning, rapid-response, reconstruction, prevention, and preparation. At each stage Eko draws out and incorporates local knowledge and practices regarding disaster response. For example, early on he identifies and documents the traditional signals people used to foresee impending disasters. One good example is how people beat on hollow tree trunks to warn each other of impending floods.
During another stage he helps people return to their communities, if possible, to assess damage and the potential for repair, to begin fixing homes, and to search for lost livestock. While many may be afraid to return, Eko facilitates communities' regaining confidence and restoring a sense of solidarity by organizing cultural expositions, which revive a sense of community and value for tradition.
Eko identifies disaster-prone areas and helps the community come up with ways to prevent or limit impact—activities that differ depending on the kind of natural disaster a community may face. This includes a combination of community activity and government advocacy. For example, in a flood prone area the community builds retaining walls or raises houses further off the ground, whereas in a village near a volcano the community builds a road to expedite evacuation. Too often outsiders who do not know the land and surrounding environment conduct the research upon which government policy is based.
- Providing short-term support to victims and long-term reconstruction for affected communities
P.N. Singham, Ashoka Fellow
Organization: SEED (Social, Economical and Environmental Developers)
Location: Sri Lanka
Contact: seedva@sltnet.lk
Shortly after the tsunami struck Sri Lanka, Singham mobilized emergency relief operations across the Vavuniya district. Combining its holistic work with internally displaced people, immediate response activities, and over-all emergency coordination, SEED aided the relief effort through a network of supporters in Germany. Money was collected and then spent directly, without bureaucratic involvement, to ameliorate the damage done to the island's east coast.
In the five days after December 26, SEED established 10 collection centers for the coordination of relief operations and distribution of relief items; through these collection centers, dry rations, medical supplies, and clothing were distributed to 470 families in the surrounding districts. On January 4, the SEED team committed to providing immediate support and long-term rehabilitation to 400 families, with all relief work applying SEED's holistic approach.
Prior to his disaster relief work, Singham focused his development efforts at an organic farm he founded both to produce healthy food and to bring long-time warring factions of Tamils and Singhalese together. Singham, a Tamil with German citizenship, recognizes that peace needs economic progress to survive. Accordingly, he is leading an exemplary reconstruction effort.
Singham founded SEED after he returned to Sri Lanka. In Vavuniya, a small town 140 miles north of the capital Colombo, there are already 40 employees and 20 volunteers. Their workplace is the ghost region of the north, where the civil war began in 1983. The conflict between the government and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, known as the Tamil Tigers) went on to take 70,00 lives. It drove 1.5 million people from their homes and turned the economic clock back by decades. Villages were destroyed, spirits broken.
Most of the 65 deaf children are victims of the war, having lost father or mother or both. Children who can neither hear nor speak are at a disadvantage in times of hunger and flight. "Many handicapped people here vegetate their entire lives in dark huts," says Singham. The 14 teachers have training in sign language and, more important, endless patience. The children's relatives also receive instruction, expanding the circle of people with whom the children can communicate and increasing their mobility.
SEED's aim is to improve living conditions in as many areas as possible simultaneously. The soul and the economy should convalesce together. Next to the school, communities were built for several hundred war widows and their families. Each includes houses, gardens, wells, stores, and a community center. The organization assists the inhabitants in earning money through piece work at home so that they do not have to leave their children. SEED takes in street kids no one else wants, and has built a five acre model farm to test organic methods of agriculture.
- Involves women directly in community-led disaster relief and development
Prema Gopalan, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Mumbai, India
Organization: Swayam Shikshan Prayog
Organization: www.sspindia.org
Contact: sspindia@vsnl.net
Reacting powerfully and strategically to earthquakes in Maharashtra State since 1993, Prema Gopalan and her organization Swayam Shikshan Prayog have been strengthening community participation to mitigate the effects of disasters and to position communities for better anticipating how to respond in the future. The thrust of her approach relies on involving women directly in facilitating policy at the government level and taking ownership at the local level. This work aims to put rural poor women at the center of decentralized, democratic, basic-service management.
Over the last three years, SSP has facilitated a learning exchange among grassroots women's groups to share lessons from community-led disaster relief and development, local governance, and economic initiatives across several countries and regions of the world. To increase her impact Prema spreads her lessons learned as a steering committee member of GROOTS International—a network of autonomous grassroots women's organizations around the world) and leads the People Centered Disaster Group of the Huairou Commission—a partnership coalition of UN agencies, development organizations, and grassroots groups working in support of women and habitat issues.
Prema began her work with SSP in 1989. Her search for economic alternatives for women belonging to poor communities led her to pioneer the work with savings and credit in rural Maharashtra. But her real lesson came when she began working directly with women's groups and communities in the socially and economically underdeveloped districts of Latur and Osmanabad after the devastating earthquake in September 1993. In the Maharashtra Emergency Earthquake Rehabilitation Program, SSP performed as community-participation consultant to the Government of Maharashtra and implemented its model for the community-driven reconstruction program across 2,000,000 households in 1,300 villages.
In her 1995-1998 partnership with the state government in the post-earthquake rehabilitation program, Prema realized that rural women who were stepping out of their homes for the first time in their lives to organize themselves into groups can grow to establish themselves as planners in local development and governance. Building on the capacities of the grassroots women's collectives during the reconstruction efforts, SSP later steered the community groups through a broad-based development strategy to address the economic necessities and social empowerment of women and the poor.
- Introducing a method of collective decision-making in northwest Pakistan to respond to disasters and environmental problems generally
Shaukat Ali Sharar, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Karachi, Pakistan
Organization: Shaukat and Associates
Contact: sharar@brain.net.pk
Shaukat Sharar is an architect with more than 10 years of design and construction experience in NWFP, especially in Swat. Shaukat's interest in environmental protection and social entrepreneurship led to the creation Environmental Protect Society (EPS) and he developed organizational capacity to deal with urban and environmental management issues. Two projects—the urban environmental management project for Mingora and the Swat River Protection project—are regarded as good practices in bringing stakeholders together to resolve environmental issues through consultation and dialogue.
In response to the recent earthquake, Shaukat has prepared design proposals for reconstruction in the affected areas and is looking to pilot a cost-effective and appropriate design of tents from locally available materials. Shaukat is also leading the establishment of an information and coordination mechanism and is working in close partnership with the local government, international and local NGOs and actively involving the local leadership in the relief and rehabilitation activities. Shaukat is setting up an information mapping center at Besham to support relief coordination.
Shaukat has prepared plans to construct and renovate housing. He is creating an information and coordination system—in close partnership with the local government, and international and local citizen sector organizations—that actively involves the local leadership in the relief and rehabilitation activities. He is establishing a coordination office for these activities in Besham. He is digitizing the available maps and setting up a mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) center. It will support, coordinate, and link the relief and rehabilitation efforts of the district and provincial governments and the various local and international citizen sector organizations.
Shaukat's rebuilding plan consists of the following elements: construction of shelters with reusable materials and a light-weight frame (able to withstand Richter-scale shocks measuring 6) that can be assembled and disassembled onsite—components carried by hand and on mules up the hills.
In addition, Shaukat is looking for volunteer support from architects and engineers and for fund raising support. He also plans to engage academic and professional institutions in the process of institutionalizing learning that leads to establishment of a disaster preparedness and mitigation center.
Shaukat's approach is always to create a broad coalition of interested parties to address problems that otherwise would be impossible to solve. He believes that any one actor, or even group of actors, is not powerful enough to change public attitudes and government policy, but that a large coalition can tip that balance in favor of broad social interests. Since he sees environmental problems generally as an expression of an eroded sociopolitical order, he pursues the restructuring of civic mechanisms that can determine what development is sustainable in the local environment. He has encouraged citizens' organizations to participate in such restructuring in contrast to the "charity" base from which they had always conducted their efforts before.
- Sets programs that ensure the involvement of women in post disaster decision making and development
Sengül Akcar, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Istanbul, Turkey
Organization: KEDV (aka Foundation for the Support of Women's Work: FSWW)
www.kedv.org.tr
Contact: kedv@kedv.org.tr
Sengül has designed a unique, community-based foundation that educates and empowers poor women and families, particularly in urban areas. Among other things, her project aims to help poor women affected by the 1999 earthquake. The organization enabled women to move from being victims of disaster to active participants in transforming their communities from disaster areas to examples of development.
They organized themselves into several independent organizations working on issues like governance, housing and reconstruction, economic initiatives/sustainability and childcare and other community services to ensure women's involvement in pre- and post-disaster efforts and to increase their capacity for dealing with long-term development issues.
Moving from tents to centers in prefabricated settlements, women quickly established systems for collectively caring for their children, distributing and stretching relief aid, and for understanding and accessing their entitlements for housing and economic assistance. Today hundreds of women are involved in negotiating replacement housing, pooling savings to legally establish housing cooperatives, and pressing local municipalities to work with them to keep women involved in positive actions to rebuild what the earthquake took away.
Since 1999, FSWW has been cooperating with other organizations in India, Honduras, and elsewhere with similar experiences as part of a global group working on "Women and Disaster." This international effort is aimed at influencing the policies of governments, multinational development and humanitarian agencies to turn a "disaster" into an opprotunity for sustainable community development.
- Champions water harvesting techniques to mitigate the effects of drought
Ako Amadi, Ashoka Fellow
Organization: Community Conservation and Development
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
Ako Amadi is addressing the perennial problem of acute water shortages during the dry season in Nigeria by developing a cost effective and simple rainwater harvesting system for use in poor rural and semi-urban communities.
Ako's idea begins with the conviction, borne of extensive experience and education, that an adequate water supply is fundamental to any country's development. Without water there can be no successful and sustainable social, economic, or environmental initiatives. Available water, then, should be the greatest priority of all development efforts. Ako is convinced that the acute water shortages which plague poor communities during Nigeria's dry season are unnecessary. Through an organization he founded, Ako is revolutionizing the rural water supply system by harvesting water during the wet season for use during the dry season. His water collection and storage tank system, which includes the use of water hyacinths and lilies for microfiltration, ensures water supplies adequate for both domestic use and economic development. The idea behind the system is simple and requires only basic technology. Most of the required labor is provided directly by the community, thereby making Ako's program an inexpensive yet highly effective community water supply system.
Ako's system is the first time rainwater has been harvested on a large scale anywhere in Nigeria. higher levels of water pollution.
- Uses disaster as an opportunity to create a middle-school for children at risk with student, parent and teacher participation
Mike Feinberg, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Houston, Texas, USA
Organization: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP)
www.kipp.org
Contact: mfeinberg@kipp.org
Mike Feinberg looked at the Hurricane Katrina disaster and saw the opportunity for providing both immediate relief and long-term and lasting solutions to an entrenched problem horribly aggravated by the disaster. He decided to apply and extend the successful Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) model that he and his co-founder David Levin had already established to prepare middle-school children at risk of school failure. The original program design was built on the simple premise that "there are no shortcuts" in education. The idea is that every child can succeed if students, parents and teachers make contractual commitments to do whatever is required to ensure the student's academic success.
The Katrina catastrophe catalyzed KIPP opportunities for providing all-important relief for kids even more desperately in need of structure and education than they are under normal circumstances. Taking initiative quickly, as social entrepreneurs unencumbered by bureaucracy are so often able to do, KIPP Houston, in partnership with Houston ISD and Teach For America, determined that it could open a brand-new campus within a few weeks to serve the children of displaced Louisiana and Mississippi families who are in grades Kindergarten through 8th grade.
KIPP will run the Houston school building that just reopened—Douglass Elementary. Staff there will be made up of a combination of teachers from Phillips Preparatory, the KIPP Transformation School in New Orleans, as well as Teach for America Corps Members and Alumni from Louisiana. The name of this school, fittingly enough, is NOW College Prep (New Orleans West). The "College Prep" part is important as well, as that part of the name symbolizes the goal of turning disaster into opportunity. To the test the notion of a whole village raising children AND setting them up for success, many of the existing staff of KIPP Houston schools and KIPP Foundation's Fisher Fellows will have a role in supporting NOW's efforts.
- Agitates for change in conditions for poor youth in the wake of disasters
Suchitra Sheth, Ashoka Fellow
Organization: SETU (Centre for Social Knowledge and Action
Location: Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
In the wake of the 2001 earthquate in Gujarat, Suchitra Sheth used her SETU organization to champion opportunities for many "invisible" peoples who might otherwise have been overlooked by rebuilding efforts: Dalits ("untouchables"), Kolis, Maldharis and Muslims of Joriya Block in Jamnagar District; and the widows of these communities, who are proscribed from making public appearances
SETU was also responsible for bringing in architects who were specialists in earthquake and cyclone-proof housing. With their help, SETU completed building temporary shelters for more than 3,000 families of five to seven members. These homes were built to last for two to three year from material that can be dismantled and used to construct permanent homes.
A dedicated children's rights activist, Sheth's primary work with SETU is bringing major changes to Gujarat's state-run homes for children, turning them into vibrant and professional rehabilitation centers. Using art and culture with the children-and the arts of diplomacy and cooperation with government staff-she is reviving a new sense of responsibility and hope for Gujarat's forgotten youth.
- Links international volunteers to needy survivors
Sombat Boonngamanong, Ashoka Fellow
Location: Thailand
Organization: The Mirror Art Group
www.mirrorartgroup.org
Contact: superbuff@bannok.com
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Sombat Boonngamanong and his Mirror Art Group have been extremely active, having been in Phang Nga, the worst hit area in Thailand by the tsunami. Along with 80-120 volunteers, he is creating a database that aims to track the records of deaths in a systematic way. Sombat's team is also working with the forensic department to track missing persons, despite coordination problems.
He has also created a Web site to link volunteers with organizations (www.tsunamivolunteer.net), documented the missing and dead, and helped village leaders determine how to help themselves and their peers by organizing and planning their own recovery. He has effectively linked hundreds of international and Thai volunteers to places that need them the most. In fact, he receives almost a 100 emails a day from potential volunteers.
Over the short-to-medium term, the group will continue to provide daily updates on volunteer needs in the area, host a memorial event on the 100th day, and create an "art wall" along Phang Nga of photos and captions.
All of his effectiveness in meeting the tsunami disaster stems from his career-long work devising an education system that erases divisions within society. He links the interests of children, teachers, and parents so that everyone can participate in the educational process. A pioneer in using the Internet, he has been actively extending communication from remote parts to the rest of Thailand, its government, and even international neighbors.
Sombat's peers have said that his school is the first Thai citizens' organization to use Internet technology to address social needs. While others have used it to advertise, Sombat not only fundraises with the Internet, but also builds allies for his learning system. The technology is organically suited to his goal of breaking down barriers, and he uses it to expand the notion of community beyond local to national and even international levels, bringing together communities on an ongoing basis that were not previously linked. He has used the Internet to help the hill-tribes.
In early 1999, Sombat and his organization moved to Ban Huey Khom, a set of several small villages in Chiang Rai province where the majority of the community are members of various hill tribes. Sombat sees this location as a laboratory to experiment with various social change initiatives that, if successful, could be adapted to many different locations. For instance, he believes that rural children, if given the proper educational opportunities, will succeed as much as any other children.
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