What I like about it is the radical antiphilanthropy it embodies. (And I mean that in a positive way.) That may be my contrarian nature coming out.

I look forward to seeing you in New Hampshire.

I hear what you are saying about helping people, so this isn’t to contradict it, but rather to share a quote/idea that was important to me in thinking about my desire to help people. Maybe it is too revolutionary for your taste….

“If you have come to help me, then don’t waste your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

The quote is often attributed to an Aboriginal activist group from Queensland, Australia in the 1970s. It is specifically from Lila Watson, who was one of the group members, but she said she that she was not comfortable being credited for something that had been born of a collective process.

Anyway, just a thought. I’ll look forward to hearing more from you at the upcoming conference in New Hampshire. All the best, Elizabeth

It’s a tough dilemma, I don’t have a good answer yet. Although, I do find promise in a portfolio approach to assessment (taking a cue from educational assessment here).

We do so in the conviction that ordinary citizens, being themselves and interacting directly as they practice their professions, are the best ambassadors and the best architects of mutual understanding among peoples. It’s our conviction that a teenager abroad who works with a US museum curator on one of these exchanges may take from it a different sense of the US–a sense of connection–which pays dividends somewhere 10, 20, or 30 years down the road when that teenager becomes an adult participant in his or her own society.

Now, in a world of results-based philanthropy, can I prove this? Absolutely not. An outcomes-based assessment at the end of the project won’t capture it–the payoff we are after takes place years after the project ends. And will anyone fund us to do a long-range study? No, not on your life.

So here is a program that embodies what the papers and think tanks are calling for: citizen diplomacy. And in a world in which we strictly follow outcomes-based philanthropy, we would have no choice but to strangle it in its crib in favor of funding something more assessable.

There’s something wrong in this scenario…

Erik Ledbetter