Daniel O'Neil

What would I do if I was in charge of the American Red Cross?

After I published my post last week on the American Red Cross (ARC), a few people have asked me what I would do if put in charge of it. Given all of the bad publicity that they have generated with their response to each major disaster, they certainly need to change their approach and to rebuild trust. The ARC plays a critical role in disaster response. They have an incredible ability to raise funds and are part of a broad international organization that has branches in nearly every country. They are perfectly placed to provide leadership on disasters all over the world.

So how do they pull themselves out of their deep hole and reestablish their leadership? I would suggest focusing on the following three areas:

1. Figure out what they are best in the world at doing and focus on it: The ARC seems to try to be all things to all people. They provide emergency kits, build shelters, feed people, finance grants, rebuild communities, and on and on. Sometimes they work through the local Red Cross, sometimes they set up their own organization and work around the local partner. Instead, I would have the ARC keep only a small number of high level experts who would implement only through the local Red Crosses and other partner organizations. The role of the ARC team members would be similar to the role of the OFDA staff. They would provide technical assistance to their partners and review grant requests. By being in the field and focused on implementation, they could help their partners be flexible in their approach. Given that the ARC is an NGO, they ought to be the most flexible of the funding organizations. By having highly trained people in the field, these experts could be trusted to guide the funding decisions.
   
   
2. Embrace Radical Transparency: Since the ARC will be subcontracting out most of the work, it will be easier for them to be very transparent. Their management costs should be around 10-20% of the donations that they receive. This would cover all of their home office costs and the costs for their field teams. The rest would be given out in grants. They can require that all funded proposals are published and have an open database that tracks the results. Financial data should only be published at the line item level (showing for example how much goes into all salaries but not showing how much an individual is paid). In this way, it will be clear not only what the ARC is doing but how their money is spread around. After all, the money being spent isn’t really the ARC’s money—it is money donated through the ARC to help the disaster victims. By having the funded proposals published, other organizations can see what is being done and better understand both how to coordinate with the implementer and how to learn from the funded approaches. This would encourage learning by doing and improve the quality of proposals over time.
   
   
3. Publish Evaluations Consistently: Because the ARC is focused on being the best in the world at what they do and on being radically transparent, it only makes sense that they conduct thorough evaluations and publish the results. Yes, these will highlight mistakes and shortcomings and will sometimes be embarrassing both for the ARC and for their partners. Implementing projects in a disaster or post-disaster environment is tough. You have to move fast which means making mistakes. But we shouldn’t be repeating the same mistakes. If the ARC committed to conducting thorough evaluations and publishing the results, the ARC could help share best practices and prevent repeated mistakes. Besides, as most politicians have learned, the best way to avoid a public scandal is to own up to your shortcomings.

The ARC ought to be a very powerful force for good and a key actor in every major disaster. Instead, their brand seems to be continually weakening. Each scandal hurts not only the ARC but every NGO who ends up painted with the same brush. 

Two years later: a long slow fight

photo by Jordan Michael of Red 1 Studios

Two years ago, the ground in Port-au-Prince shook and tens of thousands of buildings collapsed. The January 12^th earthquake was the worst disaster to ever hit the Americas. The early days after the earthquake were unimaginable. When I drive through some of the neighborhoods that I visited that first week, I get terrible flashbacks. Poor Haiti had been in such bad shape before the earthquake, I just couldn’t imagine how it would ever get rebuilt.

As we commemorate the second anniversary of the earthquake, there are lots of stories highlighting what has and has not been done. A lot of articles focus on the apparent slow progress with headlines like Haiti 2 years later: Half a million still in camps. Except that most people are not in camps because they lost their house and are waiting for someone to rebuild it. They are in the camps because they are desperately poor and have nowhere to turn. The Miami Heralds video, Nous Boke: Two Years Later nicely highlights this problem by talking with people living in the distant Corail camp who are desperate for work.

Nou Bouke: Two years later from The Miami Herald on Vimeo.

This desperation existed well before the earthquake. The earthquake made a bad situation much worse. The important question is where should Haiti be today? Given how bad the situation was before the earthquake and how bad the damage was, have we made good progress?

At the one year anniversary, I had strongly mixed feelings. On one hand, I was disappointed at the lack of progress. The camp populations seemed enormous. Although the rubble had been cleared from the roads, the wounds seemed very fresh. I wished that we had made greater progress. At the same time, I couldn’t image having worked harder or pushed my team any harder. I found the same reaction when I talked with others working to rebuild Haiti. We wished that we could have done more, but had no idea how we could have gone any faster.

At the second anniversary, I feel far better about the progress. The rubble is gone from most public spaces. The government’s program to empty six camps into sixteen neighborhoods (“6/16”) has emptied the camps that used to occupy Place St Pierre and Place Boyer—two of the most visible camps. As I drive around Port-au-Prince, life seems to be much more normal.

One of the challenges is that change comes slowly. After the earthquake, we all hoped that Haiti could be quickly rebuilt and rebuilt better. We dreamed of modernizing Port-au-Prince to have wider streets, of building modern building, of making Port-au-Prince into a livable city. Two years later, we are still dreaming of this. In Delmas, we are working with an urban planner who has drawn pictures of townhouses on palm tree lined streets. Maybe someday we will get there. However, we have to first finish repairing the existing buildings, clear out the collapsed buildings, and start repairing the streets.

When I left Haiti in May 2010, I did not intend to return. I was proud of what I had accomplished and wanted to try something new. I also feared that if I stayed in Haiti, that Haiti would break my heart. I stayed and it did. But I am glad that I stayed. Brick by brick, micro-entrepreneur by micro entrepreneur, we are helping to rebuild Haiti. It is a long slow fight, but I believe that we are moving in the right direction.

What do you think? Should we be proud of what we have accomplished or should we be embarrased that we have not done more?

Death of a Dominican Hero: Sonia Pierre

Sonia Pierre was both lauded and harassed by the Dominican government for her work to protect the rights of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. While the Dominican Government was threatening to revoke her citizenship, her photo was being displayed downtown Santo Domingo as a Dominican Hero.

I worked with her in 2008 as we were preparing a proposal to improve conditions in the the bateyes. I was impressed with her drive and vision as well as with the quality of the work that MUDHA was implementing.

Human rights work is thankless work. The Dominican government knows that it needs to have a clear, coherent policy towards dealing with Haitian migrants, but it is split. There are those who want the cheap labor and those who want to protect Dominican jobs--just as we have in the United States. Haiti has the same split--because Haiti cannot provide jobs or liveable conditions for so many of its citizens, it needs the escape valve provided by the Dominican Republic while at the same time deploring the way its citizens are treated. I saw this as an unsolveable problem and did not focus on it. Sonia Pierre saw this important work and devoted her life to it. 

Notes to a newly appointed Project Director

Dear Newly Named Project Director,

Congratulations on your new assignment. Whether this is your first stint as a project director or if you have done it many times, this is an exciting moment. We are glad to have hired you. You have a chance to make a significant difference in this new endeavor. If it is a brand new project, then you are facing the challenge of coloring in a blank slate. If it is an ongoing project, then you have the opportunity to push it in new directions.

We expect you to do more than to keep the project on track, write reports, and balance the project's checkbook (although you must do these three perfectly!). We selected you because we need someone exceptional to make our work remarkable. To get you off on the right foot, I suggest that you start by focusing on the following challenges:

Completing my work in Haiti

I drove away from Haiti yesterday, having finally been relieved of my role as the Acting Country Director. I chose to make the five-hour drive to give myself time to reflect on the last four months. I am both wonderfully relieved to be done and sad to leave my team. In my farewell speech the day before, I had stressed how proud I was of everyone. It was the hardest four months of my life. We had great successes--reopening the office within days of the earthquake, developing a logistics chain that delivered 50 containers of supplies to our most needy partners, restarting and accelerating all our programs so that we could help as many people as quickly as possible. 

Signs of Progress in Haiti

 
I had a rare chance to get out today and see the good work that my team is doing. It is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day hassles of managing that I lose sight of the great changes that are happening around me. 

Five weeks ago, I visited the Delmas 32 neighborhood. It was a tough visit. the area had been hard hit by the earthquake and still looked bad. Many of the roads were impassable and the area looked unlivable. I noticed a fire burning inside one of the buildings and made the mistake of asking what it was. I was told there was a body that they could not recover and were burning it. We put together a proposal to do demolish the buildings that were falling into the street and to remove the rubble from the roads. We were given a couple of grants to put 1,300 people to work in this neighborhood. We began working just over two weeks ago.

A month after the earthquake, the streets in Delmas 32 were still blocked by debris.

The change that I saw today was incredible. The streets were filled with yellow and green shirted workers that were working hard to remove the debris. many sections of the streets were already cleared and many of the partially collapsed buildings had already been demolished. However, the most impressive change was in the people. As the workers moved through the neighborhoods, street vendors set up stalls and life returned to the neighborhood. 

Today's visit reminded me that we are making progress. Sure, we might end up rebuilding the chaos, Haiti might not have elections this year, and no one knows what tomorrow will bring. But we are working hard to recover from the worst disaster to ever hit the Americas. We might not have the answers, we are making life better. Petit à petit l'oiseau fait son nid--Little by little, the bird builds its nest

The 5 lessons that I learned in my first year blogging

I began blogging a year ago because I wanted to see if I had something to say. I consider myself to be a bright, interesting person. I had been reading a number of blogs and wanted to see if I could do it. It seemed simple enough--Seth Godin just writes a few lines each day with little formatting and no pictures and thousands of people read. How hard could that be? 

I also started blogging because I saw it as an important tool that my organization could use to reach out to a broader audience. We had been working along the Haitian-Dominican border for many years and knew the region quite well. I had encouraged others to write about the border, most notably Elizabeth Roebling,yet we had written very little. 

Last November, I took the plunge and starting blogging. I worked hard on my own blog for six months and then started a blog for my project and let this one go quiet. I certainly did not have "279 Days to an Overnight Success." I did learn a lot and will continue blogging. The five biggest lessons that I learned are the following:

1. Having a blog is fun: I love my blog. I love referring to it ("I wrote a piece on that subject on my blog--can I send you the link?"). I love thinking about what I will write. I love seeing that people read what I write.
2. Writing a blog is a lot of work: I can't jot down a quick thought and hit "publish."  A quick post for me takes an hour. The longer posts on the Our Border site or the early posts on poverty on this site took at least several hours to pull together and I sometimes agonize for days over them.
3. Getting readers is harder than writing:  There is so much great, free content available, it is hard to attract readers' attention. Writing interesting material is essential, but it is not enough. Instead, all the blogging gurus highlight the importance of actively recruiting an audience through commenting on other blogs, participating in forums, guest blogging, and using your networks (email contacts, facebook, twitter, etc.). Recruiting readers can take more time than writing!
4. Making money off a blog is even harder: I read the emails that I get from the blogging money gurus like Jeremy Shoemaker and Eben Pagan, but I have never followed their advice. I would be happy to earn lots of money doing little work, however I don't see myself running operations like theirs. Instead, I opt for Chris G's Authority Blogger model. I blog to share knowledge and attract attention rather than to directly earn money. The donations that come in through the Our Border blog don't cover the hosting cost of the blog. However, the blog is our best calling card. When people read our blog, they know that we are the experts on cross-border development. I'm hoping that this blog will land me the perfect job as the Executive Director of an exciting organization.
5. Blogging is fun: I love the new interactions that I have because of my blogs. I love it when I get comments on my articles and I love the challenge of developing interesting content and attracting new readers. Blogging has made me more thoughtful and has brought me in touch with lots of people that have helped me improve my work. Despite all the hassles and frustrations, I can't imagine ever giving up blogging!

Back when I was first considering blogging, the best advice that I received was to just do it. Don't worry about the quality of your writing--no one will read it in the beginning and it will improve with practice. If you're not willing to pay the small fee that typepad charges, there are lots of free options. The only way to learn how to blog is to start blogging.

Hire me as your next Executive Director!

I've spent the last 20+ years running projects and country offices throughout the world. I have worked on making things better in some of the most difficult corners of the world: Haiti, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and many more. I am ready to return to North America and take up a new challenge. I'm looking for an organization that needs a remarkable leader, one that wants to take on greater challenges.

Can I help you to change the world?

Learn more about me, click on one of the buttons below: 

or read more of my blog.

If you are interested, contact me by telephone at 809 224-8307 or through email or via Linkedin by clicking the links to the right.

Seth's mad at the "non-profits" and the situation is worse than he thinks

Seth wrote a strong post today highlighting how non-profits are failing to embrace the new social media technologies that seem perfectly designed to help them to fullfill their missions. He says that we should be agents of change and yet we fear it. His post was so painfully true that I almost couldn't finish reading it. From what I have seen in international development, we don't just fear new technology, we fear all change.

I started blogging as a way of joining in the discussion of how to improve international development projects. I have been working internationally for over twenty years and have become disenchanted with the lack of progress. One of my first posts was on how non-profits do not foster learning. I later wrote on the new challenges in the development business and the failure of USAID's excellent online document depository to foster learning.

I've never figured out why we don't do better to foster organizational learning and change and am ashamed by our collective failure. Somehow non-profits have become more afraid of failure than of the status quo. Too often we focus on short-term goals ("number of people trained," "number of schools built," "number of farmers using new techniques" and we lose sight of our broader goals.

The international development work that I do is full of projects that failed to have a lasting impact and yet negative evaluations are very rare. I've heard it said that the best predictor of success for a new entrepreneur is the number of businesses he or she has started--not the number that have succeeded.  In business, it is recognized that failure is probably a better learning tool than success. Yet non-profits hate to admit failure.

What if we admitted that our approaches were risky? What if we strove to either make dramatic changes or to fail brilliantly? Our track record would not be perfect, but we would certainly be remarkable and isn't that better?