I can’t believe that I just got back from South Africa 3 days ago; I have just over 1 week to work here in the office, then I am heading out of town for Thanksgiving, and then the annual event is upon us. Whoa. Where does the time go?

It is a remarkable thing to step back and think about everything that is going on in your life and in the life of a social enterprise. To feel like the days are whirling along at an unbelievably rapid pace can sometimes feel like the extent of the perspective we are afforded in this work. But that is not really true.

Indeed, everyone has enough time in their extremely busy schedule to carve out 10 minutes to journal, meditate or simple appreciate the beauty that exists around us all. I did a little experiment yesterday to test my theory and it has paid off wonderfully. I downloaded an app on my iPad called iDid to track how I am spending my time and watched how long I was actually spending on different parts of my job from fundraising to staff management, to financial planning, and more.

What I learned is that out of 11.5 hours spent in the office, only 7 hours and 45 minutes were carefully accounted into a specific bucket that is relevant to the job. For example, I have been writing this post for 6 minutes and 43 seconds so far, but the time I spent making my coffee this morning (probably about 10 minutes) was just lost… In short, I cannot precisely account for over 3 hours of my day yesterday. There is so much room for improvements in my efficiency at work that I can hardly wait to hunker down and make the most of every day.

As John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach wrote in his book Wooden On Leadership, “Make every day your masterpiece.” I intend to, and I invite you to join me!

There are walls!

Construction is moving along. The community hall has walls, and we are thrilled.  We even spent the afternoon sitting inside the new building just getting used to it!

Azaph Sithole is the senior member of our committee.  He is an Elder and therefore is well respected by the community.  The group of Elders in Uta work to help the local traditional leadership to guide the community.  He has worked his life to support his 14 children, all of whom have successes that their father can brag about.  He has a reputation across Uta of being able to provide excellent life advice, some of which we’ve had the opportunity to witness.  As an Elder, Azaph has helped us bridge the gap between traditional leadership and Uta’s future leaders.  When the planning committee needed to secure permission-to-occupy from the local chief for the land, his role allowed him to help the group navigate this system and made that process possible.

Azaph announced at our last committee meeting that he would take it upon himself to survey the building site at 5am Friday morning in order to begin construction on the community hall fence.  Azaph has been getting price quotes for fence materials from local hardware stores.

The original and most basic purposes of the community hall are to hold meetings and facilitate pension distribution.  Azaph is an example of a member of the community who collects pension from the government but is currently is unable to do so in a comfortable environment where he and others can be protected from sun or rain. The government will be able to use the community hall as a pension site so that mothers and the elderly will be able to collect every month in a secure location.  Azaph’s leadership in the community and in the planning committee is a blessing and his commitment to the project has been an inspiration to the rest of the committee as well as to us.

What if you could impact 50,000 lives in rural Africa?  What if it only took 10 hours?  What if you won a free iPod nano for volunteering?

Would you do it?

ThinkImpact is calling on you to join the Impact Corps – a group of  75 supporters that are committed to alleviating poverty through sustainable development.

The Impact Corps is mobilizing from January 15 until January 22 (only one week) to get votes for ThinkImpact in the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook.

We’ll provide you the tools to get your networks involved.  We’re just asking you to commit 10 hours to reaching out to your communities.

If ThinkImpact wins $1 million (or even $100,000 as one of the 5 runners up) in the Chase Community Giving contest, then EVERY Impact Corps member will win an iPod Nano! The most committed, hardest working corps member will win a FREE trip to South Africa in 2010 with our Global Development Ambassadors trip.

What are you waiting for?

Sign up now! Go to http://bit.ly/impactcorps. Only the first 75 volunteers to sign up will be eligible for the free gift. Take action now. Make an impact!

Fundraising for many people is the least exciting activity they can think of. Most of my friends loathe raising money, even if it is for a cause they absolutely love and believe in with genuine passion. That is why fundraising should be fun. Sarah Whitney and the GW SMRC chapter successfully pulled off their 3rd Annual Anything But Clothes Run, and it was a wild success. The campus dean joined them along with a slew of students all taking the steps (no pun intended) to build a community center in Uta South Africa. 

The article in the campus paper can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/ccas2r. What other ways can you think of that make fundraising fun and successful?

Working on international development from a cushy Washington, DC office has its challenges. People always say that you must love your job purely because your mission is important to you, and that you feel like work is rewarding outside of yourself. They are correct, but it’s not so simple.

The issues and their solutions are the drivers for my work – and I think I can speak for my staff and say they share the same attitude – but we sometimes lose sight of that. As the leader of the organization, it is important that I help the team stay focused on the mission. The low pay or lack of direct access to fieldwork opportunities all the time can be discouraging, especially when the times get tough.

So I put together a graph that explained this. Energy and Goal Clarity (See Graph) seem to be directly related over time. I have no problem working 14 hours a day on SMRC projects – even if it means just drafting memos or setting up meetings – if it also means that I am pursuing a clear and understandable goal. Goals like building a school for 300 children, providing young leaders access to a community that will inspire a lifetime of work, and so on. There will be inevitable drop offs; sometimes you just don’t feel the inspiration. But if you can keep yourself in the top half of the graph – always have a good to very good sense of what you are working towards (you may want to post a big sign on your desk that reminds you!) then you will always have the energy to kick it into gear.

That’s how we are looking at the challenge of being so removed from making a direct impact for so many months out of the year. It has been helping us out so far… in a future post I will fully describe our goals, which gives us that much needed clarity!

I found that South Africa, especially in the Eastern Cape, suffers from water scarcity, which inadequate infrastructure has exacerbated.  My goal is now to help rural communities self-develop infrastructures they can locally manage to ensure a sustainable water supply.  This goal directly emanated from what I saw on-the-ground in Manyeleti.  Through it all, I realized that all peoples share one common value: a sunny and indefatigable human spirit.

I am currently finishing my second year of a Rhodes Scholarship where I am completing a MSc in Water Science, Policy, and Management at the University of Oxford.  Once I complete this degree, I likely will pursue a PhD in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University in hopes of pursuing a professional career as an academic and rural enterprise developer.

SMRC is preparing an in-depth training program for students on our global development internship. We are seeking to build the capacity of each individual, of course, but we are looking for a way to train them to be catalysts for change when they get to the communities. The most compelling models that we are studying to prepare the curriculum comes from the Asset Based Community Development work that is being done at Northwestern University.

One thing that SMRC knows to be true is that communities are the best drivers for change. They have assets (albeit sometimes it’s hard to tell what they are at first) and they have informal and formal structures to develop programs and projects. The inevitable truth is that SMRC members from the United States who visit the communities will always be outsiders… so the challenge is not to become insiders (for that is impossible without permanent residence) but to become partners at most, or catalysts at least.

A catalyst for change is someone who inspires an individual to leverage existing and potential resources to build a brighter future. In this context, in any community, the possibilities are endless. We will be working on this curriculum and will be doing it with some other leading considerations in mind: the value of microfinance, power of social entrepreneurship, and the importance of the Millennial Generation. What are your thoughts?

Reading “Good to Great in the Social Sector” by Jim Collins was enjoyable, if brief. What makes me really excited, though, is the way he breaks down the three circles that lead to success. First, you must be passionate about what you do. We are insanely passionate about what we do, so that’s good news Second you must do what you can be the best in the world at. I stongly believe that SMRC can provide the best and most productive global internship program and fellowship process in the world for international development. Third you have to drive your “Resource Engine”. In the for-profit sector they call that the economic engine, but non-profits require three pieces to build this circle: Time, Money and Brand.

Time comes from your staff and your volunteers. We have many, and we hope to recruit many more. Money comes from a revenue generating model and effective fundraising, which we are working hard to build. But Brand is the most elusive. Brand is how people talk about the organization, what people think of when they hear the name “Student Movement for Real Change,” how much legitimacy people feel we have, who we work with, who we are funded by, and so much more. There is no end to any of this, but I ask you, when you think about great non-profits… what makes a brand?

I was just referred to the work of Eric Greenberg, author of Generation We and host of http://www.Gen-We.com. His story is unbelievable and his commitment to improving other’s lives is admirable. He is a brilliant businessman who has experienced epiphanes that have led him to a fulfilling and meaningful life. His book is available online for download, and I recommend it to everyone interested in the power of youth today.

As a young person who works to empower other young leaders, it is refreshing to read about someone from the generation older that not only believes in our generation, but is joining us in partnership through the dissemination of ideas and support to ensure a more sustainable future for everyone.

The website offers a We Declaration that lays out the challenges that stand before us all. Let’s get it together and address these issues. Like Greenberg, I think this is just the generation to make it happen.

It occurs to me that SMRC does not have a strong slogan – or really any slogan at all. We once used the phrase, “Millions are neglected. Advocate. Empower. Improve.” but that message had inherent flaws. We didn’t like the negative feeling of the first phrase, we aren’t a full blown advocacy organization, and we dont really believe that we have the ability to swoop into a place and just improve peoples lives. Of course, empowering locals through partnership can improve lives. So it wasn’t all off base.

One thing that I keep considering is who we serve. It turns out we serve incredible young people with the drive and mission to fight global poverty. We aren’t really a leadership training program, or a development agency, or an advocacy group. We are more specific and indeed, I think, more unique, than any of those. We are where young leaders turn to deal with global health and education issues.

So it follows, to have a new slogan, we should consider the very core of who we serve, and what we are trying to achieve. We serve students: hence, Student Movement for Real Change. What we are “for” is global poverty reduction.

The final analysis – right now, I like the idea of this slogan: “Extraordinary young leaders fighting global poverty.” Doesn’t that sum it up? After all, we are where these extraordinary young leaders turn to do just that.