Leslie Allen, Greengrants Director of Communications and Development, updates us about goings-on at the Global Greengrants Fund Advisors Retreat, held in Bali, Indonesia, February 28 and March 1 and 2, 2007.
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Last night I arrived in Denpesar, the capital city of Bali, after 22 hours of flying and an (unexpected) layover in Tokyo. I am traveling with Greengrants Program Director, Chris Allan, and the Greengrants Alliance of Funds Coordinator, Scott DuPree. Our final destination is the Samdhana Retreat center in the “Cloud” mountains in Bali, a two- hour drive from Denpesar, for Greengrants’ bi-annual Advisors Retreat.
After spending the night in Kuta, a beach town where the nightclub bombings of 2002 and 2005 took place, seemingly only to temporarily cripple this bustling town, we start our drive to Prana Dewi, where the retreat center is. Starting out in a beach town choked with traffic and shops selling what looked like the same jewelry over and over, we began to empty out through rice paddies, fields of soy beans, cassava and sweet potatoes.
I also notice that there are flowers everywhere and people seem to be bringing lovingly arranged flower arrangements to many of the statues that line the road. Some are very elaborate. I’m told it’s a custom for people to honor sacred spaces, or to bring good luck and protection, and that many times the arrangements are changed three time a day. I’m amazed by their intricacies. Our driver has one on his dashboard.
We arrive at the retreat center and climb up through little stone paths and rice paddies to an outdoor restaurant and meeting pavilion in the midst of luscious fields of grass and trees. There are also 13 bungalows tucked inconspicuously in among the surroundings. The retreat center is home to the Samdhana Institute, which is a member of the Greengrants Alliance of Funds. It makes small grants all over the region, including in Indonesia and the Philippines.
But it is also a retreat center, where Samdhana “fellows” (42 of them right now) come to rejuvenate and reflect on their work, mostly in the human rights, social justice, and environmental communities. The fellows, in turn, are a network that recommends grants and brings together groups that would otherwise not be connected.
This first day is a meeting of the Greengrants Alliance of Funds partners: Samdhana Institute, CASA (Centro do Apoio Socioambiental) in Brazil, Fundo Accion Solidaria in Mexico, and Global Greengrants Fund. In Brazil, the advisors started CASA as a new organization from scratch. In Indonesia, the advisory board partnered with the Samdhana Institute to merge grant making in with the retreat center, and in Mexico, the advisors are just at the beginning stages of raising a new organization in Fundo Accion Solidaria. The three were started as extensions of the Greengrants advisory board structure: these boards saw opportunity for local resource mobilization and momentum towards the creation of a more formal structure than a volunteer advisory board.
It’s fascinating to learn about the differences and similarities among these organizations. All three are committed to giving voice to the people who are most affected by environmental and social problems and have a strong emphasis on connecting small grassroots organizations with each other and with larger movements in order to address these problems. But they use different language.
CASA is focused on capacity building for groups in Brazil. Samdhana talks about building a different type of community organization, with a focus on channeling the grassroots, and Fundo Accion Solidaria is just starting up. They are asking the questions about how to focus, how to raise funds. “We know it’s time for a change,” Artemisa Castro Felix from Fundo Accion Solidaria said, “But we don’t know how to do it.”
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This entry was written by Scott DuPreee, Greengrants Coordinator for the Greengrants Alliance of Funds.
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One of the really interesting things is that with the Alliance of Funds we are learning about partnerships. Each step pf the way, each organization is becoming involved with a diversity of issues, not just environmental issues, but institutional issues, communication issues, people issues, and there is a lesson for everybody in these issues. So what surprises me is that I always think that we can get to the decisions and planning really fast. But the reality is that even though we saw each other six months ago, so much has happened and it’s so interesting that we listen to each other and we feel like we’re each part of all of the organizations. We share each other’s successes and we think about and confront each other’s challenges.
Artemisa Castro Felix of Fundo Accion Solidaria said that for them as they are now launching their own organization, everything is going to be different when she goes back to Mexico. She says, “Now that I’ve listened to what some of the challenges are to make programs, to take ourselves seriously, I know that we have to talk about some of these issues today, we can’t wait until tomorrow.” On the other end of the spectrum, Nonette Royo from Samdhana Institute said that it really is all about learning from each other and by doing so, seeing what opportunities we each have and to see how we’re all part of a bigger system that is supporting socio-environmental action. And while that’s the most important thing–the learning and sharing that come out of this very valuable time we have together–we also did get to some decisions. For instance, we decided a brochure that communicates our partnership can go forward. We decided to work together, particularly in Europe to work to get new partners, and we agreed on some shared responsibilities for reporting and for building our capacity to be able to fundraise together.
Having these discussions in a place that the Alliance is really working on allowed us to share a reality which couldn’t be done in a hotel conference room somewhere. Sheets of rain fell down while we were talking, requiring us to pull down bamboo shades in the open-air pavilion, and we all looked around, laughed and just yelled our points a little louder…
As I sit at dinner, I am able to hear conversations about resource centers in China, workers movements in India, and the political situation in Argentina as the candles burn low and the frogs screetch all around us.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
This morning at breakfast there is a new swell of advisors. Two of our African contingent have made it, defying visa complications, expensive travel, and an extraordinary contortion of flights. We also have a few more Samdhana fellows join us and the Russian advisors. The meeting pavilion is nearly full.
Our sessions today were mostly on the mechanics of the Greengrants network. There was a session in which we discussed board strategies in small groups. When the groups came together, we came up with a good list of common strengths of our advisory board strategies:
·Our strategies are flexible; we remain open to opportunities as they come.
·The chain of trust from the grantees to the advisors to Greengrants is key to a successful strategy.
·The strategy of each advisory board depends on the context in each region. You can’t have the same strategy in China as you have in Latin America.
·There are always choices we have to make. Should we work on lots of issues or just one? Should we spread the money around or continue to fund the same groups?
I also attended a group today called “Diversity in Values”. This was a discussion questioning whether the Greengrants network has a set of common values. We saw some basic common themes such as the conviction that the best people to solve problems are those most affected by them. But, we also saw challenges. What if one local group is advocating for the preservation of mangroves, while another is advocating for aquaculture for an impoverished community? Shrimp aquaculture destroys mangroves, but what about the need for the community to make a sustainable living?
This theme was brought up again later when we discussed possible cooperation between advisory boards. What do we do when a global advisor recommends a grantee to which the regional advisors object? This has happened in Latin America where our Brazil Alliance partner, CASA, strongly objected to a recommendation by the IFI (International Finance Institutions) Global Board to fund the Landless Workers Movement because of some questionable tactics the group has used.
In this session there were a few great examples given where cross-advisory board grants did work. One India advisor was working on advocating for the Bhopal disaster victims when she heard about a student group in Togo that was also doing some work in their country around Bhopal. She approached the Africa advisors and they gave a grant to the group in Africa. In Latin America, there is a region-wide effort to coordinate boards. Thanks to a special pot of money given by the Mott Foundation, the three boards in South America are meeting to consider joint grants to fund work around regional development projects.
Another lovely candlelit dinner outside, serenaded by the frogs. A discussion with an advisor about the need for more funding for Russia, a brief look into the currency problems in Zimbabwe over wine, and a hunt for a gecko in my neighbor’s room before bed. Tomorrow promises to be as exciting!
Friday, March 2, 2007
The air is so heavy here. From my room, I hear frantically rushing water. Water everywhere. Running down in from the hills in little canals, falling over rocks in the nearby stream, flowing over a man-made waterfall, standing still in rice paddies, and coming down in curtains at short intervals during the day.
Today was our last day and we were focusing on the future. The first session was about generating ideas for mobilizing resources—not just money but volunteers, office space and equipment, the talents of other groups and advisors, etc. It’s clear that many advisory boards are thinking about this. The China Board is funding resource centers across the country to provide office space for environmental groups. The India Board is working to arrange for consultants to provide technical assistance for grantees. The Russia Board is considering taking a grant from the local government. All are interested in strengthening the grassroots however we can.
The next session I organized with advisors from India, Cameroon, and Ghana. We’re talking about future environmental challenges. We hear a little from each board and stick up pieces of butcher block paper all over the pavilion, listing dozens of issues from food production to nuclear power. A few themes float to the surface:
·Extractive industries (oil and gas, mining, forestry)—all of the advisory boards participating mentioned extractive industries as a threat for the future.
·Energy—every board also mentioned the rate of energy consumption or the search for energy alternatives as a challenge. More than half of the boards referred to climate change directly as the major threat to the future.
·Unsustainable agriculture—this was also mentioned by at least four of the boards in terms of the health effects (agro-chemicals) and the degradation of the land and environment. The issue of Food Sovereignty (control over production, distribution and access to food) and its link to trade and climate change was also a common theme.
·Globalization of consumptive trends—several boards were concerned about the globalization of Western consumptive trends and corporations being more unscrupulous, divisive, and unaccountable as a result.
·China and its hand in global industry was mentioned by the China Board and at least two other boards. What is behind China’s policy? Why are they doing what they are doing with regard to development?
While we’re talking, our advisor from Cameroon, Samuel Nnah Ndobe, walks into the pavilion after days of delay in his trip. To get his visa to Indonesia, he had to travel to Nigeria. Then on his trip here he missed his connection in Paris and had to wait for the next plane to Kuala Lumpur before continuing on to Denpesar, Bali. We’re all so glad to see him. Amazing how much effort so many of us have made to get here!
While some people drifted in and out of other sessions, got coffee, had side conversations, we were all quiet and still for the closing session. Our facilitator, Chip Fay, also a Samdhana fellow, passed around a lovely pink flower and with each turn said what we were taking with us from this retreat. People mentioned the faces they’ll never forget, deeper devotion to their work, learning about other issues, new ideas for grantmaking, and friendships renewed and begun.
As the sun fell, about 40 children came from the village to dance for us. They don’t do this for tourists; it’s just part of their every day life, like any after school activity. Their dance told an ancient Hindu story of the struggle between good and evil. Most of them were dressed in black and white checked material, tied around their chests and waists. About six girls were dressed in bright gold with elaborate bead work and beautiful headdresses. In turn, they would get people from the audience (mostly men) to come and dance with them. A Russian, a Cameroonian, and Greengrants Executive Director Chet Tchozewski were among the many dancers on stage.
That night we all started to drift away and make plans for our travels. Some of us are staying to explore the island a bit. Others are heading back to the airport for the long trek home. I feel incredibly grateful for the job I have.