GSBF 2019 | PICO Rwanda
Muraho family and friends! I’m excited to bring you all along with me on my journey in Rwanda over the next 8 weeks. So much has already happened within our first few days of arriving that I can’t wait to share. To give y’all some context for the blog posts to come, I wanted to start by providing some background on what brought me to Rwanda in the first place.
GSBF
The Global Social Benefit Fellowship is a 9-month program that Santa Clara University students can apply for in January of their junior year. The fellowship is organized through the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, one of SCU’s three centers of distinction. As defined in Getting Beyond Better, social entrepreneurship is essentially transformational equilibrium change. Social entrepreneurs develop and scale sustainable solutions to shift unjust yet stable equilibria.
This year there are 18 fellows working in 9 different teams. Each team is working with a different social enterprise. The fellowship began during the spring quarter of this past school year when we took an upper-division experiential learning course. We learned about the field of social entrepreneurship as a whole, recreated and analyzed the logic models and business models of various case studies relating to our host organization, began researching and communicating with our host organization, and much more. The quarter concluded with an action research plan for our 8 weeks of work in the field.
At the core of this fellowship is the concept of creating a value exchange through action research. You can read more about the specifics of the fellowship here.
This year there are 18 fellows working in 9 different teams. Each team is working with a different social enterprise. The fellowship began during the spring quarter of this past school year when we took an upper-division experiential learning course. We learned about the field of social entrepreneurship as a whole, recreated and analyzed the logic models and business models of various case studies relating to our host organization, began researching and communicating with our host organization, and much more. The quarter concluded with an action research plan for our 8 weeks of work in the field.
At the core of this fellowship is the concept of creating a value exchange through action research. You can read more about the specifics of the fellowship here.
pico Rwanda
The organization I am working with this summer is PICO Rwanda. PICO was born from an Oakland-based organization called Faith In Action. Pastor John, a native Rwandan and a Lutheran pastor, discovered the transformative power of Faith In Action’s community organizing model and brought this framework home with him by founding PICO Rwanda.
PICO’s mission is to help Rwandan’s help themselves. When it comes to foreign aid in the global south, oftentimes money is thrown around without ever consulting native community members. This lack of communication can cause well-intentioned money to go to waste on projects that don’t actually benefit people in the way they are intended to. Rather than relying on outside aid, the PICO model fosters the confidence and leadership skills in Rwandans that motivate them to take the initiative to transform their own lives.
Pastor John trains community members and encourages them to hold themselves and their government accountable to taking the necessary action to lift their communities. After going through the PICO training, community members join together to create cooperatives. The model emphasizes one-on-one conversations. Cooperative members begin by discussing and listing the needs of their communities. Then, they decide on their most pressing need and pursue that project first. Everyone brings their own skills to the project, and they hold their local governments responsible to assisting them where possible.
You can learn more about PICO Rwanda and Faith In Action here.
PICO’s mission is to help Rwandan’s help themselves. When it comes to foreign aid in the global south, oftentimes money is thrown around without ever consulting native community members. This lack of communication can cause well-intentioned money to go to waste on projects that don’t actually benefit people in the way they are intended to. Rather than relying on outside aid, the PICO model fosters the confidence and leadership skills in Rwandans that motivate them to take the initiative to transform their own lives.
Pastor John trains community members and encourages them to hold themselves and their government accountable to taking the necessary action to lift their communities. After going through the PICO training, community members join together to create cooperatives. The model emphasizes one-on-one conversations. Cooperative members begin by discussing and listing the needs of their communities. Then, they decide on their most pressing need and pursue that project first. Everyone brings their own skills to the project, and they hold their local governments responsible to assisting them where possible.
You can learn more about PICO Rwanda and Faith In Action here.
Our Work THis Summer
From June 17 through August 11, my partner Nick and I will be living in Kigali to work with PICO Rwanda. Last summer, three GSB Fellows and three Miller Center interns worked with PICO. The interns held workshops for cooperative members that focused on general business knowledge like financial literacy and money-management. The fellows conducted interviews to evaluate the success of the PICO model and the interns’ workshops while also gathering video footage to create films to boost awareness and understanding of PICO’s vision and impact.
You can watch the videos here.
Nick and I will be building on the work of last year’s fellows and interns. We will work through a co-creation design process with the cooperative members to create business plans, financial plans, and reporting structures for their projects. Instead of working with all 5 PICO cooperatives, we will mainly be engaging with 2 cooperatives, Mumeya and Nyange, visiting both of the cooperatives on a weekly basis. Since April, we’ve also been working with Faith In Action and PICO Rwanda leadership to explore sustainable ways to diversify their revenue streams, including crowdsourcing and microfinancing.
You can watch the videos here.
Nick and I will be building on the work of last year’s fellows and interns. We will work through a co-creation design process with the cooperative members to create business plans, financial plans, and reporting structures for their projects. Instead of working with all 5 PICO cooperatives, we will mainly be engaging with 2 cooperatives, Mumeya and Nyange, visiting both of the cooperatives on a weekly basis. Since April, we’ve also been working with Faith In Action and PICO Rwanda leadership to explore sustainable ways to diversify their revenue streams, including crowdsourcing and microfinancing.