Change Agent

Spare pennies can finance a surge of personal abundance halfway across the world. (Courtesy of Bob Harris)

What six piles of pennies can mean in Rwanda: why I Kiva

By Bob Harris, TakePart / 03.20.13

Not long ago, I was in Kigali, Rwanda, watching a small boy in an Annie T-shirt playing with a marble. The child was surrounded by sweet potatoes, fruit, sugar, cooking oil, and dozens of sundries—gum, candy, pens, razors—much as you might find in any small convenience store. 

This was his mother Yvonne’s place of business.* It was also the front room of the family’s modest two-room home. And it was a sign of great hope.

Yvonne was a client of Urwego Opportunity Bank, a local microfinance institution. The bank’s loans are partly financed through Kiva, a nonprofit organization that enables people like you and me to invest as little as $25 in mom-and-pop businesses in more than 65 countries.

Through Kiva, I’d sent $25 chunks of my own cash toward hundreds of clients like Yvonne all over the world. Curious to see the results, I was now traveling through five continents—from Peru to Bosnia to Kenya to Lebanon to Nepal to Cambodia and beyond—to hear the stories of as many clients as I could. (The ensuing book, The International Bank of Bob, was just published by Bloomsbury.)

Yvonne spent most of her days tending to her kids in this front room convenience store; the back was where they all slept. It was a humble but stable arrangement, the store providing a small but steady income.

A year and a half earlier, however, Yvonne and her kids didn’t have a giant stack of produce to sell and a home with a solid roof. They were sleeping on a mat in an unpowered shack that she rented for the equivalent of five U.S. dollars per month. Yvonne’s husband had been in and out of jail, met another woman, and then fled to Uganda, leaving Yvonne as a single mom in a country still recovering from the 1994 genocide and war, with no advanced skills beyond sheer persistence.

But persistent she was. She learned from friends how to buy sweet potatoes, sorghum, and other staples in bulk, transport them home, and sell portions at a profit. (Think of the 7-Eleven business model.) Yvonne’s first loan to buy bulk goods was for 70,000 Rwandan francs—the equivalent of about $140.

Prior to the arrival of microfinance, Rwandan banks required five times as much just to open an account. Yvonne’s loan would have been inconceivable. Her kids might still be sleeping in the unpowered shack, instead of curling up in a real bed under a good roof.Yvonne’s face brightened most when she told me that her children would soon begin school. With stability in their lives, the boy in the Annie shirt could learn to read the word Annie. Since literacy breeds knowledge, communication, and greater opportunity, these kids may very well have a wholly better life, simply because their mom had access to a tiny amount of capital.

If I put $25 into the best savings account where I bank, in a year, I’d have $25 and a few pennies. If I put that same $25 into a Kiva loan, which pays back about 99 percent of the time, next year I’ll have a small pile of pennies less.

Yvonne’s $140 is less than six $25 Kiva loans. Six small piles of pennies, then—that’s the ultimate cost to help a kid in an Annie shirt possibly have an entirely different and better life. 

This is why I Kiva.

*Yvonne is a pseudonym. Independent journalism scarcely exists in Rwanda, and the language barrier was formidable. On the small chance that the purpose of our interview was not utterly clear, I will err toward her privacy.

Related Stories on TakePart:

• Kiva Extends Microloans to Developing Nations' College Students

• Kiva's Microlending Magic

• VIDEO: Sierra Leone Chefs Cook Up Big Plans for Microfinance

• Bob Harris has had a diverse career as an author, TV writer, and AP award-winning radio humorist. Often known for his 13 "Jeopardy!" appearances, Bob has also contributed numerous travel pieces to ForbesTraveler.com. He holds an honors degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Case Western Reserve University. As a Kiva lender, Bob has made more than 5,200 loans. Bob Harris Online | @bobharrisdotcom

• This article originally appeared at TakePart, a leading source of socially relevant news, features, opinion, entertainment, and information – all focused on the issues that shape our lives.

A Tibetan man sits besides the world's highest post office located at over 5,200 meters (17,060 feet), near the base camp of Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma, in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Remote post offices could take on a second role as banks. (David Gray/Reuters/File)

A new bank for rural poor: the local post office

By Jessica Perkins, Global Envision / 03.19.13

Post offices in Nigeria are becoming surrogate bank branches for the unbanked rural poor, under a government project launched last month.

Opening new bank branches in remote areas to reach the financially excluded is often prohibitively expensive, because the rural poor wouldn't use a branch enough to cover its costs.

That's why India and Nigeria have banks that are collaborating with post offices to turn them into banking outlets. This transformation will not be too far of a stretch considering just how many financial services many public post offices already provide in these regions: small savings accounts, life insurance, mutual funds, e-money orders, and foreign exchange.

Collaborating directly with banks would let post offices add small credit, remittances, and various insurance policies, too. Very small-scale lending, for instance, does not require extensive knowledge and could be learned by the existing post office staff.

Small savings deposits that already exist can be a useful start-up resource for lending. And India Post, for example, already has more than a century of experience operating Postal Life Insurance, which could be extended to include an array of valuable insurance policies for the rural poor.

The post office-to-bank transformation is one variation of "agent banking," the supply of financial services to customers by a third party in support of a bank or other licensed provider. Already, supermarkets, convenience stores, pharmaceutical retailers, and lottery outlets have been turned into banking outlets.

90 percent of India's post offices are located in rural areas, compared to just 37 percent of its commercial banks. Because of this, discussions about an India Post Bank have been carrying on for a long time now, though plans have yet to materialize.

For Borno State in Nigeria, utilizing post offices to bring financing to the 87 percent of the population that lives in rural areas seems to banking industry leaders like a no-brainer. “In 2010, the average distance for a Nigerian to a bank was more than 10 kilometers [6.2 miles]," the Center for Financial Inclusion's Jeffrey Riecke wrote last month. "In addition to extending financial services to those without access, agent banking would help financial institutions regain customers that they might have lost over the year through the closings of unprofitable bank branches."

It is clear that post offices in remote locations provide a physical advantage over commercial banks, but will the money it takes to train postal workers, secure necessary licenses, implement technology, and raise salaries to match those of bank staff make this option any more sustainable than extending traditional banks into rural areas?

Those working on the Borno project seem to think so.

“If we succeed with the project in Borno, it will be extended to other states of the federation," Enterprise Bank CEO Ahmed Kuru said last month. "And we are convinced that we will succeed.”

Related articles: 

A 'demographic window' of opportunity: Why youth need bank access nowResources: Post Offices Fill Financial Inclusion Gaps (via the Center for Financial Inclusion))A case for converting India Post into a bank (via The Hindu Business Line)Post offices to drive financial inclusion pilot scheme (via The National Mirror)

• This article originally appeared at Global Envision, a blog published by Mercy Corps.

Luis Nieves (right) helps Michael Raleigh (left) secure floorboards on Raleigh's front porch. Raleigh is renovating a house on the East Side of Buffalo, N.Y., that he purchased from the city for $1 through the urban homestead program. PUSH, a grass-roots organization in Buffalo, seeks to provide affordable, environmentally friendly housing and job training. (Mark Boyer)

Green housing: In Buffalo, it's not just for rich people

By Mark Andrew Boyer, YES! Magazine / 03.18.13

Massachusetts Avenue Park was not a place you'd want to take your kids. Before, the small neighborhood park in the heart of Buffalo's West Side was little more than vacant land with a small playground and a crumbling basketball court.

“It was a real mess,” says Terry Richard, a neighborhood resident who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and later moved to Buffalo, N.Y., by way of Brooklyn. “So we figured … why don’t we just take this on as a task to really force the city’s hand to take care of their problem,” she adds, standing next to the park’s new playground with a bright smile.

Buffalo is located where the waters of Lake Erie feed into the swift currents of the Niagara River. It was established as a major grain shipping and storage center in the late 19th century, but as shipping routes changed and heavy industry packed up and left the Great Lakes region, Buffalo's population rapidly declined. In 1950, Buffalo's population was about 580,000, but by the 2010 census it had fallen to about 260,000.

It isn't just the population that's been shrinking though: Employment numbers are down, and like other Rust Belt cities, Buffalo has struggled to support its infrastructure with a shrinking tax base. The rebirth of Massachusetts Avenue Park echoes many other stories taking shape throughout the city. Instead of waiting for the city to make things better, residents like Ms. Richard are taking matters into their own hands.

Richard is a board member for People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH), a grass-roots organization based in Buffalo that seeks to provide affordable, environmentally friendly housing and job training.

In early June PUSH celebrated the opening of Phase 1 of the small but pleasant new Massachusetts Avenue Park, which resulted from about two years of petitioning City Hall to fund the project. The park is just one piece of PUSH's broader plan to create a Green Development Zone within the West Side—a 25-block area where the group is developing sustainable, affordable housing and creating new career pathways for neighborhood residents.

Like many Buffalo neighborhoods, the West Side is full of vacant properties, and PUSH co-founders Aaron Bartley and Eric Walker wanted to know why. When they launched the organization in 2005, their first order of business was to conduct a survey of Buffalo's West Side, which meant going door-to-door in the community for about six months.

With a bit of digging, they discovered that a sub-agency of the New York State Housing Finance Agency was in control of nearly 1,500 tax-delinquent properties in the city—about 200 of which were on the West Side—that were being left to rot. In 2003, the state of New York's Municipal Bond Bank Agency bought the delinquent tax liens for those homes, which were then bundled and sold as bonds to investment bank Bear Stearns.

But there was one major problem: According to a report published in Artvoice, Buffalo's main alternative weekly, the assessed value of the properties was much higher than they were actually worth. In effect, the state was using vacant houses in Buffalo to speculate on Wall Street.

Meanwhile, nothing was happening with the houses; the state was neither maintaining them nor selling them.

"There just was absolutely no due diligence done as part of the transaction," Mr. Bartley said. "If there had been, they would've seen that bond was fraudulent."

The value of bonds was based on revenue that was supposed to have been generated by the houses, through either selling them or collecting unpaid taxes. But the state made little effort to sell or collect taxes on the properties. Why? Because doing so would reveal the true value of the properties, according to Bartley, and the house of cards would come crumbling down.

"The reason they didn't do that is that would've shown the lie to the deal, because they would have sold for $0, and it would have indicated that it was worthless," Bartley explained.

When Bartley and Walker made the discovery, they tried to bring it to the attention of state officials through standard channels, but when that failed they launched a direct action campaign. Using a big stencil, they painted an image of then-Gov. George Pataki's face on more than 200 houses across the city. Eliot Spitzer was campaigning for governor at the time, and he took an interest in the issue. When Spitzer took office, his administration unwound the bond, gave the houses back to the city of Buffalo, and created a small housing rehab fund. The houses were turned back into the city's inventory, and when PUSH or one of its partner organizations wants to redevelop one, they ask to have it transferred.

Two years later, PUSH invited hundreds of residents to a neighborhood planning congress to draft a development plan for the largely blighted 25-block area on the West Side that would later become the Green Development Zone (GDZ). The plan went far beyond energy-efficient affordable housing to include the creation of employment pathways and promoting economic stability within the zone.

On the surface, the GDZ still looks similar to other Buffalo neighborhoods: The streets are lined with 100-year-old two- and three-story houses, and in the summer they teem with people. Old ladies sit and talk on first-floor balconies, while kids weave in and out of slow-moving traffic on bicycles. But this small neighborhood is in the midst of a pretty radical transformation.

"Sustainability" in the context of PUSH's agenda means reducing the neighborhood's environmental impact, but also strengthening the local economy and creating green jobs in the building rehabilitation and weatherization industries. PUSH was instrumental in getting the Green Jobs - Green New York (GJGNY) legislation passed, which seeks to create 35,000 jobs while providing green upgrades and retrofits for 1 million homes across the state.

PUSH recently established PUSH Green to implement the GJGNY program in the Buffalo area, functioning as an independent outreach contractor in the region. For the work, PUSH has established what it calls a "Community Jobs Pipeline," a network of contractors who agree to provide job training, pay living wages, and hire local workers from target populations.

In September, PUSH held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for three gut-rehab buildings with a total of 11 affordable housing units, bringing the total number of residential units PUSH completed in the GDZ to 19.

But the organization has much bigger ambitions. In December, PUSH announced plans to build nine new-construction buildings and to renovate seven existing properties, adding a total of 46 more energy-efficient, affordable units to the neighborhood.

"We're very strategic in our development work, so we've taken a small section of the West Side, and we're really trying to concentrate our development," explained PUSH Development Director Britney McClain. "We don't want to contribute to the scattershot development work that is also common in the city of Buffalo."

Ensuring that the homes it produces are energy-efficient is an important component of PUSH's work, because heating and energy costs account for a large percentage of living expenses in Buffalo.

"A lot of the houses in this city are over 100 years old and poorly insulated, so to have an apartment at an affordable rate but also that is totally energy-efficient, through the new windows and insulation, the utilities bills will be drastically reduced," McClain told me.

Green buildings enjoy lower operating costs, but they're more common in luxury real estate portfolios than in the inner city. That's a perception that PUSH is looking to change.

In 2011, PUSH completed a net-zero energy house—a home that produces as much energy as it uses. The project was launched to showcase renewable energy technologies and to help give low-income residents paid job training.

In the process, the builders found another innovative use for vacant lots: They dug a deep trench in the adjacent lot to provide geothermal heating and cooling for the house. On all of the buildings, PUSH reuses existing materials where possible, upgrades the windows and insulation, and installs Energy Star-rated metal roofs that help to passively cool the buildings.

Back at the PUSH headquarters I met co-founder Eric Walker, who I instantly recognized even though we had never met. Walker guest-starred on an episode of ABC's reality TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that aired in 2010. In a typical episode of the show, a handful of hyperactive celebrities and local volunteers target a distressed home that is owned by a family undergoing illness, disaster, or some other hardship, and they quickly fix it up for the family in need.

Instead of just fixing up one house, though, PUSH and some 4,500 volunteers teamed up with the show's producers to fix up several surrounding properties in the neighborhood as well.

Why go back to the way things were when we can create housing that embraces the best of tradition and the best of new thinking?

Extreme Makeover brought the West Side some positive national exposure, but Walker still has mixed feelings about the show. Neighborhood improvement can either come from external forces or it can come from within, and the forces of change portrayed in the show weren't entirely homegrown.

"In organizing, we talk about three kinds of power: power over, power for, and power with," explains Walker. The TV show gave PUSH an opportunity to inspire, but the tools of change were in the hands of the ABC producers and the celebrity hosts—not members of the community. "It was one step removed from the power we're trying to build," Walker says.

The TV cameras packed up and left, but the transformational power remains in the neighborhood. It is evident in the carefully restored Victorians that line Massachusetts Avenue; in the raised beds the community has acquired through PUSH; and in the fact that parents now take their children to the once-dangerous park they fought for and won themselves.

• Mark Andrew Boyer wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Mark is a photographer and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared in GOOD, Inhabitat, and Mindful Metropolis.

• This article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

A water wheel with steel blades operates in northern India's Himalayan Uttarakhand state. The energy it produces grinds grain, presses oil, and generates electricity for a remote village in the Himalayas. (Archita Bhatta/AlertNet)

Updated water wheels power India's rural mountain economy

By Sujit Chakraborty and Archita Bhatta, AlertNet / 03.15.13

Living in an isolated Himalayan hamlet, 2,500 meters (5,600 feet) above sea level, Govind Singh Rana seems an unlikely candidate for wealth. But by the standards of other villagers in northern India’s Uttarakhand state, he earns a fortune by harnessing the power of the mountain stream that runs across his land.

Rana uses a water-powered turbine to run a saw mill, press apricot oil in season, and generate electricity, at little cost to himself and without the need for environmentally unfriendly power sources like diesel generators.

He is one of 28,000 people in Uttaranchal who have discovered the advantages of a modern incarnation of the traditional wooden water wheel, or gharat. The turbines, which harness hydro power for small-scale industry by day and for generating electricity by night, have brought an ecologically sustainable economic revolution to the Himalayan states of Uttaranchal, Jammu & Kashmir, and Himachal Pradesh, as well as the so-called Seven Sister states in India’s northeastern Himalayas.

During the day, the turbines grind wheat flour and spices, thresh rice, press apricot oil, and comb cotton. At night, the turbines in the first three states alone generate a total of 264 megawatts of electricity per hour, all without burning any of the fossil fuels that could exacerbate the effects of climate change on the Himalayan environment.

Spearheading the sustainable exploitation of mountain resources is Anil Joshi, a former professor of botany. Inspired by the Gandhian philosophy of rural self-sustainability, Joshi launched a grass-roots movement to help Himalayan villagers stop using coal-intensive power and instead turn the region’s thousands of fast-flowing streams into personal mini hydro-electric power stations.

Water wheels are a centuries-old technology in the Himalayas, but one that was becoming obsolete until Joshi and the Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization (HESCO), which he founded 29 years ago, taught villagers to develop alternative livelihoods by modernizing the wheels and using them for traditional industry during the day and to provide electric power to as many as 60 village homes per wheel at night.  

Improving the technology was key to HESCO’s strategy. The old water wheels were inefficient, taking a day to crush around 10 kilos (22 pounds) of wheat. Making a single wheel was a laborious process that required the wood from an entire pine or deodar (Himalayan cedar) tree. And environmental considerations had led to restrictions on tree-felling, which drove up the price of timber to as much as 500,000 rupees ($9,200) for a single tree.

“These factors made the gharats unviable,” Joshi explained. “And gradually, the system started dying out.”

From a high of around 187,000, the number of water wheels in Uttarkhand, Jammu & Kashmir, and Himachal Pradesh over time fell to around 98,000, said Joshi, who has undertaken surveys of mountain villages on foot and by bicycle in numerous states of India’s north and northeast.

 HESCO’s solution was to improve the gharats by fitting them with modern gears and ball bearings.

“This doubled the output,” said Manmohan Singh Negi, a HESCO worker, as he helped three other employees upgrade an old gharat into a modern one at Ghontu Ka Shera, a remote village around 22 km (14 miles) from Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand state.

“Today a powerful gharat can turn out about two quintals (80 kilograms) of wheat flour a day, making it a very profitable option for villagers,” Negi added.

The modernization of the technology has continued with the introduction of wheels made of steel. Wooden wheels were liable to break when torrential monsoon rains washed rocks downstream, and repairing the blades was time-consuming and costly.

“In the olden days, when a blade of a wooden turbine would break ... we would need to take the entire turbine out and make a different one, costing time and money,” said Negi.

Using steel instead of wood has made it possible to repair a single broken blade – and most repairs can be done locally.

“With the new material used, one can simply take off the screws of the single turbine blade and get it welded and repaired locally, at very little cost and time,” he explained.

Originally, gharats were used simply to grind wheat for flour. But the improvements to the wheels gave HESCO an idea.

“It struck us that with this massive availability of water from the streams we can actually generate electricity, and this is what we started to do,” Negi said.

HESCO continues to introduce innovations. At Ghontu Ka Shera, for instance, it has recently constructed its first horizontal turbine, rather than the traditional vertical ones.

“Due to the tremendous force of the hill streams, roughly 15 to 20 percent of the generative capability is lost when the water crashes into the turbine vertically. But in a horizontal turbine, we save that [capacity],” Negi said.

The Ghontu Ka Shera water mill does not simply crush wheat and spices by day and produce electrical power at night. The single horizontal turbine has four conveyor belts attached to separate machines for milling wheat, threshing rice, grinding spices and generating power, though to ensure maximum efficiency only two of the machines will be operated simultaneously.

Each gharat is run by an individual family. The owner of the Ghontu Ka Shera gharat is 45-year-old Kamal Singh Panwar. He will charge villagers up to 1 rupee (around 2 cents) to grind a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of wheat. They would otherwise pay twice as much for the use of a diesel-powered mill in Raipur, the nearest town.

From the 80 to 100 kilograms of wheat Panwar expects to grind each day, he should receive around 12 kg of wheat flour, as well as cash, in remuneration. Under an agreement, he will give HESCO around 1 kg of flour per day, which the organization will then sell to gradually earn back its 200,000 rupee (about $3,700) investment in the turbine.

Panwar points out that that there are further economic benefits to having his own mill, since he no longer has to pay 80 rupees to take a taxi to and from Raipur to have his wheat ground. And he will earn additional income by handling spices and rice.

For HESCO, the reduction in the carbon footprint from milling wheat is an important aspect of the program. But it is above all a sustainable, environmentally friendly way to revive rural economies.

Panditji, a priest and another gharat owner from Ganeshpur, near the holy town of Uttarkashi, recounted how his son left the village to earn a living working in a town elsewhere in the state. By reviving his gharat for grinding wheat and spices and threshing rice, Panditji now earns an average of 25,000 rupees ($460) every month, making him wealthy by local standards. But for him, the best part is that by improving his economic status he has been able to recall his son back to the village.

• Sujit Chakraborty and Archita Bhatta are science and environmental journalists based in New Delhi.

• This article originally appeared at AlertNet, a humanitarian news site operated by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Several women and one man attend a weekly meeting led by Maria Cordova (far right). The meetings usually consist entirely of women, but sometimes a man will attend when his wife cannot. (Sena Christian)

An oasis of community and support for Latina moms

By Sena Christian, YES! Magazine / 03.14.13

Maria Leon grew up in northern California as the child of a single mother who worked long hours and spoke little English. Back then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, her hometown of Lincoln in Placer County had only a small Latino population, a demographic that has grown over the decades. She was often left alone, struggling with her anger. She got in fights, was defiant to authority figures, and regularly missed school.

“I got away with it because of the language barriers with my school and family,” says Leon, now 35 years old. “I would have appreciated a mentor at that time.”

Today, Leon herself is a mentor, or "promotora," and one of many in her community. These women, who now number 10 in Placer County, form a new and crucial link between the Latino community and the broader society, which they had previously been separated from by barriers of language as well as by a lack of knowledge about how to interact with schools, hospitals, and other key institutions in the United States.

Because of the traditional role of women as caretakers in Latino communities, these mentors are primarily female. But there are three male mentors in the county who work specifically with boys and men.

Leon helps parents learn how to better engage with their children. A year ago, she began working with Latino girls 13 to 17 years old in Placer County. The problems she saw included lying, truancy, drug use, and early sexual activity. The parents knew about these behaviors, but said they felt unprepared to handle them. Some had difficulty communicating with law enforcement or school administrators because of language barriers. For others, fear over their citizenship status inhibited them from speaking up. As a promotora, Leon can help parents leap these hurdles and get more involved, both with society at large and with their own children.

She nudges the parents along. She urges them, for instance, to contact schools repeatedly until they reach a translator. She connects them to free county resources. She teaches them how to push for the well-being of their families.

“It’s hard,” she says. “Hopefully, one at a time, we can make it work out.”

About 18 years ago, a school psychologist in Placer County named Maria Cordova began noticing a trend in the local Spanish-speaking population: an increase in cases of domestic violence, feelings of isolation and depression, and mothers who lacked power. So, Cordova started a number of groups in which women provided emotional support to one another.

“Her intent was, how do we get these women—many of them immigrants—to learn about each other, support each other, because when they move here they become isolated,” says Elisa Herrera, coordinator of the Latino Leadership Council, an organization formed in 2007 to assist underserved Spanish-speaking populations in Placer County. About 13 percent of the county’s 350,000 residents are of Hispanic or Latino origin.

“We [later] asked the women, when they had a problem or a challenge, who did they call?” Herrera says. And they said that they called Maria Cordova.

The council labeled Cordova a promotora.

“She said, ‘What the heck is a promotora?’” recalls Herrera. A promotora, Spanish for “promoter,” acts as a trained paraprofessional to help families navigate complicated social systems and access resources.

Promotoras aren’t unique to Placer County. Various social agencies throughout the United States use them, including the Migrant Clinicians Network based in Austin, Texas, and Planned Parenthood chapters. They typically focus on health issues.

Placer County’s promotoras are managed by the Latino Leadership Council. Cordova helped develop the program and now serves as its manager, overseeing 13 trained participants. They are paid on a contract basis and earn between $12 and $20 an hour, depending on skill level.

The first and most important factor in selecting someone to train as a promotora is that she must be trusted in the community.

“We hire for attitude and trust, and train for aptitude,” Herrera says.

The promotoras undergo training on a regular basis, learning about topics such as health education, youth violence prevention, and how to deal with trauma. They learn when to refer a client to a licensed professional or other organization. The promotoras who work for the Latino Leadership Council recently received training from a clinical psychologist on setting boundaries.

Herrera says that promotoras sometimes want to do too much for families, and take full responsibility for their lives.

“This training helped promotoras understand that they cannot work harder than their client does,” she says. “They can help the client access medical help, for instance, but they must then teach the client how to go to a pharmacy to get a prescription filled, or learn how to call to make their medical appointments. They should not do those things for the client because [that] creates dependence.”

Promotoras provide language translation, arrange transportation, act as liaisons, and work with youths and parents. They share vital information about health issues—Latinos are affected by diabetes and high blood pressure at a higher rate than whites—and connect people to primary care services so they no longer go the emergency room for nonemergency situations. They also host classes in Zumba, a Colombian workout style, where women go to dance and exercise, while learning about nutrition.

Using grants from Kaiser Permanente and the Sierra Health Foundation, promotoras in Placer County have collaborated with nursing students to conduct health screenings for Latino clients. Based on those results, the mentors set up the initial appointment, accompany the patient, help them understand doctor recommendations, and make sure they follow up on the advice. Herrera says this effort has been successful in improving the overall wellness of local Latinos.

On a sunny January morning in the historic district of Roseville, a woman escorts her young children into a building where more than a dozen women sit around two large tables. Over the course of the next hour, the women will discuss their struggles with issues including domestic violence, their husbands’ alcoholism, and argumentative teenaged children.

Cordova stands at the head of the table as she facilitates the weekly meetings.

“Sometimes, when they come here, they don’t even know what they need,” she says, as the women assemble. “They just know something is lacking.” The women range in age from early 20s to late 50s. Once a week, they come together to form a sisterhood.

Blanca Arciniega, 47, has been attending these meetings for 13 years.

“I came here with a lot of fear, desperate and anxious for a way to escape,” she says in Spanish. “Thank god I was invited here to this personal power group and thank god I’ve learned to value myself. … I’m learning to heal. My life has changed 100 percent.”

As three of her kids sit giggling and snacking on cereal, Pastora Gonzalez, 33, talks about learning to release her stress, which has improved her relationship with her five young children. But she needs information on tenants’ rights and how to access inexpensive legal services. Her husband was unfairly fired from his job, she believes.

As she describes what happened, many of the women nod. They attend the weekly meetings partly for an escape from domestic life—all of them raise their hands when asked if they become depressed when at home too much—but also for the friendships that form within the group.

“Helping each other is extremely important,” says Marta Miramontes, who lost her young daughter to leukemia in October. Through her family’s struggles, she became an advocate. When she learns something new, she shares the knowledge. When other mothers ask questions, she gives them advice. Despite not being formally trained as a promotora, she’s one in spirit, and has become a leader among her peers.

“Marta not only found her voice,” Cordova says with pride, “but she’s a voice for the community.”

• Sena Christian wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sena is a newspaper reporter in Roseville, Calif., with a passion for social justice and indoor soccer.

• This article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

A public bus passes under a Puerto Rican flag sculpture along the Paseo Boricua near Humboldt Park in Chicago. The neighborhood is known as 'little Puerto Rico' with a cultural center and Puerto Rican shops and restaurants. Chicago is making vigorous efforts to assimilate its many immigrant populations. (Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/File)

Cities try a new strategy with immigrants: embrace them

By Jessica Reeder, Shareable / 03.13.13

People like to move. Hundreds of millions of people around the world pack up and hit the road at some point: seeking greener pastures, finding work, following family members, escaping strife, and just going someplace.

Human migration has been a part of our nature since we populated Pangaea. And though modern borders and immigration policies slow the ebb and flow of human movement, decreased racial and cultural boundaries are allowing disparate cultures to intermix, particularly in modern cities.

In 2010, 214 million people – 3.1 percent of the world’s 6.1 billion human occupants – were living outside of their native countries as immigrants. The majority of those people traveled to more developed areas. Cities everywhere are growing, fast.

With the world’s fastest-growing cities spread literally around the globe, it’s an exciting and important moment for civic strategists. The current wave of migration will reinvent many cities as we know them, making them dramatically more diverse than in the past. The effects will be magical and, in some cases, intensely dangerous.

President Barack Obama touched on this topic when calling for immigration reform in last week’s State of the Union address.

"Our country is stronger when we harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants," Obama said. Immigrants bring economic activity, ambition, and a diversity of thought and behavior – but when new populations aren’t successfully integrated, the result can be xenophobia, segregation, poverty, and violence. Even in the United States – one of the world’s more immigrant-friendly nations – it’s common to see ethnically segregated neighborhoods, churches, schools, and their associated opportunities. Left unchecked, segregation can escalate to crime and brutality, race riots, and even ethnic cleansing.

“Government works best – most responsibly and responsively – when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses,” wrote urbanist Jane Jacobs. While immigration is always a national issue, the mechanics of integration happen at the civic level.

So how can modern cities be sure they’re welcoming immigrants – reaping the benefits of diversity instead of creating tension and danger? Cities of Migration has the answers.

A showcase of successful integration projects from cities around the globe, Cities of Migration hopes to provide not just inspiration but a set of tools that any city government can use to build a strong, diverse community. Some of solutions go well beyond what you’d expect, with surprising effectiveness.

“We talk about the usual and less usual suspects,” says Kim Turner, Cities of Migration project leader. “Not just diversity officers and settlement workers, but also police, business, emergency workers, planners, unions, banks, airports, sport and recreation, hospitals, schools, parks, and city streets.” The following ideas – just a few of the many innovations you’ll find on the Cities of Migration site – turn everyday resources into tools for integration and community building.

Cities are hubs of skill and innovation – and increasingly, modern cities are seeing immigrants as sources of potential and opportunity. But “It’s not enough to attract international skill and talent,” Turner says. “The secret is to attract and retain. People need to feel welcome, included, be able to participate and develop a sense of belonging – maybe even a path to citizenship.”

When newcomers feel welcome and have a reasonable financial foundation, they stay and contribute. Major cities are starting to advocate for immigration reform because it’s just good for business. Chicago is spearheading a national movement in the US, with a sweeping new initiative called the New Americans Plan. Mayor Rahm Emanuel says the goal is to make Chicago the most immigrant-friendly city in America.

“I want our city to be the first destination for immigrants because they are going to create the jobs, create the new companies, the businesses of the future,” Mayor Emanuel says. “We have to be the most welcoming cities we can be.”

In real terms, that means a top-down initiative run by the newly created Office of New Americansand advised by 50 local leaders representing all the major communities in Chicago. 27 initiatives were launched in late 2012, including business incubators, pop-up city services, education programs, support for undocumented children, and significant community outreach and engagement. It’s a massive undertaking with a good chance of success: Chicago is one of the most diverse cities in the United States, and rebranding it as an immigrant-friendly destination will undoubtedly bring in new residents while improving cultural dynamics.

Chicago isn’t alone; the Council of Europe and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg are also advocating for integration. City initiatives in London and San Francisco are actively working to help immigrants gain their financial footing so they can contribute to the local economy.

How do you get to know your neighbors? By walking through your neighborhood. Cities worldwide are encouraging community integration simply by getting people onto the sidewalks.

The Hague and Toronto both organize walking tours of immigrant neighborhoods, markets, and places of worship. The Hague focuses on tourism, capitalizing on its emerging reputation as a multicultural city. Toronto invites teachers on its tours, giving them insight and awareness into the lives of their students.

Meanwhile, the City of Auckland takes a different approach: The Walking School Bus gives students safe routes to school by organizing them along more than 300 routes, with set departure and drop-off times. Students and parents walk together in groups, staying safe and getting to know each other in the process.

Badalona, a city of 200,000 on the outskirts of Barcelona, had a different problem: a rapidly growing Sikh population that was not integrating with the native Spanish residents. When the Sikh temple wanted to host a religious procession, Badalona officials gave them a condition: They would need to go through a mediation and facilitation process with the local neighborhood association. Once the two groups started talking successfully, the parade was approved and some native residents even joined in.

It can take decades for a migrant population to gain acceptance in a new community without help from civic leaders. In 2008, the Netherlands realized it had a problem with its police force: Namely, high numbers of women and ethnic minorities joining the force only to drop out. With a growing immigrant population, the country took action to improve its police force’s intercultural awareness. Police Commissioner Patrick Voss relocated to Toronto for two months to see how its police work toward cultural peacekeeping in a highly diverse city.

Commissioner Voss shadowed Superintendent Sam Fernandes, spending every day with a different group of Torontonians.

“We talked about the importance of multicultural experiences; getting outside your comfort zone every day and seeing the world with a different perspective,” Voss wrote in his blog of the visit. “This, according to him (and me, in all modesty) is a prerequisite for leadership in this complex world and virtually every police force in the world.”

Voss’ cultural training is just one of many experiments police forces are undertaking. Their role is ever more challenging, and in many cases they do act as ambassadors between communities that might not see eye to eye. Other successful experiments helping police connect with local populations:

•  In Madrid, police meet monthly with the community in a public forum focused on how police officers can better serve and protect.
•  In Cardiff, police teach ESOL courses as a method to increase communication.
•  New Zealand police carry a handbook of religious diversity that specifically addresses religious protocols.
•  In Leicester, police recruit actively at community centers, in mosques, and through special events organized by the police force to increase engagement with various cultural groups.
•  Brooklyn police conduct outreach to help newcomers feel safe, and recruit multicultural cadets to help build personal connections.

No matter what a city does from an organizational level, it can be difficult for an existing population to welcome a wave of newcomers. Cultures and religions easily clash. Language barriers and foreign clothing styles may cause uneasiness, particularly when the either or both groups feel threatened or overlooked. In most cases, there’s a significant amount of community outreach to be done – and the best way to do it is by unblocking cultural channels:

Visual Art: Barcelona’s Anti-Rumor Campaign aims to open the conversation with humor. The City Council worked with a local artist to create a comic book about an elderly Spanish señora and her Peruvian helper, breaking down stereotypes by sending its characters through a variety of quotidian adventures. The “Did You Know?” video campaign is a series of humorous videos, such as this one poking fun at the stereotype that immigration endangers cultural identity:

Libraries and Education: Since 1977, the Queens Public Library in New York has been working to become a center for knowledge, culture, and language exchange. 55 percent of the population of Queens speaks a language other than English at home, and the library performs a crucial function for the diverse and often lower-income population. In fact, it’s the nation’s most active library, circulating more than 23 million items in 70 languages. But its cultural resources aren’t limited to providing information on American culture to immigrants; it also maintains an extensive international collection and conducts programs to share literature and performance and folk art from throughout the world.

Museums: London’s Victoria & Albert Museum celebrated International Refugee Week with a unique initiative: It recruited refugees from Rwanda, Burma, Iraq, Somalia, Darfur, and Uganda to present specific museum collections, using them as springboards to tell their own personal stories.

“When I remember what happened to me I feel bitterness in my soul,” Fayhaa Abdulwahab told Cities of Migration. “But when I see people listening and sympathizing, it helps remove it. I feel that there’s hope in humanity.” The museum also incorporated language sessions and live performance to help visitors connect with the diverse cultures being represented.

“As cities adjust to changing economic conditions, they also remain central to the social integration of immigrants across all areas of everyday life,” Turner says. “Unlike business enterprises, cities and towns must also seek approaches that are sustainable, inclusive, ecologically sensitive, and globally responsible.”

Our global culture is continuously shifting, even more rapidly now that technology connects us across great distances. Good ideas for improving cultural relationships abound, both from cities and from community organizations.

What can you do in your own city to increase diversity?

• This article originally appeared at Shareable.net, a nonprofit online magazine that tells the story of how sharing can promote the common good.

Child soldiers holding machines guns look out from a window in a militia camp near Bunia in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003. Child soldiers are an issue confronting many African countries. Sierra Leone has begun a program to teach its soldiers and its children about the problem. (Reuters/File)

Sierra Leone combats the outrage of child soldiering

By Alyson Rowe, AlertNet / 03.12.13

Sierra Leone is launching a five-year program to combat the recruitment of child soldiers and run child soldier prevention programs in local schools.

The nationwide drive, the first of its kind in West Africa, will make child-rights training mandatory for the local police and armed forces and outline standards on how troops must engage with children in combat.

Sierra Leonean troops are confronting child soldiers on the front lines when they join peacekeeping missions in countries such as Somalia and Mali, where about 6,500 Sierra Leonean troops were deployed in January.

A decade after the end of a civil war in which an estimated 10,000 child soldiers were recruited, Sierra Leone has a generation of young people who have gone to war and killed. To avoid another generation growing up amid such violence, the program aims to couple child-protection training for the police and army with an education program in 45 schools across five districts.

The Child Soldier Initiative (CSI), a nonprofit group founded by Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the former U. commander who led the ill-fated peacekeeping mission in Rwanda from 1993 to 1994, has designed the training manual and program for the army, police force, and prison officials. CSI officials said they do not yet know how many security officials will be trained but the army has 13,000 soldiers.

In the second phase of the scheme, now being developed, CSI hopes to train and employ former child soldiers to run the school program, which will teach children about their legal rights and explain what child soldiery is and what tactics are used to recruit children.

Sierra Leone is the first country in West Africa to adopt an official child soldier policy, said Ismail Tarawalie, director of internal security at the Office of National Security. Other war- affected countries like Sudan, Mali, and Ivory Coast have received training from charities like CSI and UNICEF but do not have mandatory child-protection training policies.

“It is an important project because it will enhance the military’s capacity to meet international standards and ensure adequate training for military personnel,” Tarawalie said.

The charity has raised $150,000 for the first 18 months of the program, but executive director Shelley Whitman estimates it will cost an additional $350,000 to run the project for five years as planned. CSI has done child-protection training for security personnel in 46 countries, but Whitman said this is the first time its goal is to train a whole nation.

Child soldiers are a problem confronting many African countries. Psychological trauma, maimed children with amputated limbs, and stolen childhoods are its immediate effects. But for post-conflict countries like Sierra Leone, its impact lingers a decade later. Many former soldiers who did not successfully reintegrate and finish school are now homeless and jobless, a generation of unskilled young adults living on the streets.

Saudamini Siegrist, a child-protection specialist with UNICEF, said CSI’s long-term commitment to a large-scale security sector training program is significant because it fills a gap in post-conflict countries’ rehabilitation schemes.

 “Recovery from the consequences of war takes time – even a lifetime,” said Siegrist.

• Alyson Rowe is a fellow in global journalism at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

• This article originally appeared at AlertNet, a humanitarian news site operated by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A third-grade student swings on the monkey bars during school recess in Paris, Texas. The nonprofit group Playworks provides 360 schools in low-income neighborhoods fun, organized activities for children during recess, allowing them to return to class refreshed and ready to learn. (Bill Ridder/The Paris News/AP/File)

Playworks coaches teach games, prevent bullying at recess

By Nicole Wallace, The Chronicle of Philanthropy / 03.11.13

Playworks, a nonprofit in Oakland, Calif., thinks that Hula Hoops and relay races just might hold the key to better academic performance for elementary-school students.

The organization seeks to provide fun, organized opportunities to play during recess, allowing children to return to class refreshed and ready to learn.

The charity places full-time coaches in 360 schools in low-income neighborhoods who organize games, encourage participation, and show kids how to mediate conflicts with techniques like rock-paper-scissors. Older students act as junior coaches, helping to lead activities and teach new games to younger children.

“We focus on recess and play in schools, with the idea of leveraging it to really promote learning and physical activity,” says Jill Vialet, who founded the organization in 1996.

Playworks grew from a conversation Ms. Vialet had with a principal who was frustrated by the amount of time she and her teachers spent dealing with playground conflicts. The principal was running late for a meeting, and when she emerged from her office, three little boys she had been disciplining trailed behind her.

“She starts describing how recess had become this really chaotic time and how these boys were always getting in trouble,” says Ms. Vialet. “They weren’t bad kids, but they were starting to see themselves as bad kids.”

Outside evaluators studied 14 schools in the Playworks program and compared them with 11 similar schools that were not. Teachers in the Playworks schools reported better behavior at recess and 27 percent less time transitioning to classroom activities after recess than at the control schools. What’s more, kids were far less likely to bully or treat one another poorly.

Boone Elementary School in Chicago­ — one of 22 cities where the organization works — started the program this fall. Discipline problems have decreased significantly, says Lori Zaimi, the school’s assistant principal.

“The teachers can now focus on teaching,” she says. “They don’t have to worry about what happened during recess.”

Money from fees­ — charged both to participating schools and to other schools, for training teachers and administrators — accounts for a little more than one-third of the organization’s $30.9 million annual budget. Most of the rest comes from private donations by individuals, corporations, and foundations, with government grants bringing in another $2.3-million.

• This story originally appeared at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Nusreta Sivac, a former judge, was one of thousands of women who were raped during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, as part of a systematic Bosnian Serb rape campaign. After the war, Sivac collected testimonies of other rape victims with a view to making a UN war crimes court in The Hague recognize the acts as a war crime. (Amel Emric/AP)

Bosnian woman helped make rape a war crime

By Aida Cerkez, Associated Press / 03.08.13

There were days when she prayed for a bullet to end her suffering. When she thought she was dying of a heart attack, she whispered "Thank you God."

A young judge, Nusreta Sivac, was one of 37 women raped by guards at a concentration camp in Bosnia. They never discussed the nightly traumas — their pained glances were enough to communicate their suffering. She also witnessed murder and torture by Bosnian Serb guards — and was forced to clean blood from walls and floors of the interrogation room.

She told herself to memorize the names and faces of the tormentors so that one day she might bring them to justice.

Today, it's partly thanks to Ms. Sivac's efforts to gather testimony from women across Bosnia that rape has been categorized as a war crime under international law. Thirty people have been convicted at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague and another 30 cases are ongoing. She personally helped put the man who raped her repeatedly during her two months in captivity behind bars.

"Most of the strength I took from the idea that one day this evil would be over," she told The Associated Press this week ahead of International Women's Day on March 8.

The United NationsSpecial Representative on sexual violence in conflict said Sivac and other victims are helping to make sure wartime rapists pay for their crimes.

"The courage these women have shown coming forward and sharing their stories demonstrates the need to break the silence and stigma surrounding sexual violence in conflict," said Zainab Hawa Bangura. "These survivors are helping to end impunity by making sure perpetrators are brought to justice."

Bosnia's 1992-95 war was the bloodiest in the series of armed conflicts that erupted when the Yugoslav federation fell apart and its republics began declaring independence. It took more than 100,000 lives and devastated the region. According to the UN, between 20,000 to 50,000 Bosnian women were raped — many in special rape camps — during the war that was fought between the new country's Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks.

African conflicts have seen even more harrowing figures: Between 250,000 and 500,000 were raped during the Rwandan genocide, and hundreds of thousands more in conflicts in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Sivac's ordeal started in the spring of 1992 when Bosnian Serbs took control over her native Prijedor, in the northwest of Bosnia, and threw Muslim Bosniaks and Roman Catholic Croats in concentration camps. Alongside the women were 3,500 male prisoners, hundreds of whom were killed.

Sivac, a Muslim Bosniak, would start the day counting the bodies of the men who were tortured to death overnight. "Their bodies lay there in the grass in front of the building. Sometimes 20, sometimes 30 of them," she recalled outside the factory in Omarska where she was held for two months.

During the long days of forced labor in the camp's restaurant, the women listened to tortured prisoners screaming, calling for help, and begging for mercy with voices that would become weaker until they went silent. Then the guards would force the women to clean the interrogation rooms, strewn with bloody pliers and batons. At night, guards would come to take the women away one by one — to rape.

Her captivity ended in August 1992 when a group of foreign journalists found the facility. The images of skeletal prisoners behind a fence and naked bodies beaten black and blue shocked the world and prompted an avalanche of reactions that forced the Serb leadership to release the prisoners.

Sivac's pre-war colleague from the Prijedor court, prosecutor Jadranka Cigelj, was also among the 37 Omarska women. The two escaped to neighboring Croatia, where they began collecting testimonies from hundreds of women who had been raped.

They spent years transcribing testimonies, convincing victims to break their silence, and putting together legal dossiers that they then presented to the investigators at the International Tribunal for War Crimes in Former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague.

During this process, she said, "it became obvious how many women from all over Bosnia were affected. But I wasn't surprised by the big number."

For centuries, rape was considered a byproduct of wars — collateral damage suffered by women, horrors often overshadowed by massacres. Even though the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibited wartime rape, no court ever raised charges until Sivac and Cigelj presented their overwhelming evidence.

The effort finally paid off in June 1995 when the two traveled to The Hague to take part in preparations for the first indictment by the Yugoslav war crimes court.

Their collected evidence exposed the magnitude of rape, which courts could no longer ignore. According to the United Nations, it was a major "turning point" in recognizing rape as a war crime.

Sivac remembers the sunny July day the two realized their work would be soon rewarded.

They enjoyed a coffee in an outdoor cafe in The Hague and wrote a few postcards back to their torturers in Prijedor.

"Dear Friends," they wrote. "We hope you will soon join us in this wonderful city."

A year later, the tribunal indicted eight Bosnian Serb men for sexual assault in eastern Bosnia — a verdict based on testimonies collected by Sivac and Cigelj.

It was the first time in history that an international tribunal charged someone solely for crimes of sexual violence.

Nerma Jelacic, spokeswoman for the Yugoslav war crimes court, recalls the "shocking" testimony in subsequent cases, where some victims were as young as 12.

"We had cases where both mother and daughter came to testify and both were subjected to same kind of torture and kind of crimes," she told AP.

Sivac, who has since testified in several cases, including against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, is satisfied with what she has achieved, although she wishes the ongoing cases would accelerate.

"It's slow, very slow," she said. "But it is a start."

One of the Omarska guards she testified against was released in 2005 after he served two-thirds of his seven-year sentence.

Sivac ran into him on the street one day in Bosnia.

"We stared at each other," she said. "He was the first one to lower his head."