Posts Tagged ‘On the Ground’

Dubai for Acumen’s Inaugural Spring Benefit at Cuadro Art Gallery in DIFC

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Sonya Khan is on the leadership team of Acumen Fund’s Dubai volunteer chapter. Dubai for Acumen’s Spring Benefit successfully raised more than $10,000 for Acumen Fund. The Dubai chapter is Acumen Fund’s third official chapter and we are excited to welcome them to our Acumen Fund Partner community.

Surveying the crowd of professionals mingling at Dubai for Acumen’s first fundraising event in the heart of Dubai’s financial district, I felt a surge of satisfaction.  Only a week earlier, as the volunteers made our final push for ticket sales, we weren’t sure how many people to expect for our first event. Unlike many of the other cities where Acumen Fund and its Chapters operate; in Dubai, Acumen Fund was a completely alien concept.   The objective of the event was to make an impact on Dubai’s professional community and to get the word out about Acumen Fund, so numbers mattered.  Volunteers had been sending out emails, making phone calls, and talking to co-workers, friends, and acquaintances for weeks in a bid to reach as many people as possible and it had clearly paid off – the Chapter ultimately sold 300 tickets. The atmosphere at the art gallery was animated; people strolled through nibbling on canapés, enjoying the accompaniments of the pianist, some still in business suits straight from the office, others glammed up for an evening out.  Small groups gathered around scattered TV monitors, watching videos of various Acumen Fund projects and hearing Jacqueline Novogratz speak.  Once the presentation started, the chatter quickly died down and attention turned to the informational part of the evening.

Dubai draws many people from around the world through its reputation for decadence and the lure of a more luxurious life.  The informational session that evening was a call to action, daring us all not to be lulled into a life of comfortable complacency.  It started out with Ankur Shah presenting the facts and figures along with real world examples of how Acumen Fund is achieving its goals, appealing to the most practical minds in the audience.  He was followed by the keynote speaker for the evening Sarah Dimson, a Ghanaian-American Acumen Fellow, who iscurrently working at Ansaar Management Company, a low income housing company based in Lahore, Pakistan. Sarah challenged all of us to find a way to make a difference. She spoke passionately about how amazed she was by her experiences as an Acumen Fellow, even though it was radically different from what she had anticipated when she applied.  She presented the Acumen Fellows program not only as a means through which to make positive mark on the planet, but also an avenue for personal growth.

I expected the evening to wrap up quickly after that and was pleasantly surprised to see how many people lingered on, stopping volunteers to ask questions, sharing ideas and seeking ways to get further involved.  If as Voltaire says, the present is pregnant with the future, then this event will bring inspiration, growth, and energy to the Dubai for Acumen chapter.

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Posted in Acumen Community, Events & Conferences, On the Ground | No Comments

Rising from the Ash

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Yasmina Zaidman is the Director of Communications at Acumen Fund. She recently attended the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England.

This past Tuesday I found myself moving past steep verdant hills at the border crossing between France and Spain, each dotted with sheep and donkeys in swirls of misty clouds. I was sitting in a car with four other people committed to meaningful social change against odds as steep as those hills.

Social innovation: a tall task!

This was hour 11 of a 17-hour journey overland from Paris to Madrid, inspired by a deep desire to return home after the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano covering Europe with ash had blocked all flights in and out of London, where all of us began our journey.

To return home from the Skoll World Forum at Oxford last week, a global conference on social entrepreneurship that is the sector’s most celebrated event, we had chosen the less certain (and much less convenient) option of going to Madrid, one of the few open airports in Europe, instead of staying in London to wait for the skies to clear.

In our cramped little car, we held a gently-facilitated discussion on issues close to our hearts. We chose to use the journey to address themes of leadership, unconscious wisdom, and the power of civil society. We did the work of exposing and exploring some of the biggest challenges and deepest questions we each face, aware, perhaps, of the unique opportunity to tap into the perspectives of a group of captive social entrepreneurs. I won’t suggest that we didn’t spend a lot of the trip in less noble pursuits, like singing, telling jokes, or obsessively checking our BlackBerries for news, but most of the trip was dedicated to our discussions.

While at the Skoll Forum, I perceived an emerging consensus: that social entrepreneurs, social enterprises and all those who support them (investors, capacity builders, researchers, communicators) represent an unstoppable force for good. Paul Hawken addressed this idea during his plenary talk during the Skoll awards, and it was reinforced by the quality of panel discussions and surging energy of group events around Oxford, in addition to individual connections I made, which are too numerous to share here.

Yes, the power of social change is humbling – and being in the presence of so many social innovators at once is inspiring. But this group of social innovators from around the world, from all walks of life, with diverse tactics but a shared commitment to global change, truly showed their colors after the conference ended, in the midst of the chaos caused by the volcanic ash cloud.

There were local events, an astoundingly good TedX Volcano (for more photos, click here), private dinners to advance ideas initiated at Skoll, and efforts through various technologies and social networking tools, to coordinate efforts to escape the UK. Through all of these, I saw the true nature of the unstoppable social entrepreneurs Hawken spoke of. What we do, as a community, is work, hard work. But we do this work like we breathe. Like a great dancer, or artist, or scientist, we work when no one’s watching, when no one even understands what we are doing, when others actively seek to block us. We search for ideas and opportunities that can transform the world around us. And the obstacles don’t ever succeed in diminishing our commitment to the work. They simply challenge us to find more creative routes and new alliances, and to deepen our resolve.

The days after the airport closures were charged with great urgency, as many of us wondered where our colleagues were, which path they had chosen to return home, what they were missing back home. In our small group of travelers, a child was born to a first-time father many miles away, a wedding was missed, major speaking events went without keynotes, board meetings and critical negotiations were postponed.

While it is clear that the volcanic ash cloud caused nothing but financial losses and grief for airlines, transport and export industries around the globe, it is not as clear that the volcano slowed the progress of this cohort of social change agents.

The spontaneous efforts by so many of us to find each other, continue the discussions begun at the Skoll Forum and advance them to a new level of intense and purposeful discourse, suggest to me that the volcano may have in fact fueled our work. I am back on American soil now, finally beginning to reflect on what this massive investment of time and resources by me and others to be together might be worth. And it is really the combined impact of the conference and the volcano that I have to consider.

At the conference, I saw that we social entrepreneurs are a growing community, diversifying into thematic and functional specializations that will give us greater impact – addressing issues like enterprise finance, storytelling, global water scarcity and pandemics. The theme of the conference was collaboration, yet it was a challenge to express how difficult it really is to work together as we all focus so intently on our individual challenges. Yet after the conference I saw that wherever we were, however disoriented, or uncertain, that we sought each other out, found each other, we worked together, and gave each other courage or a smile when needed. Which is exactly what is needed by all of us when overwhelmed by the challenges of an uncertain world filled with massive social and environmental challenges.

We will continue to rise.

We are better, stronger and more urgent, it appears, when faced by adversity. The blessing of the volcano is that it harmed almost no one while inconveniencing several continents. This could be considered a gentle reminder of how we can come together when we want to, and when in fact we need to . The camaraderie, encouragement, creativity and renewed commitment that I sensed these past five days need not settle along with the volcanic ash, waiting for the next big crisis. These gifts are ours to keep as we continue to rise to the challenges we encounter, to the injustices, failures of conscience, and tragic waste of human potential that is poverty. And we will continue to rise.

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Posted in AF Team, Acumen News, On the Ground | 3 Comments

Reflections from Dubai

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Pauline Nguyen is a volunteer who recently participated in an Acumen Fund presentation in Dubai, where Blair Miller presented her experiences managing the Acumen Fund Fellows Program.

I will be the first one to confess that I was pessimistic for the turnout at Blair Miller’s presentation about the Acumen Fund Fellows Program.   The feeling had nothing to do with Blair herself (who is quite fabulous in real life) but rather the type of people and lifestyle that exist in Dubai.

Professionals come to Dubai to work tax-free, live in luxury housing, enjoy fancy brunches, and travel to exotic destinations on the weekend.  In my honest and ugly opinion, Dubai is not a place with a lot of community-minded individuals.

Therefore, it felt very surreal to sit in a theatre in the Mall of the Emirates (Dubai’s excessive mall with its own indoor ski lodge) listening to Blair Miller, Talent Manager at Acumen Fund, promote the Fellows Program to an audience of 45 young professionals.

It was a tall order but even I, comfortable in my own luxury high rise, was inspired by her presentation to think deeply about applying for the Fellows Program.  The key highlight of Blair’s presentation was the focus on Acumen’s past Fellows.  The stories about the Fellows were easy to relate to as they were of the same age and stage in life as most of the audience members. I will assume (by the number of suits and Blackberry devices) that we were an audience between our late 20s and mid 30s, composed mainly of bankers, consultants, and other frustrated people working for the “man”/government. Basically, we were an audience who could use a change and some inspiration in our lives. Blair was telling us more than a story about a Fellow’s work- she was offering an opportunity to change our lives, to be that Fellow that builds more LifeSpring hospitals to bring safe birthing facilities to Indian women. Most expatriates eventually leave Dubai, but the question is:  Where to next?  Acumen’s answer:  Be a Fellow and make a tangible contribution to combating poverty in the developing world!

Another captivating part of the Acumen Fund Fellows Program was the calibre of the chosen participants.  It seemed that every Fellow had at least an expensive MBA and years of outstanding experience on their resume.   While I was a little intimidated, I still understood the message:  Acumen Fund wants the best financial and business minds (i.e. fanatic modelers welcome) to be their representatives in the field.  The Fellows Program is not asking volunteers to go to Africa and hold or adopt babies (no offense to those who do).  Rather, Fellows develop business plans, complex financial models, and contribute their business skills to make a tangible difference in a local social enterprise. Amazing stuff to think about!  Personally, I think it is much cooler and self-rewarding to be able to say “Yeah, I totally modeled five scenarios on how to alleviate India’s water scarcity problem” instead of “Yeah, I modeled five scenarios of a debt equity ratio that would yield the highest IRR.”

I would like to thank the Dubai for Acumen Volunteer Group for reaching out and inspiring us towards a more rewarding lifestyle. The Acumen Fund Fellows presentation was the second event organized by the Dubai Chapter.  I am excited for the Chapter’s next event which will be Acumen Fund’s Inaugural Fundraising Event to be held on April 7th at Cuadro Art Gallery in DIFC (for more information please email DubaiforAcumen@acumenfund.org). The event will be an opportunity to learn more about Acumen Fund and will feature a musical performance, good food and drinks.

I am eager to meet more individuals interested in Acumen Fund’s work, and hope to see you there!

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Posted in AF Team, Acumen Community, On the Ground | No Comments

When access to healthcare matters most: a personal experience of emergency medical care

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Yasmina Zaidman is Director of Communications at Acumen Fund. She recently returned from vacation in the Dominican Republic, where she personally experienced the importance of access to emergency medical care.

The hospital in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, where Yasmina and her son were fortunate enough to receive treatment.

The hospital in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, where Yasmina and her son were fortunate enough to receive treatment.

I try not to think too much about work when I’m on vacation, but when I found myself in the back of an ambulance in the Dominican Republic this past week, I couldn’t help but think about Acumen Fund’s work on improving access to emergency care. I was holding my 17-month old baby in my arms as he vomited into a bed pan, while two young medics stood ready to check his vitals. He had acquired an acute bacterial infection, we later learned, that was leading to mild dehydration. This is a problem with a very simple solution – rehydration, with the optional treatment of antibiotics. Yet this simple solution is often not available, and dehydration is the single greatest cause of infant mortality, leading to the preventable deaths of millions of children under 5 each year.

I know how very preventable these deaths are, in part because I just saw it averted for my son. At every step in the process of getting my son the help he needed I found myself asking: “what would we do if we had no money?” First, there would be no emergency transport to a hospital or clinic (though this was only needed in this case because his illness started while we were at an international airport in a foreign country). There would have been no emergency room to check into with the swipe of a credit card. There would have been no instant diagnostics to check his blood pressure, his heart rate, his white blood cell count, which told us that his infection was bacterial and not viral. And most of all, there would have been no treatment, no IV providing the perfect combination of salt and sugar to help his body absorb the fluids that would keep his 22 lb. body functioning properly.

You don’t need a vivid imagination to see how this situation could have played out differently, and my mind kept switching from my own circumstance, in a relatively clean room, with a nurse and blood test results in hand, to a very different one. I pictured a dirt-floored room in a crowded slum or temporary shelter, my sick child in my arms, a dirty rag to wipe his mouth, and futile attempts to provide water, perhaps itself contaminated, to a child who was not tolerating liquids. I would essentially have to watch and wait to see whether his own immune system’s ability to neutralize the infection and its symptoms would outpace the deadly effects of dehydration. And too often, children lose this battle, with the result, over and over again, of death. On the very island where we just spent our holiday, in a small country just across the border, there are 400,000 children displaced by Haiti’s earthquake. How many of them will face the same illness that my son had? How many of them will survive it?

I take the helplessness I felt as I watched my son getting stuck with needles and consider the situation of a parent who isn’t lucky enough to have access to this basic medical intervention and who can’t perform the basic duty of a parent to protect their child from a preventable catastrophe.

Today, my son is his normal bright and bounding self, picking up words here and there, and anything else he can get his hands on. I’ve never been happier to be home from a vacation in my life. Not only because of the comfort of familiarity after this experience, but also because what I come back to is this work we do at Acumen Fund. The work to bring basic, yet life-sustaining goods and services to people who can’t typically afford them. Whether it is access to emergency care from 1298 in Mumbai, or affordable maternal care in Hyderabad, or rural pharmacies in Kenya, or health insurance in Pakistan, basic healthcare for families should never be out of reach. No parent should have to watch helplessly while their child battles infection when a simple diagnosis and rehydration therapy is so simple and so effective. Getting to that point is not simple, but it is the work I come back to with great gratitude, both for my own circumstances, and for the privilege of doing my own small part to bring access to healthcare to other families.

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Posted in AF Team, On the Ground | 10 Comments