The Global Advocate Alumni Summit 2018
On the personal, the political, and building doors.
Earlier this month, MAMA HOPE gathered together 33 people from all over the world for our first-ever Global Advocate Program Alumni Summit. Since 2012, we’ve trained 105 people in the core tenants of MAMA HOPE’s model, including servant leadership, human-centered design, ethical storytelling, deep listening, and building authentic relationships. Our Global Advocates have raised $1.7M which has been invested in sustainable projects across East Africa, Ghana, India, Central America and in the US.
After celebrating the program’s 5th birthday, we felt that the time was right to make space for some serious reflection — to invite challenges, embrace transformation and welcome fresh ideas. Thus, the Summit was born. Alumni from as close as Oakland and as far as Tanzania and Australia joined us for a long weekend of workshops, screenings, guest speakers, storytelling, San Francisco exploration and one epic dance party.
Since graduating from the program, Advocate alumni have gone on to do inspiring and groundbreaking work in affordable housing, agriculture, LGBTQ+ advocacy, homelessness, entrepreneurship, tech, government, water and sanitation, human rights, youth development, girls’ education, public health, and corporate social good. It was a dream to bring 14 generations of Advocates back together to reconnect and figure out how we can do a better job building a more just and prosperous world.
The Personal
One of the most powerful parts of the weekend was Friday evening. After a double-feature film screening we hosted a panel of powerful women working in community development and activism. Masterfully moderated by Global Advocate alumni Morgan Deluce and Ali Osborne, the panel featured Deborah Holmes from the Women’s Funding Network, Bela Shah from the Dalai Lama Fellows, Aika Roberts, Global Advocates East Africa alumni and founder of Nguzo Tanzania (“Stand, Tanzania”), and Verónica Moreno from Thousand Currents. These women — whose work inspires and challenges us in all the right ways — set a poignant tone that stuck with us in our imaginations and conversations for the rest of the weekend.
One recurring theme that arose during the panel was the idea that in order to do the important work of social justice, advocacy, and community development, you must embrace the importance of building a personal practice of self-reflection and mindfulness. Bela shared the classic illustration of multicolored sand swirling in a jar of water. She reminded us that, when anxious or worried, we’re are unable to see through the grainy liquid clearly. But, when we take a moment to breathe and let the sand settle, we are able to make room for clear observation. With that clarity, we can make decisions and take actions that take our thoughts, feelings and emotions into account — but aren’t dictated by them.
This visualization really stuck with me. So often, I feel guilty for taking the time to clear my mind. Our society tells us that if we aren’t in “production mode,” we aren’t working. Listening to Bela, I was reminded that when we don’t make the space to take action from a place of clarity, we are more likely to make missteps and less likely to learn from them.
The Political
Like many nonprofits, MAMA HOPE exists because of a gap. Frustrated with broken governments and bureaucratic aid organizations making top-down choices that end up hurting people more than helping them, we built MAMA HOPE so that our partners are the decision-makers. We exist to help build what they envision. This structure has been working well enough for the past 10 years, but more and more we’ve come to realize that we aren’t directly engaging with the inherently political nature of our work. The issues we care about — the environment, human rights, clean water, sustainable agriculture — cannot be solved with projects alone. During the summit, so many of our conversations zoomed out to the larger picture: what are the systems at work, and what role can we play in shifting them?
Politics is an intimidating, messy, and complicated space. It has been easier for us to work directly with grassroots partners, helping communities build projects to fill the gaps that governments leave behind. But at some point, that isn’t enough. We have to start asking deeper, more challenging questions. Why do these gaps exist in the first place? Why are so many families in Uganda farming sugarcane instead of growing food? Why do the evangelical churches in Guatemala teach children that Mayan traditions are evil? Why are there protests and riots following elections in Kenya? These questions are all political, and if we want to do the work of serving our partners well, we cannot avoid them.
My favorite moment during the panel was when Verónica boldly stated that “The sector of philanthropy is a symptom of the disease of capitalism.” Many of us who have benefitted from being born on the lucky side of this system might object to this statement and react defensively. But I felt encouraged to take a moment, and let it sink in. Why do nonprofits exist if not to fill in the gaps left by our government, by our system? How have we benefited from colonization and extractive capitalism? How do we still benefit today?
The next day, we heard from our partner Denis at the Suubi Health Center in Uganda. He shared stories about how their work in women’s health has come into conflict with the government. He related how they had been prevented from expanding their family planning programs because the government was suspicious they would provide information about or access to abortion services. Denis shared how the government allocates less and less of its budget on healthcare every year and how these cuts directly impact the people Suubi serves. He talked about the need to invest in affordability, access and advocacy alongside programming.
On Building Doors
During the summit we asked ourselves “How can this group of people recognize our privilege and use it to help build doors for others to walk through? How can MAMA HOPE help support coalitions of organizations that can use their collective voices to advocate for themselves in governments and rooms where policy is made? How can we use our connections and power to amplify the voices of the people we work with?”
Matt, an alumni who worked alongside our partners in Ghana, said it best:
“I remember looking at Toby before orientation across a table and asking ‘What are we doing with our lives?’ Accessing this program brought me into a completely different world that has now led me to a space where I’m creating doorways that others can walk through themselves.”
James, from the pilot class of our Global Advocates East Africa, exemplifies this mentality. Born in Tanzania to a family of 7 children, he worked hard to finish school and get his degree in Community Development. He knew getting to that level of education put him in the minority of his peers, and from early on his dream was to help others achieve the education he had. His mentor advised him to continue on to study law, but instead he joined the African Volunteer Corps, and later found MAMA HOPE. While working with our partners at St. Timothy’s School as a Global Advocate, he saved his living stipend and earned extra money using his motorbike as a taxi on the weekends. Now, using that money, he’s begun to build his vision: a community resource center for women and girls called the Ndoto Hub — after the Swahili for “dream.”
At its best, the Global Advocate Program is an opportunity to learn to build bigger, stronger, and better doors. As MAMA HOPE grows and evolves, it gives me comfort to know we will always have this community of engaged, empathetic people who, alongside our partners, can be our North Star. After the Summit weekend I’m full of excitement for the potential of this program, and I feel an immense gratitude to our Global Advocates who are becoming architects of doors and dreams.
Katrina Boratko is the Communications Manager at MAMA HOPE.
