Giving Compass' Take:
- Jeff Edmondson discusses lessons he learned while serving in the Peace Corps, about listening to the community to drive impact and finding solutions to local problems.
- How can donors use similar approaches to charitable giving when helping communities?
- Learn more about the importance of listening to communities to build equitable solutions.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Immediately after completing college, I served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, Central Africa. I was motivated by the mission of improving nutrition outcomes and embraced my charge to help build fish ponds with families in and around the village of Ebando where I lived. It was satisfying work, but it was obvious that it would not actually help improve nutrition at scale. I learned that a Peace Corps administrator had determined fish farming was the right solution because it was effective in neighboring Congo where fish are hard to come by. But in Gabon, all you had to do was put a trap in the local creek or river to harvest fish — ponds were simply unnecessary.
What the Gabonese wanted to learn was how to raise farm animals. So we worked to change the program to something the community actually wanted, which also provided a much more steady source of nutrition. We listened to those we were hoping to serve and that led us to a much more impactful solution.
Read the full article about life lessons on lasting social change by Jeff Edmondson, Managing Director, Ballmer Group at Medium.