The Global Development Long Game
I agree with Courtney Martin that we’re living in an age where it’s “sexier” to travel to far away places to learn about exotic new things while “making a difference.” Cynically, I wonder how much of this rise is related to the rise of social media, and the desire to continuously document a positive self-image. How many photographs can one post of the stack of books needed to research a legal case to get a young person off of death row? Or to endure the long-term, tedious negotiations with officials needed to improve public transportation in a city like Cleveland, Ohio, where I live?
What would happen if we declared 2016 the year without Instagram and Facebook, to encourage people to dive in and work on the unsexy projects they think would be most impactful in their communities?
That said, I’m not sure I buy the argument that we’d all be better off if we grounded all of our young people in their own neighborhoods without first allowing them to leave, learn, and come back on their own terms. While I believe that young people may be able to make the most impact working in their local communities, I also believe in the importance of stepping out in order to return with a broader perspective.
Certainly, I know many people who are local badasses, working toward powerful change in the communities where they were raised. But many of the most effective of them are doing it after having given themselves the global perspective that can only be hard won by experiencing life in places that are different than what they know — in other parts of the country or the world. I’ve seen firsthand the effect of people in leadership positions without having experienced a place that differs from their “normal.” The results are often not pretty. It’s harder to champion visionary ideas without some kind of well of inspiration to draw from, the kind that’s deepened through this broadening of horizons.
One of the hidden effects of poverty is the associated restriction on travel and exploration when one doesn’t have the disposable income to study far from home, or a broad enough network to make it feel feasible to live in a different state or country. This isn’t a trivial need, but rather, I believe, crucial to the development of a sensitive leader or thinker. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is living with his family in Paris, partly so his son can experience “different people living by different rules.”
There’s an organization called Global Citizen Year that gives students between high school and college a “gap” year (or bridge year, as they call it) to work with one of several organizations around the world and live with a family in the community. Their founder, Abby Falik, had the opportunity to live abroad early on in her own life, and talks about how profoundly it changed her career trajectory.
There’s an imperfection inherent in these types of programs, but which I still believe makes them highly worthwhile: I’m not sure how much true “impact” a group of 18-year olds can have during a one-year stint, but I do firmly believe in the ability for an experience like that to change the direction a person will take their life.
It’s the global development long game — invest in these kinds of experiences for young people early on, and set them on a different trajectory through college and beyond. Teach For America has endured a lot of criticism about the quality of the teaching skills among its fellows. But one thing it has absolutely done is to create a generation of education advocates post-fellowship, who have gone on to work for real change in the education system, culled from a group of young people who might likely have gone into investment banking instead. Again, it’s far from perfect and sufficient, but I would argue that our education system would look worse now than it did 25 years ago if Wendy Kopp hadn’t created an organization to make domestic teaching seem a little bit, well, sexy.
To be sure, I’m not arguing that it’s acceptable for low-income children in the US and abroad to be used as guinea pigs so that more affluent students can learn about different cultures and have immersion experiences. There need to be specific systems in place to ensure that host communities feel that they benefit from any partnership. This might take the form of better and longer training programs, longer periods of time in-country, co-creation of program structures with local partners, advisor and alumni support stuctures, or any number of other improvements. Or maybe it’s just the acknowledgement from the beginning that nobody is going to “save the world” through a one-year internship, or even scratch the surface.
We must acknowledge that OPP (other peoples’ problems) are just as complex and intractable as our own, and that our main task is to listen and learn with an open mind. I’m just not sure that means going abroad isn’t still valuable.
