permaculture

[Pacific Edge Permaculture + Media <pacedge@magna.com.au>]

Title: Re: research on pc projects needed, 3

> From: "Marsha Hanzi" <hanzibra@svn.com.br>
> Reply-To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
> Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 11:54:28 -0300
> To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>

> > My proposal for permaculturists interested in working in aid to do some voluntary work (or paid work, if they can get it - we need more people to be paid for their permaculture work so that it becomes integrated into their lives and income stream) with aid agencies in their own country was to enlarge their skills and to provide insight into the aid industry, the limitations that aid agencies receiving government or other donor funding in developed countries work under and how the agencies respond to the needs of their partners in developing countries.
> >  
> > Yes, that is one very important function,.  But I also suggest that bringing the multi-disciplinary tools of Permaculture into the aid agencies could help these go in the direction that they are trying to go...
The idea of bringing the 'multi-disciplinary tools of permaculture into the aid agencies' as you suggest Marsha is, of course, a good one. It is also one fraught with the difficulty of overcoming organisational inertia - the momentum that existing ideas have developed over the years.

While you might be able to change organisational direction over a period of years, what I have found is that personalities within the NGOs can be the source of suppression of new ideas.  I - and others I continue to work in aid with - had just this experience and we found it profoundly discouraging. We have all left that NGO and feel a lot better for it. The problem was a director who had been with the agency far too long and who was threatened by new staff and new idea and who resorted to emotional blackmail to maintain her position. She was a consumate lobbyist and schemer, so left no direct evidence of her working against new approaches. The result was that the agency was very good at attracting supporters but when those supporters reached a position from which they wanted to contribute more, they were blocked, often subtley. The result was that they soon became alienated from the agency and left. 
> > ...out of the neo-colonialist top-down approach to a facilitative function  of local realities.
I don't think the work of the agencies I am familiar with - they are of course all Australian agencies - really deserve the neo-colonialist label. Many of the staff maintain a third-world viewpoint, even some in the large Australian agencies which have more of a conventional corporate structure. If there are shortcomings then I believe you would find it to do with the organisation itself rather than the staff. 
> >
...Russ