One of the things that's important
to discuss when we're talking about improving, uh, the way that people help people is
talking about the focus of the help. And so there are consultants out there
who focus on making sure you feel great about the help that you're giving people
or the things that you're participating in. And that's fantastic and
it is absolutely important
for the longevity of any partnership or any programme,
uh, that you feel good and, and it makes sense and that, um, you feel e
ngaged with the
work that you're doing. But if you don't pay attention to whether
or not the people who you're supposed to be helping or the communities that
are supposed to be getting a benefit are actually getting a benefit from the work
that you do well then it doesn't really matter if you feel great about it. Feeling great about ineffective
interventions is easy to do. It really is, it's easy to make people feel really
fantastic and warm and fuzzy about doing work without the work
actually b
eing that effective. And that is something that we
really, really have to look at. And it's controversial of course, because by definition we have to, uh, we have to say that some interventions
or some projects or some fundraising efforts or charitable endeavours aren't
that effective and they're not that great. Uh, but if we don't do that, if we don't take the time to
talk about the ineffective, uh, interventions and the work that people
are doing that's not really helping, uh, then we're going
to have a really tough
time improving the quality of care for people in need, not really improving how everyone
feels about doing the work because it's possible to do that. Uh, but if you go
in with this idea that first of all, you're going to get people feeling good
about doing a good work and then you're going to change them into doing
effective work later. To us, that seems backwards and counterintuitive.
So at the just be nice project, it's all about from day one,
from the very beginning, m
aking sure that your interventions
meet the four key pillars of impact, which is that they're comprehensive,
they're longterm, they're inclusive, and they're high output for
low input. And that is really, really important to everything that we do. Now obviously keeping things high out
port for low input means that we want to keep people doing what
they're really good at, to keep people doing what
they're really good at. They have to feel the connection to what
they're doing and they have to see
the point of it. And that's why ongoing
education and innovative
interventions are the way to go. And that's, that's something that we
focus on very heavily. Unfortunately, if we only focused on making everyone
feel great for attempting to do some work, then the people who need to help them
most will be the ones that miss out. And that's something that
we just can't abide by. So that's part of what we do at the
[inaudible] project is make sure that interventions are engaging
and interesting, uh,
that you can find a connection
with them. But at the same time, making sure that those interventions are
really high quality for the people in need. That they become part of a process, that the equality of opportunity
for everybody who needs it. And if we don't do that, then we're doing a great disservice not
only to the individuals and communities in need, but actually also to the education of
everybody about what a good impact is and how much impact you could possibly
have if you just keep do
ing what you're really good at in a system that delivers
fantastic assistance to people in need.
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