I have a favorite little corner of the Jo’burg airport where I always pass the layover while sipping a coffee and looking out across the tarmac on the beautiful African landscape. It’s there that the full reality of what we are accomplishing with MYO begins to take hold. When I think of the dozens of people who donate their energy and time on a daily basis, and the hundreds who donate their money to our cause, it makes me realize again what a special entity MYO has become. Of course, the final realization will come when I get to Mondesa and collect some smiles and hugs from the children who benefit from our efforts.

I am happy to note that Lindsay Hoover has joined the MYO staff as a volunteer teacher in Namibia. Lindsay will work primarily with the grade 7 children and has a strong background in math and science, which of course are two of our primary subjects.

It is impossible to overstate how well our staff is performing this year. Alexis, Beau, Casey, Herman, Julian, Lindsay, Pamela, and Reggie gather each day to develop and deliver the unique services that we have implemented as a means of nurturing the complete child in a very complex and marginalized environment. It is a significant accomplishment for any organization, but even more so considering MYO operates on a budget that is less than one-quarter of organizations operating in a similar environment. In addition to our full-time staff, Vera, Clifford and Uschi work tirelessly to promote MYO around Namibia and to provide strategic guidance for the foreign board members.

Jim Collins, author of the bestselling book ‘Good To Great’, wrote an addendum to that book which was aimed specifically at charity management. In that addendum, Collins details an analogy whereby small charity organizations must imagine themselves pushing a great, stone wheel around in a circle. If enough people put their shoulders to the wheel, and if they are able to get enough momentum to keep the wheel turning, then eventually, after a long time and with enough focus and commitment, inertia begins to build and the day comes when the organization can transition from one of constant fundraising to longer-term planning and sustainability. Using that analogy, I consider MYO to be in the stage where we have been successful in getting the wheel to turn, but we need more shoulders, more strong legs, and more focus before we will have the inertia to relax slightly and turn our energy to more strategic matters. We gain strength every quarter, but now is not the time to relax our efforts to find more funding partners, both small and large.

The Noble Foundation has once again make a significant donation to MYO, re-asserting their confidence in the necessity and the quality of our work. MYO Board Members have raised $16,000 in the last 3 months by hosting fundraising dinners in Pocatello and Cincinnati. In addition, we recently received an anonymous donation of $3,000, which was an unexpected but welcome surprise. In spite of these successes, we need to remain focused on fundraising in order to ensure we have 2008 operating expenses covered, and to complete construction on our education facility. We need more youth sponsorships, more medium-sized donations and at least one more large corporate or foundation sponsor that contributes on an annual basis.

It is a very interesting and compelling time to be involved in youth development work in Africa. There are two realities that have become very apparent over the past few years. First, the majority of significant development efforts put forth by the very large organizations have generally been inefficient and unsuccessful. These behemoths absorb the vast majority of money that is committed by governments and donors and then in turn spend most of that money on internal infrastructure and overhead. For the large organizations, the means has truly become the end. We also note that thought leadership in this space continues to come from smaller, community-based organizations run by a passionate and committed few using little more than common sense and hard work to approach a problem that is both complex and at the same time amazingly simple. I took the time on the flight over to read the speech that Dr. Muhammad Yunus delivered in Oslo last December upon his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Price. It is relevant and elegant and worth reading and can be found here. The Grameen Bank, started by Dr. Yunus in 1974, was conceived of a very simple idea to make small loans available to poor people whom the banks routinely ignored. Grameen Bank now has over 7 million borrowers and is a genuine success in the bid to help people pull themselves out of poverty. Grameen fitted a strikingly simple solution to what others perceived as a complex problem—they merely provided the same opportunities to the poor that are readily available to the non-poor, and they found that poor borrowers responded with predictable market results.

If the 800+ people reading this newsletter put their shoulders to the great stone wheel that is MYO, then we, together with the government and people of Namibia will change the course of poverty in Mondesa over the next 20 years. And if we can eliminate extreme and moderate poverty in Mondesa, then we can eliminate poverty throughout the world. The solution lies in scale—tens of millions giving relatively minor contributions instead of thousands committing a disproportionate and unsustainable effort.

We consider it a great privilege to be involved with MYO, and we hope that you will consider joining us.

PEACE – Rob