Nate is Headed to Congo!

This post is by CLI Founder and President, Nate Houghton

CLI supporters,

Thank you for all that you have done to make our work possible over the last three years! I’m writing to let you know about my fifth trip to Congo that begins next week. I will be flying to Kinshasa and will be there for much of my visit, but I’m also planning to meet with many of CLI’s new partners in Eastern Congo. The overarching goal of this visit is to prepare for CLI’s rapid expansion from one site a year ago to eight sites beginning in July. Growth always requires careful planning, training, and practice, and much of this is better conducted over a conference table instead of over the Internet. A great deal of my time will be spent working with partner organizations in order to know what to expect and how we can best meet their needs.

I am also eagerly anticipating several exciting meetings with major government agencies and Congolese NGOs during my time in Kinshasa. As CLI grows, we attract more and more interest in partnerships from leading groups in Congo and around the world. We always carefully consider every opportunity for partnership and make decisions based on the potential benefits to young leaders in Congo. Speaking of those young leaders, I am most excited to attend a meeting of CLI’s Leadership Institute on May 19^th. Youth will be presenting the community impact projects that they have created over the past year. I’m eager to hear about their success firsthand!

Thank you once again for all of your support and get ready for some exciting updates from Congo this month!

Best,

Nate 

Young Leader Projects: Esther

“The future of the DRC is in our hands.”

This simple, yet powerful quote comes from CLI young leader Esther. Esther, a student passionate about making a difference in the Congo, was chosen to take part in CLI’s Leadership Accelerator in July 2012.

Recently, Esther has put her CLI training into action. ”Operation Collection Bags and Plastic Bottles” has been initiated by Esther in Masina, one of the communities in Kinshasa. Kinshasa is the capital of the DRC, and with a population of around 10 million, it is no surprise that trash accumulates rapidly throughout the city. Esther took notice of the unsanitary environment of her hometown, and the health and environmental problems stemming from it.

She put together a plan to tackle this issue, and to keep it from being a problem in the future. Esther mobilized the young people and community leaders in Masina, saying “we must be exemplary and lead by concrete actions to influence others.” Working with her community and the Urban Sanitation Program of Kinshasa, Esther has been working with them to clean up the trash in her community as well as raise awareness about the consequences of living in an unsanitary environment. She shows extraordinary leadership with the other young people of her community as she urges them to join her and see that they can make an important difference in their community.

Esther’s next steps are to expand the project to Kinshasa as a whole. CLI is proud of Esther, and all our young leaders, who are putting their passion into action! In Esther’s own words, “we cannot wait for the state to do everything. We must realize we are part of the state and we can make a difference.”

Thank you Syracuse University!

This is a guest post by Emily Ballard, CEO of Congo Leadership Initiative

This past weekend, I and Nathaniel Houghton, President and Founder of CLI, competed in the Raymond von Dran Funding Competition at Syracuse University. 

We are proud to announce that after our presentation to the judges, CLI has been awarded a $5000 grant to continue its expansion and development in the DRC.

We want to say thank you to all those who have made CLI what it is today, and have added your input and support along the way. We would not be where we are without you! Your support is making a difference for young leaders in the Congo, many of whom are now starting their own ventures. We will be doing a series of blog posts in the upcoming week highlighting their stories, so stay tuned!

An Exciting Step Forward and a Note of Thanks

This is a guest blog post by Nate Houghton, CLI’s Founder and CEO.

One of the aspects of CLI that I am most proud of is our intense (probably maniacal) dedication and commitment to program quality. There are few organizations, especially in Congo, that are able to maintain such high standards. And I don’t blame them. After all, it’s hard enough to raise money and manage a staff on a different continent! But leadership training can either be a good development intervention or great one and we will always choose the latter. The only way to make real and impactful change is serious dedication to quality.

Specific changes in this edition of the curriculum include a brand new lesson on Women in Leadership, an overhaul of the examples used throughout the curriculum, and the introduction of two lessons that teaches youth the skills they need to make their social change ideas come to life. CLI also provides exclusive content to the members of its leadership network in Congo through a digital leadership library. This is where fresh content from the amazing grassroots groups we work with is introduced. Like the changes made in the public curriculum, everything in the library is sourced from our Congolese partner groups – the true experts on youth leadership development in Congo.

We’ve been fortunate to work with extremely talented volunteers and there are some people who deserve major Thank Yous for putting up with our fanaticism. In addition to members of CLI’s staff, Directors, and partner organizations, thank you to Jeff Keller, Heidi Bentley, and Tania Dungca for your contributions to this document! It is truly the engine that will drive real change in Congo.

Finally, we hope you’ll take this opportunity to see the curriculum for yourself – we’re included it right here! If you’ve ever assumed we just got some young people together and chatted for a while, consider this our way to prove you wrong.

Sincerely,

Nate

Happy International Women’s Day from CLI!

This is a post written by Deputy Director, Schuyler Dalton.

Happy International Women’s Day!  Today at CLI, we are taking time to celebrate and recognize the achievements all of our young leaders, especially those who are female.

In the DRC, many women struggle daily for equality. They are marginalized socially and physically. While allowed to own property and participate in some political and economic realms, Congolese women are often withheld from active involvement in these parts of society. The ongoing conflict in the DRC has normalized physical abuse and violence against women, but our young female leaders refuse to stand for this! 

The United Nations Development Programme uses a statistic called the “Gender Inequality Index” to rate each nation according to the limitations of achievement based on gender.  Unfortunately, the DRC ranks 142 out of the 146 countries on this list. This is unacceptable.

But we have good news!  At CLI, our classrooms are represented by equal proportions of male and female students. CLI puts a premium on empowering women, and teaching all of our young leaders about the importance of including women in leadership and development.  As part of our mission to ‘develop the next generation of leaders to be catalysts for peace and prosperity in the Congo’ we know that both men and women need to be involved in the process. A nation cannot move forward without including half of its population! By developing these leadership skills, CLI’s young leaders can affect the changes necessary to move the DRC up on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, and that makes all of us here at CLI extremely proud. 

Want to know what else fills us with pride? — These reports from some of our current female leaders and recent alumni:

 

“I intend to create an NGO to support teenage mothers with AIDS. I will recruit staff, look for ways to finance the operation, and find a headquarters. This should enable us to care for and train young mothers so that they can generate their own income. With these skills, they can take charge.”

- Stephie, CLI Young Leader

 

 

“This program has been instrumental in my life! Before, I waited for the government to arrange everything and I could do nothing for my country. It is we who must take initiatives to change the Congo. I realized that development will not come from the outside – it will come from us!”

- Esther, CLI Young Leader

Aid and the Congo

This post is by Deputy Director Emily Ballard

Imagine being Congolese in the year 1960. The year that for the first time since the 1800s, the Congo is free from Belgian rule and newly named the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese independence leader, has just been elected Prime Minister after playing a huge role in the fight for independence.

Imagine if even with that newfound sense of pride and independence, you found yourself more dependent and unsustainable than ever. Instead of celebrating freedom, the DRC quickly found itself succumbing to not just a “resource curse,” but also an “aid curse.”

Dambisa Moyo, author of “Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there’s a better way for Africa” says it best in this excerpt from her book:

Giving alms to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time — millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize the need for it. Calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year.

Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment.

Aid creating suffering? As unintuitive as that sounds, it’s true.

Nonprofits who work in Africa have come under critique in the past few years as the thoughts surrounding “aid” evolve. What good does it do the people you’re aiding if in the end they can do nothing themselves?

In order to move past this problem, nonprofits, individuals and businesses must learn to rethink charity. Instead of donating, we need to invest in these people. If we truly are trying to help them that is the best thing we can do for them.

Teach skills. Educate. Ignite entrepreneurial sparks.

Don’t just throw money at them.

For Love Of Leaders

As February rolls toward an end, a taste of spring begins to fill the air. While we slowly pack up our hats, coats, and gloves, a tangible excitement grows and we start to look forward to sunnier days and warmer weather. In many cultures, spring is a symbol of growth and rebirth. It signifies all the new and exciting things to come. For all of us in the CLI community, this couldn’t ring more true.

As with any goal one undertakes, we definitely have faced our fair share of challenges, but it’s the times when our efforts bear fruit that end up truly having an impact on our community. Of course, when one has fresh fruit, it is only polite to share the sweetness with their community. So, here is some of CLI’s most recent fruit that has come to bear:

First, we have had a great deal of successful programming over the past month in Baraka, Uvira, Kinshasa, and Goma. Our young leaders are more motivated than ever and we are seeing great results from all their hard work! Check out some of the photos of our leaders below:

Secondly, we are still in the final running for the Hands Up for Social Good Award! This is a huge honor for CLI and will provide a great benefit to our young leaders if we win. But we need your help to make that happen! Make sure you vote for CLI here: http://yourmarkontheworld.com/post/42437744944/hand-up-for-social-good-award-ballot. The organization with the most votes wins, so share with all your friends!

In other news, we have a very exciting announcement to make for all of our sports fans out there! March Madness is approaching quickly and CLI is hosting a bracket contest where you can win up to $400! Check out the flyer below for more information or go to our website:

More information at http://congoleaders.org/impact.html

On a final note, CLI is scouring the globe for new young leaders who are interested in starting a CLI chapter or club in their own community (or school)! Do you think you might be one of these leaders or know someone who could be? If passion and a desire to drive social change are two characteristics that you associate with, we want to hear from you! Send us a message at empower@congoleaders.org to learn how you can start a CLI club or chapter at your own school today!

Until next time everyone!

Evaluating CLI’s impact

This is a guest post written by Nate Houghton, CLI’s Founder and CEO.

I’ll tell you a secret: It’s actually not that hard to create and manage a nonprofit organization, even in a nation like Congo. The hard part is doing it well. And sometimes it’s difficult to measure the impact a nonprofit organization has in the overall scheme of things.

If you’re confused, don’t worry. A lot of organizations are too. That’s why many (even most) organizations on the development plane actually have very simple products. Even if delivery methods are complex and teams are scattered across continents, a bednet is a bednet. As a result, success is relatively easy to define. In some cases, it’s binary (this person has a bednet vs. this person does not have a bednet); although smart organizations are more outcome-based (this person avoided malaria vs. this person did not avoid malaria). But CLI doesn’t make bednets. We make “empowered leaders”. So how can we tell if we’ve succeeded?

There are three answers that we’ve identified, each one progressively better than the one before. The first (most basic) is as follows:

“CLI has conducted leadership training seminars for 126 young people.”

Acceptable responses to this metric include: “And?” “So what?” or “How impressive – you can count!” So we revised and redrafted to establish a second metric which was a little better. It goes something like this:

“Young leaders who are a part of our program have improved their median leadership learning by 68% in two years according to our ongoing evaluations.”

However, this also doesn’t matter much unless you’re willing to believe our value proposition: young people who have gone through leadership training create positive social impact. But, we don’t expect you to take our word for it, so we have to prove that this is true. How we do that is through our third metric (also the best and the hardest to measure):

“As a result of the leadership learning created by CLI, youth in Congo initiated projects that create demonstrable and positive social change.”

That is obviously quite a leap, but we’re sticking with it! First off, we have solid evidence backing it up, based on stories we’ve heard from partners on the ground. But more importantly, we are working with experts in many different fields to create quantifiable metrics which illustrate social impact that is caused (yes, social scientists, I said caused) by CLI’s leadership training.

All of this brings us back to Rethink Charity, which is basically an effort to make all of this boring metrics-talk marketable. The fact is, we’re nerds. We get really excited when we can measure impact. So, we think you should too.

As CLI continues with Rethink Charity, be sure to keep impact in mind. It’s not just a marketing slogan – it’s a representation of how we work. Affecting change is something that should be measured, and the organizations you support should be doing everything they can to do so.

Newsflash!

This is a post by Deputy Director, Julia Perelman.

Bonjour everyone!

So much to share, such limited space. Quite the conundrum we are in! But here at CLI we LOVE challenges, so let’s see if we can make it work.

First and foremost, all of us here at CLI want to recognize one of our awesome team members who is retiring from CLI, Jason Ricciardi. We would like to extend our gratitude to him for all his hard work! CLI’s success over the past three years is a true testament to both the power of teamwork and the amazing difference that a motivated individual can make. For the past ten months, CLI has been fortunate to have one of the rare people talented enough to make a difference alone and humble enough to be a part of the team on board. Though he will be leaving us for new opportunities this week, we would like to take a moment to appreciate the efforts of Jason Ricciardi.

When he first came to us and described how interested he was to volunteer in Kinshasa with our team, we were nearly as surprised as we were excited. Nevertheless, by mid-summer, Jason was in Congo working side-by-side with CLI’s facilitators. It would have been amazing enough for him to do so with a full salary, but when you consider that his efforts were entirely on a volunteer basis, Jason’s character truly shines through. His tangible accomplishments include the compilation of CLI’s curriculum as well as the enduring success of the young leaders he has inspired in Kinshasa.

We are proud to have worked with Jason and wish him all the best in his endeavors moving forward!

Moving forward, we have lots of exciting news to share from on the ground in the DRC. Our young leaders are working as hard as ever to hone in on their leadership skills and CLI has a number of workshops coming up to help them do it. Last week, many of our young leaders met in Baraka for a unified conference (Check out our Facebook page for inside pictures and stories from the event). Next week there will be a leadership workshop in Uvira, followed by another workshop in Goma on February 16th, and another in Kinshasa on the 23rd. Stay on the lookout for pictures and news from all our workshops as they happen. On a similar note, CLI is launching an exclusively female workshop in Kinshasa at the beginning of April. We are very excited for its potential and will update you on how it goes.

For those who like to read into the future (literally), we have some crazy updates that we think you’ll enjoy. Since it’s founding, CLI has promoted its curriculum with a limited number of students in the DRC. To ensure that our model was effective, we tried to keep our participants at around 100 students. After extensive data collection, analyzation, and many many tests, we are proud to share that the curriculum is more effective than we could have dreamed. Since this confirmation, we have been working to readily increase our presence and size in the DRC.  Now, we get to go ballistic! By the end 2013, we plan have at least 500 young leaders in our institutes. We know it’s a crazy challenge, but we are already rolling and won’t stop until we hit the top!

But wait! We can’t do this alone! We need your help to make this the best experience possible for our hard-working young leaders. How, you might ask? Well, it’s super easy! If you have been staying connected to us via social media, you’ll know that we recently launched our #RethinkCharity campaign. We want to trash the notion of ‘donating’, crush the concept of ‘charity’, and blow your minds with the simple and effective vision of ‘investing’ because that’s what you are really doing when you support CLI’s young leaders in the DRC. You are investing in them and in their futures. And right now, it’s more important than ever to make an investment as we continue to expand quickly! And, it probably doesn’t hurt that you can do it right now! Honestly, you don’t even have to move. No seriously, don’t get up. Just go to www.congoleaders.org to invest in a young leader right now! Also, don’t forget to continue staying with us for the next few weeks by sharing your impact stories and engaging in conversations with other’s about the DRC through our Facebook page and Twitter!

Well, that’s all for now pals!

CLI’s Empowerment Model

In the past few years there had been a lot more awareness about nonprofits and the work they are doing. But with this awareness have come criticisms; is aid really helping anyone?

The old way of running nonprofits doesn’t work any more. Organizations like She’s the First, Educate! and the Enough Project work off of models based on lasting change and sustainability.

We at Congo Leadership Initiative don’t believe in aid: we believe in empowerment. That is why this week marks the beginning of our Rethink Charity campaign, a movement to have nonprofits and individuals alike rethink where their money and time is going.

What does Rethink Charity mean? For CLI, it means supporting young leaders in the Congo to build their own successes, and be sustainable. Our empowerment model is one of the key things that set us apart from other groups. We don’t accept donations, we accept investments. We strive to teach skills that create impact, create change.

After years of working in the Congo, we have seen that is ultimately what people want. Congolese do not want to be spoon-fed then left with no lasting impact, they want to be empowered to create a difference themselves.

Will you join with us to develop the next generation of leaders?

Join us for the next few weeks by sharing your impact stories, and tweeting with #rethinkcharity