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>>Erik: How does micro philanthropy compliment institutional international development?
>>Adam: Micro philanthropy directly compliments the work of larger international organizations
and the fact of the matter is that unfortunately there exists such a wide scale of need in
the world in many of these regions that no matter how many recourses these large foundations
may have, they’re never - poverty is never going to be alleviated, we can work towards
improving people’s lives and we can work towards “poverty alleviation” as a goal,
fine. But the bottom line is there will always exist these inequalities… which doesn’t
justify them, doesn’t rationalize them but it just – it means that there’s going
to be work for us to do. So in my work, I have seen time and time again the wonderful
affects of large-scale institutions and I support their work whole-heartedly, I used
to do some work with the UN for refugees myself… but I’ve also come to the realization that
there exists a lot more need that’s not being addressed on a micro level and so even
if you have a – let’s say that there is a small community project that has been established
by a larger institution, that small community project may have the recourses in order to
get by, in order to carry out it’s integral need but at the same time there’re so many
ways to take a small amount of money and drastically improve that situation. For example I was
just in Rio doing some work in the Favela shantytowns there and I came across a project,
a wonderful project that’s a project that teaches kids percussion and they get to do
concerts and some of them even get to go to Europe because this organization was… [Adam
gathers thoughts] Some of them even get to travel to Europe because the umbrella organization
that helped form this group is a Dutch-Brazilian NGO. So in this instance great, you know this
money has come from Holland and they’ve set up this project, fantastic. Well when
I get there and they give me a performance and I see these little kids watching and say
to the director ‘Oh, so are these little kids are they in the project too?’ and she
says ‘No, you know, they’re not’ I said ‘Well why not?’ she said ‘Well, we can
only have x amount of kids’ and I said ‘Well why can’t we have more?’ she said ‘Well
it’s simple, we just don’t have enough drums to teach them. You can’t have a drumming
class and have fifteen kids, twenty kids that don’t have the drums to play on’ I said
‘Okay well what if we just went out and got enough drums to expand the project by
fifty kids?’ she said ‘Let’s do it’ and I said ‘Okay what do we need?’ and
the next day we’re at the instrument store and we order fifteen hundred dollars worth
of drums and now there’s fifty more kids that are off the streets participating in
this project, working with these teenagers that are their role models that have shown
that entering the drug trade is not the answer and that there is an alternative and there
is this nurturing environment for them to grow and be kids and enjoy their life. So
in many cases it’s that simple, it’s just seeing that there’s a need there.