Why “Good All Around”?

About a year and a half ago – in May 2006 – I read an online interview on Yahoo’s Hot Zone website. Kevin Sites was telling the story of Yubaraj Khadka, a teenager who’d been working full-time to support his family since he was 12 years old. The interview was just a few days old, and already over a hundred comments were posted. More than 70 of them said they wanted to help Yubaraj return to school. Many of the others voiced regret that they wouldn’t be able to find him or trust that their money would actually help him.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how much it could mean for this boy to actually receive the support so many wanted to give. Not really knowing what I was getting into, but not wanting to let that opportunity slip away, I offered to coordinate the work of finding Yubaraj, confirming the story, collecting donations, and enrolling him in school if that’s something he and his family would want to do. Over the next year a team of volunteers, a few nonprofit organizations, and a whole lot of donors came together so that Yubaraj could return to school.

He’s now a full-time student, facing all of the challenges and rewards that represents, and all of us involved have settled into a many-years-long commitment to ensure that the impact we’re having on Yubaraj and his family brings as many benefits and as few negative consequences as possible. Early in the process we created a blog for the project. It’s a great place to share Yubaraj’s story and what we’ve done on his behalf.

There’s a whole other story that’s not told there, though, about what happened and continues to happen “behind the scenes” for a project like this. The kind of story that could help others who are considering – or find themselves in the middle of – that kind of effort. So that’s one of the purposes of this blog: to explore the way in which a tiny international make-the-world-a-better-place-one-cause-at-a-time project emerges. It’ll provide a forum for exploring what “success” or “failure” means for those kinds of efforts, and for how those definitions reflect whose interests are – or or not – being counted along the way.

It’ll engage in this exploration from a number of overlapping but very distinct perspectives. The need to attract, manage, and account for funding. The need to provide meaningful immediate and ongoing feedback to donors and others looking for validation that their investment is well-placed. The need for appropriate project management support from the individual or team responsible for keeping it all going. And the needs – some of which can be anticipated, some of which cannot – of those who are meant to benefit from this work, the child, family, village, and extended community.

The name of this blog, Good All Around, refers to the good that can be done by projects like these. Standing outside one of these projects and looking in, we have an opportunity to learn how to create and manage projects so that they contribute to the good that is already going on all around us. The name is also meant to draw attention to how important it is, as we engage in this kind of work, to stand in the center of a project and scan the full circle of its influence to make sure we’re contributing to that sense of “good going on” for all who are affected by what we do.