The Parallel World

Moving the Needle -- Growing the Choir

2011-04-24T22:37:00.006-04:00

I love to think that a movement of the masses will change the world. I believe it is true. Yet even with revolution as the end game, our strongest attribute is our moderation. In Pathways to Prohibition, Ann-Marie Szymanski highlights how the temperate but persistent effort of prohibionists led to the ultimate radical constitutional changes more effectively than any hardline radicalized activists were ever able to achieve. Yet the fact is that prohibition did not work. Change did not come about on a cultural level as much as was necessary. Perhaps it's because the issue was too contentious, the moderates too radical or the radicals not moderate enough, but one way or another after over half a century of organizing, the outlawing of alcohol did not stick. The masses were not with the movement. Culture had been touched but not changed. We need to learn from this.

Today if we are going to change culture we cannot simply preach to the choir. Just as there were hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, in support of prohibition a hundred years ago, the 21st century is populated with hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, in support of sustainability. But these people alone are not enough. We must reach the next level of the masses. We do this by taking steps in the right direction, not by running ahead leaving behind the people who are responsible for truly changing their actions, beliefs, attitudes and world.

Over the past week Of Rags has been looking at several exciting opportunities that might be described as more mainstream avenues than some of the more activist oriented actions we've taken over the last 18 months. With the concept of moderation in mind, I believe that these opportunities are a step in the right direction. The beauty of our organization is that we can work in between two seemingly different worlds in order to bring them together. Even though our logo is OR it is never an either or situation for Of Rags. Our organizational structure is a hybrid and so are our attitudes. Over the past week I've seen the value of what my team and I can accomplish when we see our role as the bridge between the world of NGO's and the world of high fashion.

The challenge that I have though as the leader of the team is straddling the gap between two diverse crowds. I have to find a stable balance between my passion for changing the world and my interest in the same fashion, marketing and mainstream media that have in large part made the world the unjust place it is today. It is unproductive to think that idealism alone will make any difference. I have to play the same game but with my own rules. The important thing for me to remember is that change is a spectrum.

By shifting the needle bit by bit we will ultimately get people's engines revving to make a difference. First it will be about buying a sustainable product. Then it will be about working to create more sustainable products to replace everything that is not. Finally it will be about changing our daily habits and everyday personal values.

We are not anywhere near our final goal. The choir may be there, but the whole congregation isn't even through the doors yet. Let's harmonize our voices and draw them in with the sound of music just as I've ventured into churches in Harlem and Hohoe, Ghana when I've heard music playing inside. Those moments of wandering and wonderment have been some of the most profound experiences of my life and they did not begin by any radical claim of religious redemption--just a beautiful song spilling out from the windows. So let's get something going that no one can ignore. The rest will follow.

The Sustainability Revolution

2011-04-04T00:12:00.009-04:00

From companies and organizations to communities and collaborations, we are businesses that care and individuals ready to take action with our everyday lifestyle—our everyday values. We seek fundamentally to empower the disenfranchised as opposed to just make the wealthy even wealthier. We’re working to put people before profits so that everyone will have every necessity before anyone has every luxury. We aim not only to transform boardrooms and the halls of congress, but also ourselves as citizens of a nation and of our World. We know that we must redefine success so that we measure our accomplishments, not by the number of sports cars we’ve purchased, but instead by the number of schools we’ve built. Our collective goal is to meet the needs of today, while ensuring the future needs of tomorrow. We might not know it yet, but we are the Sustainability Revolution.

For around 500 years the word revolution has been used to describe a pivotal moment in a society when the status quo is replaced by a new set of norms. While the exact definition of the word revolution is a much-debated subject, one consistency can be found with only a glance through the history books: the push for change has almost always come from the oppressed. Today we are revolutionizing revolutions and I believe that our approach will indeed make our push for Sustainability sustainable in a way that history has never seen before.

The key difference between the Sustainability Revolution of today and just about any revolution of years passed is that our change is demand driven. From as far back as Jesus Christ and the Magna Carta, nearly every revolutionary act has been driven by the people calling for rights for themselves. In the global economic system, these people are the world’s suppliers. The nobles throughout England supplied the King with goods and taxes. The American Colonists supplied the British with cotton and tobacco. The sugar farmers in Cuba supplied the US sweet tooth. Today our Revolution comes not from the people supplying our products, but instead from the people buying them.

I don’t mean to boil down the nuances. The push for change is not at all unilateral. In fact, our Revolution is without a doubt the most dynamic and diverse of any revolution in history. But, in general, it is this demand-side sustainability that will change the world.

Today we are demanding that every product we buy be sourced from fair trade production. At the same time we are ensuring that enough fair trade production is in place to meet this growing demand. We are using our dollars to hold companies accountable for their treatment of people and of our planet. The long run potential for this is to create a society in which it is uncompetitive (and thus unprofitable) not to hold the common good as the highest priority. Yet to achieve this potential we are not doing enough and there are not nearly enough of us doing it.

While giving a presentation for the Of Rags: Sustainable Fashion College Tour this weekend at James Madison University in my birth state of Virginia (James Madison was a key player in writing the US Constitution by the way), I discovered that there was an event called Spring Fest taking place at the same time as our event. Last year Spring Fest, which brings together all of the Greek Life at JMU and surrounding college campuses, led to a drunken riot, the burning of a police car and the arrests and expulsion of several students. While Of Rags brought hip-hopper Genesis Be to perform songs about taking action with our everyday values, Spring Fest this year would culminate with the performance of Wiz Khalifa, a rapper who has become famous for his songs about doing drugs. (“I’m high as fuck. I’m sloppy drunk.” is the chorus of his latest single.) Needless to say, I didn’t stay for the concert or any of the Spring Fest activities, but I’m positive that with the support of the Universities Program Board and the fame of Wiz Khalifa it drew in exponentially more people than Of Rags, the Justice Studies Student Organization and the African Studies Organization got to show up at our event. Yet with practically no budget and the competition of the biggest event on JMU’s campus this whole year, we still managed to draw in around 30 people. Regardless of the turnout, I was glad to talk with students committed to sustainability. But I will not be satisfied until we’ve turned those 30 students at JMU into 3,000 celebrating Sustainability as the highlight of Spring Fest.

Our model of utilizing social media, email and the like to organize shows on college campuses is working, just not as well as we need it to. I think that with the ideological framework of the Sustainability Revolution we will begin to retool the way we grow support. To elaborate on our future and the ideology that crafts it we need to first take a brief look at how we are different from past revolutions.

During the height of previous revolutions, the idea of a better world swept over the masses of people suffering impossible exploitation and drove them to act. American minutemen risked everything on the hope that they would achieve the unknown concept of Freedom. While their bravery is astonishing, to believe that over 230 years later Freedom has been achieved by all men and women created equal is pure ignorance. Even in the United States poverty runs rampant. Slave-like conditions persist. And yet there is more wealth than anywhere else in the world. Between 1776 and today such stark inequality, some might say such grave injustice, has been addressed head-on time after time by revolutionaries with slogans of Marxism.

In Cuba oppressed farmers rallied behind a push for equality. While the fierce revolutionary spirit that entranced the island may have been calling for dignity, respect and equal rights for all citizens, the Revolution of the time did not hesitate to kill the opposition. Where are dignity, respect and equality in that, one might ask? The argument for such violence was based on the idea that to achieve justice the Revolution must do away with all remnants of the mode-of-being that perpetuated oppression. The Marxist ideology of the time was that only by creating a society in which the state controlled the resources would the value of the common good embed itself into the way of being for every citizen so that ultimately no one would act in self-interest, but rather in the interest of others. Class divisions between the handful of landowners and the masses of land-workers would no longer exist, and the sense of collective purpose would unite the country behind the idea of common good.

I will state now and forever that I believe in these ideals. From the time I was in pre-kindergarten I have been taught in increasingly subtle ways that doing good for other people is the highest mode of existence. But I profoundly disagree about the ideology. I believe that Socialist ideology as enacted by regimes such as that in Cuba ignores the most fundamental human trait and by unconsciously acting contentiously against this trait the Socialist ideology sets itself up for a battle that it cannot win on a large scale—if even on any scale.

By limiting individual creativity and removing the private incentives underlying the competitive nature of innovation, the Cuban Revolutionary regime led its nation into a stagnate state. As the global economy progressed, the Cuban economy has struggled to keep the pace and has been in almost all cases left behind by many indicators of success. Most importantly the attack against the well-to-do in Cuba led to a harsh class conflict that only intensified the lines between rich and poor, both nationally and internationally. As opposed to utilizing the resources of the wealthy for good, much of Cuba’s wealth was destroyed or forced to flea the country. And without the motivation to innovate, that wealth has in most cases not been recreated.

This is all to say that our strongest attribute as today’s Sustainability Revolution is that we are not forcing power out of the hands of anyone. Instead we are merely demanding that such power be used in a sustainable manner. The ideology that drives the Sustainability Revolution is the belief that our capitalist system is not a mode-of-being focused on self-enrichment, but rather a tool to empower the disenfranchised—a tool that is in many cases simply not being used right. We must spend time educating ourselves about how we can best use our toolbox to carve our world into a fairer place and then we must act on that knowledge. This is the point of the Of Rags Sustainable Fashion College Tour. We have been working with students at 20 universities to make sustainability a keystone on campus and in the curriculum.

So how do we grow from 30 to 3,000? And as a growing base of consumers how do we make our nation’s most innovative corporations use their businesses for good?

First we need to lower the barrier to entry for involvement in the Sustainability Revolution. We achieve this by showing the growing number of people who are involved and the diverse ways that they take part in meeting global needs of today while ensuring the future needs of tomorrow. If we make it clear to outsiders that more people are getting on board with Sustainability everyday, then more people will indeed get on board everyday. I know that my organization can do a better job of showing this. As opposed to videoing my speech at college campuses, we should turn the cameras on the audience to show that people actually listen and take action based on these ideals! (Check out our podcast series “Conversations with Changemakers” for an example of something we can build off of.) We also need to do a better job of highlighting the businesses that do care about the common good in order to spark competition from other businesses to show that they care even more. (Check out The Fair Trade Sustainable Lookbook and Fair Trade Fashion’s Night Out coming up in September. We need to push hard behind this event!)

Then we need to ask our peers “are you in or are you out?” By framing this challenge, more people will rise to it. We need to remind ourselves that change happens; but it doesn’t happen on its own. We must make the conscious decision to live sustainably everyday in order both to make an immediate impact and to encourage others to do the same. We need to recall the astonishing bravery of past generations and we must remember that we are the change we seek.

So I ask you now, are you in or are you out?

Contention with the Competition

2011-03-05T02:31:00.014-05:00

One of the inspirations behind Of Rags is a story I heard on the radio while living in Honduras for a summer. The story was about Coca-Cola’s investment in several youth centers throughout the small Central American country. Right then it clicked in my mind that business has the potential to do good--not only the potential, but the obligation both socially and financially. It’s nothing revolutionary to consider the fact that the better off poor people become, the more money they have to spend. And the social side of the equation, in my mind at least, is equally as obvious. Yet Paul Hawken (of the high-end gardening store that was Smith & Hawken--very insightful wiki article) depicts Coca-Cola, (the same company that also gave millions to bring the first ever World Cup on the African Continent to life,) as a bandit in his book Blessed Unrest. He also suggests that many major corporations fall under the same criminal code. While he does note that there currently is a shift occurring in the marketplace at this very moment, he describes corporate social responsibility as little more than a footnote on an annual report or a marketer’s tool to overcome bad press. I’m not quite so critical, but after relaxing in the Cartagenera pool of one of the houses owned by the CEO of Coke Latin America, I can certainly say that no executives at Coke are living like Gandhi.

The question that I have is where can we draw the line between reducing harm and optimizing benefit? And if our ultimate goal is to leverage the potential of big business to do good how can we run campaigns of contention against those same corporations? Is there not an element of biting the hand that feeds us? Or is competition different from contention?

My favorite slogan at Of Rags is “What does your shirt do?” When I came up with this I hoped that our consumers would feel the challenge to think critically about the value underlying every purchase they make. I know some of our consumers do this. But at the same time, whenever I come across people entrenched as much in the fashion world as I am in the community development world, I feel I'm often pressured to admit that many fashion companies do give money away and try to make a positive impact on the environment. Some people have even gone so far as to ask me “how can you put that on your shirt, don’t you think we care too?” This question is exactly what I asked myself this week when I read the New York Times article highlighting the growing effort and “coalition” in the fashion industry to go “sustainable.” (Someone anonymously sent me the article in an email at 6:45 AM.)

Now I don’t mean to sound completely cynical. I really do believe that just about everyone has good intentions. But the fact is that the way the fashion industry works, with corporate shareholders trading bite size pieces of brand names, a shift toward “sustainable” is really only an effort to reduce harm. Even the NYT article makes this clear.

Frankly true sustainability would be convincing consumers not to buy as many clothes as they do when there are so many people who can’t even afford clean water. Doing this is not out of the realm of possibility for Of Rags. But right now we are focused on optimizing benefit with our unique hybrid for-profit/not-for-profit organizational structure. To accomplish this I want our consumers to buy as much clothing from Of Rags as they can afford. More than they can afford even. Eventually I’d like to give out OR credit cards and use the interest rates to run micro financing programs. But that’s another story.

The point is that we are one of several social ventures optimizing benefit. I include cosmetic mega-giant Estée Lauder along with The Body Shop on the list of do-gooders as a note that this can be done on a large scale. And as to size and scale... There IS a HUGE difference between what we do and what Gap does (yes, even the (Red) campaign.) Likewise, there is a massive difference between what an organization such as Rishi Tea does and what Coke does. Yet the fact is that Coke bought Honest Tea, a company based two blocks from where I grew up that is also built on the reputation of integrity and social responsibility. Will that social mission continue now that it is part of a corporate empire? It’s too soon to tell, but I'm learning toward probably not and definitely not in the same way.

One thing is certain though, competitors do contend with one another. It is in the very nature of the game. And so I will contend with Gap, Wal-Mart, Target and 25 of the other 27 Sustainable Apparel Coalition members to say that while I commend you for trying to reduce your harm, do not dare to think that you can say you are optimizing benefit. The day that your CEOs meet with the seamstresses and have dinner with the screenprinters’ families and walk the cutters’ kids to school, then maybe you can say that you aim to benefit the people who labor away while you enjoy seven-figure luxury. But for now you are merely trying to get ahead of the trends so you don’t get the boot from your shareholders when consumers realize that a red sweater is just a red sweater, but a red sweater that empowers a community is a whole world more!

Developing Communities

2011-02-26T04:40:00.023-05:00

Of Rags is a fair trade fashion cooperative for sustainable development. Seamstresses earn living wages allowing them to provide essential goods for their families. 40% of profits from sales are reinvested into public health and education initiatives in the same area where the clothes are made, giving community members even more reason to strive for the success of the organization. Consumers can see the value of their purchases both stylistically, as the clothes draw from influences across borders, and socially, as each we display the number of products we’ve sold, the number of dollars raised for community initiatives and the amount of wages paid.

I developed the idea to begin this organization after spending what totaled over a year living, traveling and volunteering in parts of the world that show up on World Bank reports as developing or undeveloped. Before beginning Of Rags I had spent the other 19 years of my life living in an upper class family in Bethesda, Maryland—home to many World Bank economists, politicians, high-powered Washingtonians and the residents of what was at one point the relatively low-income apartment complex right across the street from the house where I grew up. While living in Bethesda and attending one of the Nation’s top prep schools, I immersed myself in a world far away.

In high school I was determined to become fluent in Spanish, so I watched Telemundo and Univision everyday after class. I even subscribed to the Spanish packet on Cable in order to tune in every afternoon to Franscisco el Matemático, and other Colombian TV Programs. I also volunteered as a tutor at a community center for primarily Hispanic low-income youth.

I’m not really sure why I did all of these things. At first my determination to learn Spanish was motivated by my romantic interest in a young lady from Venezuela who I met during a summer program at one of the world’s top universities. But I think there were other causes—the desire to fit in with a certain group of people? The desire to stand out from another? Did all of the history lessons and storybooks of change makers in my Quaker school’s curriculum actually rub off on me as they were intended? What it was that opened my eyes to another world right in front of me, I cannot say. All I know now is that my interest in something other than my familiar environment has matured into a passion for changing that very same environment.

Around the time I started Of Rags a year and a half ago I launched this blog. And when I launched Of Rags, I wrote this post http://www.theparallelworld.com/2009/10/of-rags-to-riches.html explaining my theory behind the failure of development. To elaborate on this I’ve created a couple of diagrams:

Development fails in that it breaks the circle. What happens when social programs try to run without jobs and the national industry to support them? All the money comes from one side of the equation. There is no circle. It is not sustainable.

This is of course one of the key points in the call for change of writers such as Dambisa Moyo and NYU’s Bill Easterly (who doesn’t hold office hours against department policy but who does rightfully claim that the best economic outcome is when private good is equal to social good), who have made a lot of money stating the obvious about why poor people are poor.

Arturo Escobar was one of the first of these writers. Easterly and Moyo owe him their houses (and Jeffrey Sachs lives in a brownstone on the Upper East Side while arguing the contrary point), but well beyond the typical self-inflating AidWatch style debates, Escobar’s Encountering Development brings several key points to the table…or page, really. A few of these points are listed here:

"Development relies on setting up the world as a picture, so that the whole can be grasped in some orderly fashion as forming a structure or system (56).” This point is furthered by the fact as Escobar explains it that development is based primarily on economics which use simple models to sum up complicated situations.
That labor once defined the value of a product, but soon value was redefined by utility. (64)
That development and social service institutions are the main players in the developing world whereas they are just one of many players in the developed world. And that development professionals educated in the US and England often plan with the toolbox most familiar to them seeing only that development institutions such as the federal works program made a great impact in US history, but disregarding the context in which these program took place.
“According to de Janvry, industrialization in the world’s periphery depends on the availability of cheap labor, which is maintained chiefly thought the provision of cheap food and the exploitation of the peasantry and urban working class. The requirement of cheap labor is imposed by the “laws of motion” of capital globally and its contradictions…The result is a structural situation in which a “modern” sector—based on a combination of multinational, state, and local capital---coexists with a “backward,” or traditional, sector, the chief function of which is to provide cheap labor and cheap food for the former. Because the dynamic sectors of the economy produce for export or for the modern sector, there is no real need for consolidating an internal market that would encompass most of the population.”
Anthropologists frequently only have unilateral conversations.

The conclusion I draw from all of this is that development functions outside of the consumer economy. In the name of capitalism, a centrally derived socialist system is set up with connections to the “free market” only at the highest levels. Development planners do not see themselves as part of the system they are planning. More importantly as Marx would point out and as Escobar outlines courtesy of de Janvry in the above point 4, consumers don’t see producers. It’s as if community didn’t exist, only numbers on a page. No friends, neighbors, colleagues, loved ones, family or traditions, just columns of GDP, GINI, and HDI.

This is where development traditionally fails.

With Of Rags community is what makes us different. We are grounded in building pride among community members about the work that they themselves can do to deliver on the populist political promises of healthier living conditions, better education and job opportunities. We plug some of the most marginalized producers into the global market place. We put consumers and the people who make their clothes as face-to-face as a computer screen will allow.

This is all great. But we represent 0.0000004% of the annual dollars flowing into development. Other community-based development programs are for the most part similar specs of dust in the scheme of things. Even fair trade in total represents no more than a 300 million dollars industry. While the 50billion dollar aid industry is only 10% of the annual dollars flowing into armed forces. Creating substantial systemic change based in one community at a time will take a very very very long time. Yet it’s no coincidence that I’m talking about the value of communities.

Community, whatever the word really means, is what motivates me to type out a blog post on social change at 3am. Seeing the faces of the people for whom many development agencies only see numbers is what drove me to think outside of the box and start an organization in partnership with a Ghanaian artist and designer. Whether those faces were through the TV or in a corn field in Honduras, I saw from a relatively early age that there was something more going on behind the scenes of the poverty that Children International shows in the ads asking for a dollar a day. I worked with the Water Committee and the Youth Action Group in the small town of Coalaca. I saw that there were organizations on the smallest level working to build a kitchen at the village school and holding soccer matches to raise funds for a new community center.

Five years later this is still my inspiration. Tattooed on my side are the words “vida verdad amor.” Life truth love—The same words one of my friends in Honduras said to me when I left to return to the comfort of my recently renovated house in Bethesda. She told me “No tenemos mucho acá como tu tienes allá, pero sí tenemos vida, verdad y mucho amor. No te olvides de eso. Pues nunca te vamos a olvidar. --We don’t have much here like you have there in the States, but we do have life, truth and love. Don’t forget that. We’ll never forget you.”

Talking face to face. Asking “…y como fue que llegó a la USA?” Listening. Sharing. All those healthy values that they taught in the storybooks really must have worn off on me somehow. But I don’t know if it was in the classroom. My experiences are unique, but I’m not alone in my knowledge of the world and of community. Almost every single person I know who has travelled in the same way I have, shares the opinion that change must come about on both ends of the spectrum for any one end to be sustainable.

Tuition for Peace institutionalizes community-based development and face-to-face sharing. The idea is to put college aged people into unfamiliar environments where they volunteer in whatever capacity they are able. Their volunteer service would be facilitated by a college scholarship drawing in many ways on the ROTC program for the “all volunteer” military. Not only will this solve the failure of development and the current economic system, but it will also open the doorway to jobs and career opportunities that students otherwise would not have the interest in or the access to. If Tuition for Peace were implemented tomorrow, twenty years from now development would reflect the value of community to its very core.

But if one thing is clear to me at this point it is that even the best idea isn’t getting anywhere without a community supporting it from the start. In the case of Of Rags, we have the Labadi Town community in Ghana and we are growing our community here in New York. With Tuition for Peace I find myself a lone voice sounding a drowned out call to action. Yet there are two ripe communities to which I am yet to turn.

My focus with Tuition for Peace is on finding a small community of people like myself—four or five dedicated believers. From there we will target communities that would benefit the most from the program—high schools, where the threat of college tuition looms large.

But I’m yet to figure out one elemental aspect and that is whether or not those core believers will be all, or even partly, located in New York City where I am. If they are not all located in New York, then one key question remains—a question, not put too lightly, that may determine the fate of the world—is our belief in community enough to bring us together if we are not face-to-face?

I'm interested to see how Paul Hawken treats this subject in his book Blessed Unrest that I'm reading for next week.

Competitive Advantage, Competitive Change

2011-02-23T01:30:00.009-05:00

Sometimes I wish I had a tube connected to my head that would just take my thoughts and write them down. Now is one of those times. I've got an exam tomorrow/today at 8am and let's see it's 1:31am already. I studied a little, but it's Econ, which is mostly logic. Logically, our economy is screwed up, but more on that in about 36 hours. Instead of studying, I thought a lot.

The last few days have been quite inspiring. I watched The Social Network (on the Amazon on Demand online video service). It made me feel both motivated and a little frustrated too for not having a quick-fix, go-viral, be-all end-all solution to the world's problems. I went through several NYU Reynolds program worksheets for the Business Plan Development Team. These asked questions that may seem obvious, but when asked al together in their particular style make me stop and analyze my approach to Of Rags and just about everything a little more critically. I also met with some cool fair trade business people and worked with a web designer on some tech details for the upcoming new Of Rags website.

But enough with the boring stuff. The thoughts that I'm looking to put into words somehow revolve around the fact that in my experience as a consumer I have frequently faced a decision about opportunity cost. I see this cost as an individual--what it costs me. I remember specifically an experience I had a few years ago shopping for new winter weather clothes. I went to Banana Republic where I saw a beautiful red striped sweater. It was 180 dollars. Then I went next door to the Gap where I saw different color striped versions of an OK sweater. Each version was 45 dollars. Being me I bought two of the OK sweaters and a bunch of pants and other shirts until I spent around 360 dollars. I walked home thinking "wow, for the price of two sweaters I got two sweaters two pants and three shirts (and I shouldn't have spent so much money.)" Beyond sounding like a crummy example from a textbook, my point is this:

Never once in my consumer process did I think about the opportunity cost of where my dollars were going and what opportunities they represented for other people. Instead I thought only about what opportunity I had to get one thing versus numerous other things--even if those other things are, do I buy a shirt or do I give ten dollars away. Never once had I seriously considered do I buy a shirt that pays fair wages or do I buy a shirt that employs sweatshop labor? There was no reason for me to consider this because there was no easy alternative to the sweatshop labor, or at the very least the profit driven relatively poor labor conditions somewhere in Asia or Central America. What I found was that all compassion was removed from the marketplace.

The environmentalist movement is the first time that any of these habits have really started to change. But even so, a Compact Florescent Lightbulb doesn't really tell me how it was made, it only tells me I'm saving on my electric bills, which somewhere in the back of my mind I equate to less green house gas.

The magic combination is having a sweater somewhere quality-wise in the range of OK to Beautiful that markets itself not on having red stripes, because there are half a dozen stores in half as many blocks that carry the same look, but instead that markets itself on where the consumer's dollars go.

If with Of Rags we can come up with a system that shows our potential consumers exactly how much of the purchase price of each item in their shopping cart goes to pay living wages and how much goes to community initiatives, then our product is no longer just sweater. It is a sweater that puts food on the table for a family. The opportunity cost of buying a different sweater from another company becomes more than not getting our version of basically the same thing. The cost is not feeding a family.

So with this in mind we will soon launch our website that will include a unique ticker showing the number of products sold, dollars raise and wages paid. This is just a prototype of what I hope we can create one day. My goal is to figure out how to include this same breakdown of wages and community reinvestment for every product that we sell at the moment that we sell it. This way consumers will see what each of their purchases amounts to the second that they spend money with Of Rags.

(An unauthorized sneak peek at the new Of Rags website.)

Perhaps my blog is not necessarily the best place to announce this plan. But I figure if someone can steal this idea and implement it faster and better than my team and I can, then at least we'll be competing on something of more value than whose red stripes look cooler on the mannequins. It's this competition of social value that the consumer market lacks. It is this competition that will breed innovation and it is this competition that will ultimately change our world. ...so long as the competition is honest.

Forging a Foundation

2011-02-19T23:12:00.009-05:00

A call to action is only as good as the people who hear it, and we've got to listen to be heard. In the Civil Rights Movement, whether the action was registering to vote, sitting in at segregated lunch counters, boycotting stores or just talking about making a difference, the call was sounded most clearly through face-to-face dialogue. While the telephone, the postal service and certain newspapers spread word of what was occurring in towns like Greenwood, Mississippi to other areas throughout the United States, the forums that instigated action took place in churches, social halls, barber shops and in people’s homes. Spurred on by Sam Block and other SNCC activists, Greenwood residents discussed how they could uphold their constitutional right to vote and their basic human right to a dignified existence. In the book I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Charles Payne charts the course of change that occurs through each discussion. Be it in a mass meeting, or on door-to-door canvassing activities, every time people engaged in conversation they built trust, community, confidence in themselves and buy-in to the cause. This laid the foundation for the actions that broke the chains of segregation.

Fifty years later we must rebuild that foundation. As we’ve added more forms of communication, mainly the Internet, to our repertoire of organizing tactics, too frequently have we forgotten what it means to share stories of personal experiences and aspirations in a face-to-face conversation. At least this is what I have observed over the past year as I have tried to organize my peers and colleagues around a cause. With some help from one or two supporters and the power of today’s connectivity at my fingertips, I have organized visits to 15 of the nation’s best colleges and universities in order to promote sustainable consumerism. At first I thought it would be easy to leverage this network into support for the concrete goal of passing legislation to open up volunteer opportunities as a way to help pay for college. But quickly I realized that standing in the front of a room with a microphone and speaking to my peers is not the same thing as sitting in a circle and sharing stories and ideas in conversation with one another.

While there is some value in preaching to the choir, the opportunity that I am now aiming to create is a forum where every voice can be heard distinctly. I believe that only with this approach, the same approach that kept Greenwood fighting for freedom even when run down by injustice, will individuals truly take action on any scale of significance beyond just nodding their heads in ascension or clicking a button online. If we congregate as a group of supporters for a cause, but do not listen to one another’s voices, how can we expect that we will believe in each of our own unique stories and set of values enough to keep taking action on an individual level until we achieve our collective goal? This is a matter of faith—not in any higher power, but in ourselves. And as we share our stories, ideas, values and opinions gained from our own experiences we will also be able to craft a more universally accessible call to action and a more comprehensive strategy to reach our goal.

With today’s 24-hour network news cycle and 140-character thought process, it is easy to fall into the trap of seeking change overnight. I am only just beginning to pull myself out of that trap through a course of reading and guided thinking in much greater depth than I’ll bore you with. To truly live up to the clichéd promise of the 21^st century and give voices to the masses, we have a bigger chunk of work cut out for us than I think many people would like to admit. We’ll have to go into classrooms, church basements, and community center meeting halls over and over and over in order to develop a dialogue well beyond the complexity of a Facebook newsfeed. But if we forge these traditional tactics with our contemporary connectivity, then we can create not just a movement, but a revolution.

Marketing the Truth

2011-02-10T18:11:00.008-05:00

Over the past 18 months or so I've learned a lot about running an organization. I've probably learned more about what not to do than anything else. One thing that I've discovered is that, as far as most people are concerned, the information that an organization publishes about itself, whether nutritional facts, how its products are made, or what it does with its money is the only information that most people looking into the organization will ever know. Even most journalists don't do more investigating than looking through a press release. This puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of people running organizations--power in the form of trust. Consumers, whether of products or information, trust that what an organization says it does is indeed what it does. When an organization is honest a great relationship between the organization and its consumers is formed.

Yet there is a huge potential for an organization to abuse that relationship since effectively it is its own authority. It takes someone with a combination of experience, time and some inside knowledge to know that sometimes what organizations say about themselves is not true. Over the past 18 months I've gained such experience and inside knowledge--at least in a particular field. Today I look more critically at information published and think of it from a marketer's perspective. I've come to ask myself scrutinously how is this spun, exaggerated or otherwise just made up?

I know that I don't stand alone with this critical perspective and I know that I must turn it around toward myself and my own organizations with just as much of a laser eye, because the biggest lesson that I've learned over the past 18 months is never to represent my organization dishonestly.

Trust is the most powerful form of relationship. It is a power that must be used responsibly because it is a power that can be lost in just seconds. Yet the potential that lies in truth is infinitely bigger than anything dishonesty could ever come up with. So we as both producers and consumers must challenge ourselves to seek out the truth. We must respect our mutual intelligence and realize that all of us are humans. None of us is perfect. Let's be honest about that so that we can share the benefits of a strong and lasting relationship.

Valuing Demands

2011-02-10T11:26:00.008-05:00

This week I’ve been making my way through Charles Payne’s I’ve Got The Light of Freedom. The book tells the story of the civil rights activists who made history but didn’t make the history textbooks. In terms of envisioning a functional coalition in today’s struggle to trade fairly and peacefully this book is an eye opener. What I see is that the social entrepreneurs of the 21^st century are in many ways replicating the efforts undertaking by the likes of Amzie Moore, and Septima Clark over fifty years ago. Citizenship schools like Highlander and its disciples are echoed today in leadership courses and even school clubs that I think we far too often take for granted. Yet while many of the same mechanisms are in place today as they were nearly two generations ago, what we lack is who to directly contend with and what we’re directly contending for.

60 years ago the struggle was clear: voting rights and racial integration. Not to dilute these issues, for they are much more nuanced than one sentence will allow, but essentially they are an easily defined call to action. Today each of our leadership courses, such as the NYU Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship that I’m so honored to be a part of, is training participants to develop their own diverse passions. School clubs and community organizations are tackling more issue than I even knew existed. THIS IS GREAT! Don’t get me wrong, our diversity is our strength—a strength that yesterday’s activists gave their lives for—yet now we just need to figure out how to use it.

Yesterday I sat on a panel discussion at Fordham University. I was there to talk about Fair Trade, Social Entrepreneurship and starting an organization while still in college. Certainly the fact that the panel was even taking place, represents some unified direction in a movement toward Fair Trade practices. Yet the spread of opinions from the panelists about the future of Fair Trade left me more confused and concerned than I think many of the audience members may have been. There is an intense debate in the Fair Trade world as to how to take the industry to so-called scale. Should it go the way of organic, corporatizing itself out? Or should it stick to its roots relying on numerous small organizations competing as alternatives to unfairly trade products? Certainly there is value to both arguments, yet my fear is that if we, as the big players in the Fair Trade movement, can’t make up our minds about one clear cut direction, then how we will be able to lead the movement anywhere. My solution falls somewhere between the two sides of the debate.

I think that the biggest value to trading fairly is the belief that people must come before profits. This belief allows for just about every perspective on the debate to hold water while still moving the whole Fair Trade industry forward. Yet this path forward is much more ambiguous than merely protesting the Forever 21’s or writing letters to boardrooms asking for companies to go Fair Trade. The most sustainable solution is calling for a change in the values of CEOs, shareholders and consumers alike.

So with this in mind I’ll continue examining I’ve Got the Light of Freedom to see how the civil rights movement went about (and goes about) changing the values of Americans in order to make whites and blacks equal by voicing its call to action around neatly defined demands. Today's real challenge is not in starting more Fair Trade organizations or conveying the idea of doing good to business leaders, but more than anything in changing the underlying values of our consumer habits so that we see what our dollars do, good or bad, and not just what product we walk home with. We are all consumers after all.

I think this change happens just as much in the market place as it does through experiential learning.

But that's just me. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please chime in via comments.

Peace,

Branson

Choir Practice: Uniting Our Call to Action

2011-02-02T09:54:00.006-05:00

Today I begin an independent study with Professor Alejandro Velasco at the Gallatin School at NYU. Over the semester we'll be studying theories and tactics of movement building and change. I'll compose some short thoughts based on reading assignments and personal experiences. The idea with these postings is not so much of academic value, but rather I hope that by sharing what Alejandro and I are working on, we can enjoy a collective dialogue that indeed puts us closer to the goal of the course. And if nothing else, at least I'll have all my thoughts stored somewhere in one legible format to build on the other writings I've laid out on this blog. That said, feel free to chime in via the comment function. The reading for this post is Sidney Tarrow's book Power in Movement:

Social movements in the 21^st century are for the first time in history at a point where they truly could change the world thanks to instantaneous communication from anywhere to anywhere. Over the course of the last three hundred years communication has proven to be one of the most critical tools coordinating collective action (Tarrow: 47-51). But today’s rapid and expansive communication network presents its own unique set of problems undermining collective action.

Whereas in the past pamphlets and pulpits have been used to disseminate ideas on one cause for action, with a few simple keystrokes today we are able to see millions of causes for actions. Today, “changing the world” is a term thrown around like a lacrosse ball. So why then has a global revolution to balance the socio-economic injustices and to right the phobias and isms not swept through the city streets of our globe with the same commitment that movements from French peasantries to American civil rights activists displayed before?

Has today’s form of protest changed with communication technology? Or are engaged citizens in the 21^st century merely faced with the challenge of defining a uniting frame for our good intentions that will muster our diverse causes into one overpowering movement? I believe that a little of the former and a lot of the latter are what is holding us back.

With so many voices it is nearly impossible to hear just one loudly enough to decipher its call to action. My goal over the next 13 weeks is to figure out exactly how to harmonize our voices and make sure that the right ears are listening.

Consider It.

2010-12-17T23:45:00.006-05:00

Is aid-based development merely NGO-run socialism?

I believe that the answer to this question is obvious.

Consider three points:

Lack of Private Ownership
Reliance on Handouts
Partitioned from a Balanced Market System

I leave this note here as a reminder to myself to elaborate on these ideas in more depth, and more importantly to see what types of responses it will stir up in order to consider the question from a variety of perspectives.

Thanks,

Branson

Love Will Triumph

2010-10-21T11:37:00.003-04:00

Pain. That’s something that I hadn’t felt for a while.

I began traveling around the world on a consistent basis when I was 16 or so. Certainly there are people with a lot more experience traveling than I have, but I’m proud of my ability to adapt to pretty much wherever I end up. I’ve stayed in the nicest hotels and I’ve stayed in shacks on a dirt floor. Over the past five years I’ve developed a certain immunity to seeing inequality. When I’m traveling, I see a problem and I search for a solution. That’s all.

But yesterday after an exhausting drive from NYC to Boston and back for the Of Rags College Tour I think I let my guard down. For only the third time in five years of being confronted with massive inequality did I completely loose my composure. Never have I been so angry and never had I been so sad.

For a number of reasons I was suddenly frightened by the long road ahead of us toward fairness in our global socio-economy. I felt all in one moment the pain of all of the people I have meet along my travels come crashing down on my shoulders. Generally I’m optimistic. I’ve even heard people call me overly optimistic, but in this moment I had only doubts.

On the battlefield of the fight for fairness, not pessimistically, but realistically, the perpetuation of the status quo has the higher ground. While this realization overwhelmed me as I thought of all of the suffering I have seen and the disregard for it that standardizes much of our social values here in New York City, I mentally surveyed the situation and concluded that even in the plight of misery and lack of opportunities there is love, even in the most selfish pursuit of material wealth there is love. However angry I may feel because of the inequalities that I have seen, I indeed feel love and feel loved.

Whether we chase dollar signs with six zeros or trash that may contain morsels of something to eat, much more often than not, we all have experienced family in one way or another. And that family is love.

Sure, I may sound like a Beatles song, but they’re right damn it. The problem is our lack of caring. The solution is our compassion—the same compassion that will lead us to do anything for our children, parents, sisters, brothers or best friends. We must unleash that compassion for the greater good. If that greater good is a homeless shelter around the corner, or a refugee camp five thousand miles away, we must understand that we as human beings are all in this together and that just as our greed has led to great suffering, our love will lead to peace.

The Old Empire May Have Known What It Was Doing After All.

2010-10-15T14:44:00.002-04:00

Yesterday Dame Hilary Blume of Britain's Charities Advisory Trust addressed my NYU Reynolds 2010 Cohort class. Certainly I was happy to hear about her inspiring work on "Charity Trading," on in US English terms, making non-profits make a profit. Everything I am doing with Of Rags would not be possible had she not paved the way first with the Good Gifts Catalogue, widely imitated by Oxfam and the like. But more than anything I was intrigued by her comparison of US values with common UK values. Many of the differences she attributed to a more static lifestyle in the UK in terms of living in one place for all of one's life. But I wonder if there is not another factor that has lead to the much more prevalent "third sector" of volunteer workers?

Hilary Blume, who carries the honorable title of Dame (the female version of Sir i.e. she's been knighted...damn.) notes that UK citizens are generally much more active with their volunteerism. She said that conversations are not "I" centric but "we" driven. She noted that whereas she's heard people in the US say "I'd like to volunteer with this organization because I will grow from the experiences," in the UK generally people just say "I want to make a difference." One example of that is tax law surrounding non-profits. When in the US you donate to a cause, you receive a tax exemption. In the UK, at least in some tax brackets, the tax exemption goes to the charity to which you donated so that it receives twice the money and so that your contribution is truly charitable and not self serving. That's not to say that the street is unidirectional by any means, but she also observed that people in the UK are generally much more receptive of the government. "Brits," she commented, "don't run and hide from the word socialism." Dame Hilary Blume believes that Great Britain leads the world in charity and volunteerism. With no reason to doubt her, I assume she is correct. Either way, perhaps it's time that we, the new worldeans, turn our heads back to the nation that bore us and learn from what she has to offer.

Let Our Dollars Ring!

2010-10-11T18:09:00.005-04:00

Cities in Global Context is the name of my favorite class this semester. The class isn’t telling me anything that anyone who has ever walked through a major urban area has not seen or experienced before, but it is providing a forum for analytical thinking, something I can definitely take advantage of after spending the summer in Labadi Town, a lower-middle income area in Accra, Ghana, only to return to my rather absurd apartment in my rather ridiculous city. Or is it really so absurdly ridiculous?

The long and the short of it is, yes--the outlandish luxury goods and services available in New York and other mega cities around the world are ridiculous, not in and of themselves, but in contrast with their surroundings. What does that mean? Capitalism is great, but not when it only serves the wealthy.

If cities, as Professor Anne Rademacher suggests, are indeed where classes collide, then New York City is very much the paradigm of her definition. New York is, or at least has been, the capital of money. But for every Bentley I see chauffeuring some CEO, I see at least two people (typically of Asian features) walking down the street with massive piles of cans that they will turn in for five cents each. While some people work to maintain their millions, if not billions, other people work to find their next meal. New York is home to numerous success stories of epic proportions, but it is also home to countless more failures ripe with the makings of tragedy.

Tragedy.

No other word comes to mind to describe New York’s dichotomy. What makes us great is also what destroys us. But as my travels have proven to me time and again, this tragic story is not unique to New York City. Any urban environment brings together different classes. And almost always the classes on top maintain their position at the expense of the classes on the bottom. In Accra for example the wealthiest businessmen are often tied to exploitative foreign exporters. In China the overnight millionaires have struck it rich only because of the cheap labor in almost slave like conditions. In Ecuador the corporate class has grown as more and more land is taken away from indigenous tribes forcing them into the cities in search of non-existent jobs.

The stories are almost always the same. In fact, so consistent are these stories that I dare say such tragedy is our human nature. A certain Elizabethan British playwright would agree.

But why? Are we doomed to strive for greatness as way consequentially kill ourselves?

My answer comes back to cities. Though classes may collide in cities, do producers and consumers come face to face? How many stores have you walked into and seen the people who manufacture the product that you buy? Human beings are removed from the commodity. And it is in cities where this disconnect occurs.

Products are for sale everywhere in cities. Urban centers are by definition centers of economic activity. But shelves lined with products don’t mean we see where those products come from. Instead, we see only our newest wants and trendiest desires. On Madison Avenue, just as in the shopping malls in Shanghai, we value commodities over the people who make them.

I don’t believe that this is due to any class clash. It is not the capitalist’s fault for doing what they have been told—make a profit. No guilt can be placed, save for on the people who are yet to commodify human wellbeing.

So long as there is a disconnect between the products that we consume and the producers who make them, then the stores in New York City will be only that—a place to buy the hottest topic. But if we can indeed show the true value of our purchases in human terms, then storefronts will come to signify much more. They will be centers for charity, symbols of generosity from the hands of one to the hands of another until the circle is closed. When the Bentley driven corporate executives see that their work can shelter the homeless and feed the hungry, then they will equate their profits using a different scale. Our green gold must stand for freedom—a dollar an opportunity.

Let us not dream of this day as if it were a distant future. This day is now. For nearly 125 years the Statue of Liberty has marked the harbors of New York City, the capital of money. We must liberate our dollars if we truly strive for greatness. Otherwise we will only succumb to the tragedy of empire cities once more.

Peace,

Branson

WORLD LEADERS PLEDGE TO STOP TERROR BEFORE IT STARTS!

2010-09-21T17:52:00.009-04:00

For those of us who go looking, headlines this week will read something to the effect of "world leaders meet for talks on global development."

Will these talks lead to absolutely anything at all? I seriously doubt it.

Now I'm not privy to the insides of the UN General Assembly or the special Millennium Development Summit, but from most accounts (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11380539) and from historical precedent, these talks are nothing more than a way for global leaders to feel good about themselves.

Presidents and secretaries of state take the podium and confirm their commitment to ending poverty, hunger, environmental degradation infant and maternal mortality, educational and gender inequalities, and HIV/AIDS. Their eloquent and often passionate speeches are the equivalent of my giving five dollars to Oxfam. I feel good about myself, but realistically I know my five dollars mean jack shit in the struggle to get 1.35 billion people out of dire poverty.

When they go back home, do they rally their citizens to work toward the MDGs? Do they change their policies to bring about more sustainable market based solutions? Do they speak with the same passion about ending global poverty when they address the often relatively well off people of their own nation?

Almost always the answer is no.

Perhaps a little more money is thrown at the problem, but the dramatics undertaken on the podium in New York, do not play out again in the cabinet rooms and congresses in Paris, Washington, Alberta, London, Berlin, Madrid...

A little more money is better than nothing. A summit is better than no summit. But if we renamed the summit "Stopping Terrorism Before it Starts," I bet a lot more would come from it.

(Have you ever noticed how much terror lines the headlines? If that doesn't catch your attention, just look at where the dollars are spent. Maybe if we took care of the world we wouldn't have to patrol it.)

Indeed that is how we must view it. The problems addresses by the Millennium Development Goals are the same set of issues at spawning terrorism, hatred and violence around the world. While terrorists typically call for less excessive wealth, the MDGs call for less excessive poverty.

When will our world leaders make the link?

Whenever they do will be the day when there will be a little less conversation and a little more action. ...please.

Let's hope it's today!

Peace,

The Of Rags to Riches Philosophy

2010-09-20T02:16:00.008-04:00

Our globe today knows greater wealth and equality than it ever has before. Hundreds of millions of people spend trillions of dollars on consumer luxury goods. Items that not all that long ago were only available to kings and nobles are now for sale to the mass market. Yet while more people wield a greater purchasing power than anyone in history, over a billion people, the equivalent to the world’s population two centuries ago, are left thirsty, hungry and dying of preventable illness. Indeed the 21st century has ushered in unparalleled equality for some, but for many more it is the era of the largest inequality known to man.

One community far too familiar with this inequality is the Liberian Refugee Settlement in Buduburam, Ghana. The people of Buduburam fled the brutal Liberian Civil Wars, which were fueled by a lust for power. After a long and treacherous journey, on foot, on overcrowded buses, hidden in the trunks of cars, they arrived in Ghana traumatized both mentally and in many cases, physically. 500,000 thousand people packed into tents, shacks and temporary mud housing.

Today the war is over. Many refugees have returned to Liberia to pickup whatever remnants of a life are left. Just as many have died after suffering through the long journey and horrible conditions as a refugee. And roughly 50,000 people still remain on the Settlement that is now their home.

(Panels from the upcoming Of Rags: Sustainable Fashion College Tour--the images were taken by children on Buduburam. Click to enlarge)

For those who remain on the Camp there is inadequate support and no legal means of providing for oneself, let alone for one’s family. With no healthcare, no proper education, scarce food and scarce water, the people of Buduburam are living two centuries ago. And yet our world has never had more excess than it has today.

Of Rags has taken on the mission to empower the Buduburam community. Though we may only make a dent on the surface of a much larger problem than any one organization can single handedly address, we aim to transform the Settlement by providing jobs and empowering the community to better their health and improve their own living conditions.

Many organizations take on large developmental goals of this nature, but when their grants run out and their program ends, life returns to how it was before. Of Rags is committed for as long as it takes. Our aim is not to rely on grants that will dry up. Rather, we are an organization built on the same strengths that have made our world as wealthy as it is today. Of Rags manufactures and sells a product in order to make a difference.

The power of consumerism is undebatable. It is consumerism and capitalism that have built the skylines that marvel our world’s major cities. Yet it is greed that has spawned the wars that have torn so many of them down. But what if we consume compassionately? Can we not use capitalism to empower the disenfranchised as opposed to make the wealthy even wealthier?

By making fashion sustainable and compassion cool, we can truly change the world, if not for everyone, then at least for the people of Buduburam.

With your support we can transform a community, we can serve as an example, we can set a trend. And perhaps the community that we transform will turn out to be global.

Peace,

Branson

Redeeming Fairness

2010-09-06T21:26:00.003-04:00

The nuances of how the world works are far too many to account for in sweeping words no matter how eloquent and studied they may be. Yet the way the world should work is quite simple. The system can be described in one word: fairness.

Last night I watched The Kite Runner. I’ve only seen the movie and I hear that the book is even better. There is a scene in The Kite Runner where the dad of the main character Amir tells his son that there is “only one sin. Only one. And that is theft.”

"Every other sin is a variation of theft…when you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to her husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat you steal the right to fairness."

The way I see it, the big words and sweeping statements used to describe and design the world’s political, economic and social structures are thieves of fairness. By seeing the world in black and white we are not being fair to the spectrum of colors that are reflected in white and absorbed in black. By dividing politics into democrats and republican we miss all that falls in between. By pitching communism against capitalism we don’t see the values they both share. By holding consumerism in one hand and charity in the other we rob ourselves of the combined strengths of the two. By categorizing citizens and immigrants, residents and refugees, we fail to categorize ourselves as people.

The Kite Runner deals with human decency. It frames this in the context of the Cold War, Fundamentalism and redemption. What I take away from the story is that we loose our decency and dignity when we overlook the nuances of our world and see it instead as a matter of rich vs. poor, right vs. wrong, good vs. evil. Let us picture that in motion.

We must not rob ourselves of our capability to see the nuances that make us all individuals and that will make our world one. We must be the redemption of fairness. To make a difference we must be fair to the different beliefs, visions and values that complicate our world so that one day we will simply be fair to each other.

Peace,

Branson

Go and Come

2010-08-05T12:49:00.002-04:00

From www.ofragstoriches.com:

Go and Come is what many Ghanaians say to a friend going somewhere. It implies that you will be back. When I left Ghana the first time last December I knew I would be back this past June. Leaving Ghana this time I had no idea when I will be back. Although I might want to go back soon, I may not need to go back any time soon. In fact, more than anything, now I need to be here in the States.

The ever growing Of Rags team accomplished a great deal over the last two months. We laid out new designs for t-shirts and other casual wear. We formalized patterns for these designs in every size. We connected up with folks to make accessories, such as bags and necklaces. We introduced the idea of a training program for teachers and/or teacher’s assistants so as to educate on HIV/AIDS and Special Needs Learning to our partner organizations. We made a bunch of videos. We set up a new website. We surpassed 1000 fan mark on Facebook and 100 follower mark on Twitter. We co-hosted an evening of art, sustainable fashion and music. We partnered with Art for Global Justice to run a photography class for young refugees. We put a child in school. And we established a workshop at the Buduburam Liberian Refugee Camp where we now employ a total of 12 people.

What we didn’t get done is meet with the Ghanaian ministries about our various economic and public health/educational programs. We didn’t formalize parts of our accessories line as much as I would have liked to. We didn’t clean up the sanitation issues in Labadi Town. We didn’t finish photo shooting our entire collection. We didn’t lock in as consistent fabric supply as I would have liked, mostly because there just isn’t a way to do that cost effectively in West Africa (but we have a solid backup plan). And the list can go on and on.

There as many tasks left unchecked as there are completed. Indeed the checklist keeps growing. But this is nothing over which to despair.

Everything we’ve accomplished over the last two months both in Ghana and in the States has accelerated our startup process significantly. We now have roughly eight people on the OR team here in the states and at least 15 team members in Ghana. What we need the most now is for you to be a part of the team in any way that you’re able. If you’re in college and can help us set up a date on the Sustainable Fashion Tour featuring live music by Keeping Riley and Guests, please get in touch. If you want to wear the difference with Of Rags sustainable fashion, a new online store will be up by August 14th, so please buy stuff and send the link to your friends. If you have a fashion, development or personal blog, please mention Of Rags.

All of these things are focused mainly on the US market, so it’s good that I’m here because it’s the US side of Of Rags that now needs the most focus. But I know that I will go and come.

Once we check off the next page of our list, I will be back with the OR team in Ghana to make an even bigger difference. I’m just not quite sure how long it will take to get through this page of our plan. With your support though, I bet we can do it in record short time!

Peace,
Branson

Americans United

2010-07-05T17:31:00.007-04:00

“It takes a special breed.”

-Peace Corps Volunteer, Ghana July 4^th 2010

I spent the Fourth of July weekend among friends, new and old and from three different continents with three distinct accents to their English language. This was at least the fourth Fourth of July for which I have been far away from the country whose independence I celebrate. I seem to have lost count. What I know is that even though we had no fire works, our bonfire on the beach was more than enough for us to feel the spirit that brought us all together over the weekend. Indeed every nationality was included in our celebration. For we weren’t celebrating our independence, rather, we celebrated our unity.

There is something inside of us all that makes us equal. Perhaps it is because I am Quaker that I believe that—there is that of God in everyone. But this weekend I was the only Quaker among my friends and yet we all shared the same belief. All of us, be it through the Peace Corps, through other programs, through our own initiatives or through some combination of these, have been immersed in another culture. This experience has lead us to firmly believe that we are all equal.

This is how I spent my 4th of July--corn on the cob and soccer on the beach in Butre, Ghana. Nothing is more patriotic than changing the world.

Now I won’t argue with the Peace Corps volunteer who suggested that “it takes a special breed” of person to do the work we are doing, particularly the work of Peace Corps volunteers who are immersed in a foreign culture for two years. I will say, however, that it does not take anything special to believe that we are all equal. We must merely have a reason to know it. It is something we cannot be told. We must experience it. We must work alongside others. We must speak with strangers. We must get lost among the familiar and find our own way home. Then we will know that every human being experiences life just as we do. We are all equal. We all are at the liberty of our own desire. We all pursue happiness.

If we believe this—that we are all equal—if we believe it because we have experienced it for ourselves, then we will treat others the way that we want to be treated. There will be no other way than peace.

-Branson

Life Less Luxury

2010-06-28T06:59:00.004-04:00

Last night I met with a two friends from the US, one of whom I've known since the first week I was ever in Ghana. That was her first week in Ghana as well. It was her first week any where outside of the US, Canada and a resort in Mexico. While it takes a certain type of person to decide to spend an entire year studying and living on campus at the University of Ghana Legon, Julie self-admittedly has matured in her compassion and understanding of the world over the course of the last year. She's now working on a water and education project that she and her boyfriend started in a rural costal village called Butre. (wearebutre.blogspot.com)

For the almost month since I've returned to Ghana my life has been pretty immersed in the country, the culture and it's people. I've spent maybe a total of 12 hours with people not born and raised Ghanaian. Of course I've been connected wirelessly with people on every continent, but for all three of us and eventually RAAM, it was interesting last night to put perspective on our collective experiences.

As Julie's first experience removed from her native atmosphere has confirmed, there is a very serious learning curve when traveling, living or working abroad. For instance the guy sitting next to me at breakfast yelling at the waitress for not being sexual enough in her serving style. Even with accumulatively somewhere well over a year of significant traveling experience, I just sit here quietly mystified by this. I know that there are some things I should keep out of.

While certain behaviors may make me silently furious, nothing of my living situation in a lower-middle working class household leaves me feeling down. RAAM's room that I've been so fortunate to share with him, is nice. Hands down it is the cleanest and best equipped room in the house. But I fear that for many of the NYUers who complained of their living situation during the fall semester here in Ghana, my current housing conditions would be intolerable. We have no running water, we have two layers of bars on the windows, we have a bucket latrine for squating, we take bucket showers in the same place where we pee, we walk through what can sometimes be rivers of sewage infested mud and mice scurry across the floor regularly. After all of my travels, I don't blink an eye at any of this, nor does Julie, who considers these conditions superb in comparison with where she is currently immersed after quickly making progress on the learning curve. For the sake of the neighborhood's health, I'm not happy about the mud situation, I wish there were a better system for hand washing, and I'm generally just not a fan of mice, particularly when I'm sure they've run through the sewers before coming into my room. I'm also not too keen on the maggots crawling around in the bucket where I go to the bathroom, but none of these things gets me upset. I see them as health issues for the neighborhood. They are issues that can be solved if Of Rags is successful.

But what I have come to realize at this point on the learning curve of traveling experiences is that daily life where I am living now is no different from the daily life of the house where I grew up, save for the fact that basic things often take a lot more physical exertion and time to get them done. Taking a shower in Bethesda or New York requires us only to turn the faucet on. The infrastructure has been built to deliver water, hot and cold, as we desire. In Labadi Town we go through a much longer process. Once every few weeks a truck brings water to a large tank in the neighborhood. 15 gallon yellow containers are then filled up and sold for 30 pesewas, or about 20 cents each. So when I want to "bathe down" I go accross the muddy street and buy a 15 gallon jug. I carry it back to the house where I pour part of its contents into a 5 gallon bucket, I get my soaps, towel and a smaller pale, I make sure no one is in the shower space, lug everything over, pour some water on the floor to wash the urine away and then start bathing down. This whole process takes about 3-5 minutes plus shower time.

My point in all of this is that what we often take for granted in certain parts of the world is an unimaginable luxury in others. These luxuries provide for comfort, relaxation and efficiency. Laying down on the couch in the common room of our house in Labadi Town means that you constantly have to be on the lookout for mosquitoes. Going between rooms means that you have to put on flip-flops or your feet will be filthy from the impossibly dirty floors outside of the rooms. These little things, not to mention the cooking process etc, are just normalities for anyone who has grown up here, but coming from my background they are additional things that I must do. I don't mind this, but I see the extra steps in my daily routine as a roadblock to productivity.

Just as I saw living in honduras where so much of the time was spent chopping wood to fuel a fire to make food to have more energy to chop more wood... So much of our energy here is spent on doing what I see as the extra steps in our daily routines. These extra steps add up to leave me and everyone else in this house exhausted by the end of the day. Until we're asleep we never really stop working. There's always something that has to be done to make something else happen. There are very few buttons to push that get things done here. It's all human energy.

This human energy is the most valuable resource that we have. It is our time. We can earn all the money in the world, but we are only ever losing time. And so now that I have seen as much of the world as I have been so fortunate to see and in the process have become accustomed to pretty much every standard of living, I ask the question how can the people at the bottom ever be expected to pull themselves up if so much of their energies and most valuable resources are spent on subsistence routines? Labadi Town has a massively long way to go to catch up with Bethesda or Greenwhich Village. I don't think that it will ever happen, but I believe that significant strides can be taken in that direction. But these strides must come from both sides.

As we all agreed in our conversation last night, the people with the extra time allowed by the luxuries in life must use that time to fill in the time that people who have only the basic necessities, or less, lose though the necessities of their daily routine. This is the trickle down effect in time form.

The simple fact is that if the most developed society runs at a pace five times faster than the least developed society, we are leaving people behind. If we hope to close the gap on inequalities and injustice, using our time as a collective resource is scientifically the only way to do it. Otherwise the minutes of the day just don't add up.

As students, we are the Future. We have traveled to learn. These are the lessons that we're taking home. Listen to us.

Peace,

Branson

Meet Richard -- Let's put him back in school

2010-06-23T05:13:00.003-04:00

I’ve been here in Ghana for three weeks. That’s far too long to have spent only a few short cherished minutes with the Mensah family with whom I’m living, so yesterday afternoon I decided to put my work on hold and play soccer with the kids in the house. I lost embarrassingly 5-2, but it was a blast. This morning one of the kids, Richard, was still outside playing soccer at 10 am when I left the house. (I had to wait for my clothes to dry in the sun otherwise I’d be either naked or smelly.) I asked him why he wasn’t in school. Money, he said.

It turns out that there is no money to pay his 300 Ghana Cedi School fees, so even though he is a straight A student with lots of promise at 8 years old, the school has asked him to stay at home until his family comes up with the money. This presents me with a delicate situation. I have the money to put him in school right now, but that money is supposed to go into Of Rags. The idea being that if we invest in building an industry here in Labadi Town we can employ folks in his family and other families throughout the neighborhood, just as we are planning to do at Buduburam Liberian Refugee Camp. (Labadi will remain our base of operations and design center.) As Of Rags grows and provides more jobs there will be the income to put him in school consistently in the long run. But right now he’s still just kicking a soccer ball against the wall while his friends are in class.

I’ve never been faced with this decision before. It is truly a real live case study in development and overcoming the poverty trap. Do we support Richard now or do we support him in the future? Why can’t we do both?

As I’m writing this RAAM and I have been talking and we’ve decided that we’ll each contribute to pay his school fees 50-50. We refuse to let a kid living in the same house as us stay at home from school because of money. That’s just not right, but the fact is that there are thousands of kids like Richard. And we refuse to let any of them stay at home, so we’ve committed ourselves to donating significantly to The Of Rags Foundation. But now I am calling on you to share the responsibility with us. BUY Of Rags so that we have the money to put Richard in school in the long run and to keep growing the company to reach more kids both in Labadi and at Buduburam, where nearly every child stays at home because of school fees.

I know that we all have our own tuitions and living expenses to worry about as well. No matter how much we want to benefit others, sometimes it just seems financially impossible. If you can’t afford new clothes right now, then help us connect with more people. Spread the word. Suggest the Facebook page and forward the website to your friends! Get in touch with us about organizing an Of Rags trunk show and info session. Create the movement. Make compassion cool.

Wear the difference. We’re all in this together.

Peace,
Branson

"It's Just Not Easy"-Life as A Refugee

2010-06-20T21:36:00.004-04:00

from www.ofragstoriches.com

Yesterday was truly amazing. We’re taking charge. We are hope for dozens if not hundreds of people. I saw it in their faces.

I crawled into a shack and saw a woman hemorrhaging and crying in pain. She has no way of paying for the surgery that she needs. The UN has left. The only people with money sell drugs or their own body parts, or are Ghanaians taking advantage of the refugees who have no money to go home or are too scared of persecution upon their return to Liberia. Post-traumatic stress is visible in the scars on people’s arms from bullet wounds. Tracy, a woman who is suffering from fibromyalgia, among other ailments, will die without support from you and me. She is not alone. I met several other women who have similar conditions. We will not leave them abandoned!

This is the shit and Of Rags is now in the thick of it.

We have partnered with a group called the Shelter Clothing Health Care Education Food Organization (SCHEFO) that one of my friends helped set up. SCHEFO and Of Rags will arrange a production facility to make Of Rags clothing. This will provide jobs for the jobless. There are many women and men trained as seamstresses, but they have no machines, no fabric, no supplies and no one to sell to. We are providing all of these things. As RAAM says, “we’re not giving the fish, we’re giving the hook.” That’s far more valuable. With an economic stimulus, conditions in the camp will change for the better.

We are planning to initially employ between four and six people. This may not seem to be a grand number, but the fact is that it is a huge improvement on no people employed. We believe that with your support the potential is boundless. We are currently working with SCHEFO to acquire a location to house our facility. Although our numbers may be small at first, we want room to expand.

While SCHEFO helps us figure out the land situation, RAAM and I are figuring out the designs that we will have the seamstresses make. We’re also sorting out exactly how they are going to put things together and what types of sewing machines they will need. We’ll provide all of the machines and the fabrics. We just want to be sure that we set things up as efficiently as possible to make our money the most effective that it can be.

There is a lot of work to do. Part of that work is marketing our efforts to sell what we make. Our marketing plan hinges on your support. Please help us get the word out about how Of Rags is changing lives. You can be part of the movement to make fashion sustainable and compassion cool. Tracy and all the people at the Refugee Camp need you to be a part of the movement.

Check out the photos on Facebook.

Everyone involved in this unique partnership is thrilled to start making a difference. I hope that you are too!

Peace,
Branson

…it’s World Refugee Day

The Race to 1000: Us against the Clock

2010-06-16T04:41:00.004-04:00

RAAM and I have set the goal of reaching 1000 likes on the Of Rags facebook page by July and I’d like to have 1000 group members on the Tuition for Peace group page by September. As of 11:20am on June 15th that's 284 and 884 to go respectively. So, a total of 1168 people.

That sounds like a lot, but I think it’s totally doable with your help. If 50 people suggest the pages to their collective 50,000 friends and 2.5% of those friends follow the links then we hit our goal. That’s turning 50 people into 1168. This is the impressive power of online social networking.

Why have we set these goals? From the data that Facebook provides and from our own experiments, we calculate that the yield of online social media is 2.5% or less. Which means that if we want 25 people to pay attention to our message and take action, it takes getting our message to at least 1000 people. For a clothing company this means that we have to reach 1000 people if we hope to sell 25 shirts. If we can’t sell 25 shirts we can’t stay in business. For the Student Empowerment Coalition this means that if we want to organize 25 people to send out emails to organize another 25 people we have to reach 1000 people. If we can’t organize 25 people then how can we hope to significantly change policies?

Why should supporting a clothing company and the Student Empowerment Company be important enough for you to take five minutes out of your busy day to send suggestions to all of your Facebook friends?

Of Rags is not just a clothing company it is an alternative future for a sustainable world. We are taking care of people by selling clothes. We are providing Fair Trade jobs and we are reinvesting our profits into an innovative teacher assistant training program for peer education about HIV/AIDS and other health topics and a scholarship program for students with special needs. To our knowledge, no other company is this committed to taking care of the community. But we can’t make something out of thin air. Without selling clothes we have no money with which to accomplish our goals. We estimate that 25 out of 1000 people will buy our stuff consistently. That is what we need to be sustainable.

Why support the Student Empowerment Coalition? We’re working to create a way to get your college paid for by committing to volunteer in peace and community building programs just as the “all volunteer” military pays for college in return for a service commitment. This program would put more people in college, strengthen cross-cultural understandings and change the mindsets of the future leaders of the world so as to make us think about more sustainable policies and practices.

So race forward with us to 1000. Race forward with us to sustainably strengthen communities. Race forward with us to change the world!

Peace,
Branson

Changing History

2010-06-10T09:15:00.005-04:00

I've been thinking recently as I walk through Accra in and out of the markets buying materials and selling clothes that in some ways what I am doing is no different than what the merchants of old times did when they set up Africa for centuries of exploitation. Yet I find myself staring at the face of innovation. we are making our own path. We are headed to where noone has travelled before. We embody globalization. We are the future.

That's How I feel when I think of what RAAM, Neha and I represent. The photos that we took yesterday, after a week of my being here, seem to be a snapshot of these sentiments.

What's different about Of Rags is that we're doing everything right. We're putting people first. We believe that there is nothing cooler than compassion. We want our product to reflect that and our consumer base to share our belief. We are not looking to exploit Africa, nor just unscrupulously hand out food, water and medicine, but rather we're seeking to empower it! I hope that what we're doing works. I am confident that with you tangible support it will.

What I need you to do to support Of Rags is obviously buy the clothes. But we also need to build a presence online to grow our market, so connect your friends with us! Suggest the facebook page to all your FB friends and email the link to our website to any who will be interested: www.facebook.com/ofrags, www.ofrags.com. The goal is to hit 1000 "likes" by July. You can make this happen. As Mos Def and Talib Kweli say, THIS MEANS YOU. It takes two minutes and truly can help change the world!!

Peace,
Branson

Back in Black

2010-06-05T17:45:00.002-04:00

I've been so busy with Of Rags since touching down that I've hardly had time to process everything that's been going on. I guess that was what my sleepless 10 hour flight was for. But now that I'm taking a minute to write some thoughts down it's clear to me that coming back in Ghana is, until this point in my life, the most important thing that I've ever done. I'm here in Africa living with my friend and colleague as we take our organization from concept to reality. No one is telling me what to do. In fact, it's the other way around.

It was a strange sensation the first day when I arrived. I was familiar with everything, but coming from a busy semester and month of May in NYC everything African seemed so different. At first I struggled to make sense of my feelings. Never before had I traveled back to a place I'd been so shortly after being there before. But here I am again and I'm thrilled to be here.

This morning RAAM and I woke up at around 7. I'd slept maybe three hours since I'd been working on the new Of Rags website until around 4am. Soon we we're out the door making a video. By 1pm it was online. The video is basically just us walking around for a few blocks in Labadi Town where Of Rags is based in Accra. We talk about the mission of our organization and the reason why it's so important. Check it out if you haven't already at www.youtube.com/ofrags. It's not the best video I've ever made, but then again, maybe it is. Equipmentwise/technologically and performance wise on my part certainly it's somewhat lacking. Nonetheless, after lots of positive feedback on the video we've set the goal of making a little video chronicle series called The Of Rags Minute. We've also got a serious marketing video coming up with some talented young people in the neighborhood. I'm happy to put my video skills to use!

While making the video and then once again while walking to RAAM's uncle's printing shop to get new business cards made since I've gone through all of mine, I stepped in puddles of rather disgusting mud. From my observations this rarely ever happens to people from around here. One woman nursing her baby outside of her very humble house was kind enough to offer me water and a towel to clean of my foot.

I've got a lot to learn and a lot to do, but I've got all the support I need to make it happen. That support is the woman cleaning my foot, it's my friends and family back home, it's RAAM and his friends and family here, and it's anyone else who believes in Of Rags and Tuition for Peace. That support is what pushes me forward. I wouldn't be here without it.

Yet the potential of our ventures will only be reached if we all keep pushing. We can't slow down for one minute. I know that in many ways these two months ahead of me here in Ghana will be among the most challenging of my life. I know that I'm prepared for it, but only because I know I have your support. Don't let up and together we'll change the world.

Peace
B

On the Ground Running

2010-06-04T17:15:00.002-04:00

From www.ofragstoriches.com:

I touched down in the GH on Tuesday and hit the ground running. RAAM and I have been working on a limited edition World Cup collection. We’ve got it in two stores and have made a good number of individual sales. In fact, we’re struggling to keep up with demand while we get everything else done. So we’ve implemented two strategies to help with this. One: LIMITED EDITION. Two: EMPLOYMENT.

We’ve got folks working with us in The Shop. Mensah and Joshua are a big help. And we’re able to provide them with income. It just so happens that in addition to being valuable workers in The Shop, they’re also skilled skateboarders and rollerbladers. …we’ll put those skills to use too!

While Joshua and Mensah are working on filling the World Cup orders, RAAM and I have been sorting out fabric sourcing. We’ve arranged to have batik style prints made at a local fabric dye shop. On Tuesday we’re headed up to a Bowire, a town outside Kumasi, to get our hands on raw kente cloth at the source. We’ve also got names and locations of the major textile manufactures in Ghana. We’re going to get in touch with them about getting the exact materials that we want. Eventually the goal is to set up our own supply chain entirely fair trade and organic, but in the short term this arrangement will allow us to have control over a consistent fabric supply.

We’ve been to meetings with local organizations regarding taxes, business registration, publicity events, and on Monday have meetings scheduled with both West Africa AIDS Foundation and SENDRAC. Whenever we can find the time we’ve also been discussing new clothing design ideas and we’re going to begin working on samples soon. I’ve mapped out a schedule for this and am working hard to keep us on it.

In other news RAAM and I have been hitting the gym every morning. I must be quite a sight as the short white dude (obruni) living with RAAM in Labadi Town. It rained all day today which was not helpful, but at least it cooled things down for a bit!

New Website, videos and photos on the way! …along with a whole new collection and of course progress reports from our partnerships with SENDRAC and WAAF! Twitter’s got all the news as it happens courtesy of the Berry. Follow us @OfRags and check out my personal nonsense @UnityForward.

Peace,
Branson

Compassionately Cool

2010-05-26T10:11:00.002-04:00

My Speech from The Of Rags Concept Party...although I may have strayed a little from the text.

I believe that to live sustainably, as an individual or as an entire globe, our personal lives must be driven by the economics of time and resources. Not regulation, but logical priorities. We must make decisions for ourselves as to how our time, money and limited natural resources are best spent. Let’s imagine a world where every dollar we spend and every minute we work, benefits not only us as individuals, but in some way every member of our community. Imagine the greedlessness that this would create. Just imagine.

This world sounds far too much like utopia to ever become a reality, but we’re here tonight because Of Rags presents a viable way to build this world with the resources of the one that we already have. What Of Rags is about is giving as much as much as you get. No one needs a two thousand dollar suit, or even a five hundred dollars dress. No one. You just don’t need it. No one needs to restock their wardrobe every six months or even buy a new outfit for a special event. No one. We’d be just fine with what we have. And yet businesses around the world have made a name for themselves selling people these products. Fashion, with all of the textile and jewelry industries and all of the spinoffs and product placements that are derived from it, is the largest industry in the world. It is also the beating heart of our consumer values. The fashion industry is selling us products that we don’t need, but nevertheless still buy, often at huge prices, simply because they are cool. In other words, we like buying cool stuff. While all of this goes on, 1 billion people don’t have clean water—the very essence of life. One billion people do not have access to education. One billion people live on less than a dollar a day. With Of Rags we’re out to change this.

The organization that we’ve put together is a brand built from the ground up on compassion. Because in our world people like to buy stuff, we’ve created a mechanism that allows for you to buy clothes, while at the same time supporting the immediate and long-term essential needs of some of the most impoverished and underprivileged communities in the world. This mechanism works in two ways. First, Of Rags pays fair wages to workers. This creates an economic stimulus in communities where jobs are scarce and labor supply plentiful. Then 40% of the profits from the sale of each item is reinvested into public health and education initiatives. We also hope to provide essential program coordination to support these initiatives. The remaining 60% of the profits will help grow the company both in market access and production capacity so that eventually the 40% that goes directly into program support will be quite substantial and the number of jobs that we can provide will be enough to change entire communities.

To make all of this happen we need your support. While we believe that Of Rags is a great concept on paper, it only works if people buy the clothes. We can’t make something out of thin air. We need your tangible support to help us grow this organization. There are infinite ways to show that support. Of course the most obvious is with your money. But what I hope is that we can stir up a movement. This is done not just through purchasing clothes tonight and in the future, rather through getting the word out and through working together to pool our resources and combine our strengths.

I head to Ghana next Monday to work with RAAM and our partner organizations on the ground in Accra. I come back to New York in two months. The vision that I leave you with is that when I get back with clothes in hand and many more designs templated out and ready to be ordered, that we have the audience waiting to buy our clothes and continue growing the movement. So if you have a facebook, which undoubtedly 99.9% of you do (mom get with the times) become a fan of our page, suggest it to your friends, and when you see our updates, comment on them. We want to know your ideas and hear your feedback. We want you to be part of the team so that together we can build the strongest brand out there! If you have twitter, follow us and do the same. Or subscribe via email to our blog and send the link to your address book. If you have a magazine or blog, or even just know people who work for one, make sure Of Rags gets a shout out. If you have a student organization, talk with us about supplying your shirts. If you’re a designer, a model, a storeowner, a photographer, a musician, a moviemaker, a sticker-putter-upper (we’ve got bunches of stickers for you), or just an enthusiast of the cause, then let’s collaborate!

RAAM, Neha and I have founded Of Rags, but this is your organization. It’s what you make of it. I pray that together all of us in this room and soon all of us in this city, nation and world, can make it a movement—that we change the way people do business. Let’s make compassion cool. Let’s put food and clean water on the table for families in need, medicine on the shelves and books in students’ hands. Let’s spin organic cotton and work with partner organizations to streamline our supply chain and minimize our carbon footprint. Let’s make fashion about individual expression and not just fitting in. …And Let’s make that fashion sustainable. Let’s use the resources we have so that a few people don’t have every luxury but everyone has every necessity. Let’s dream of a better world and then let’s make it happen.

Peace and thank you

Twitter beats Facebook (Most of the time at least)

2010-05-24T01:56:00.002-04:00

Twitter is a speech writer's dream come true: Sound bytes.

I now understand the craze. Enough said. Check out my tweets @UnityForward.

A Theory of Change 2.0—The Online Edition

2010-05-20T23:34:00.004-04:00

Many of us live in a world that is flooded by advertisements telling us how to waste our money and brain cells. I hope to change that. For a while now I’ve been flooding my poor facebook friends’ news feeds with ways for them to get involved in making a positive difference in our world. While it would give me great relief and satisfaction to say that the theory behind this is that if even just one person pays attention to what I’m posting and acts on it then my efforts are having their desired effect, unfortunately this is not the case.

Many of us are indeed committed to bettering communities around the world. Nevertheless I fear that this commitment must be multiplied both in magnitude and in numbers if we are to truly be successful. The influence of technology in nearly every aspect of our globalized community is obvious. We now have access to enormous amounts of information and enormous creative capabilities like never before. With these tremendous tools at our fingertips it is our responsibility to ensure that the selfless message of making a positive difference in the world is spread just as rapidly and with just as high an impact as the message of inherently selfish consumerism. Ultimately we must merge the two into one so that we as consumers in a capitalist market that is beyond any foreseeable point of return buy only products that ensure other human beings’ wellbeing just as much as they satisfy our own desires to consume. In other words we must be selfishly selfless. We are far from reaching that point of equilibrium.

Regardless of the TV channel we may favorite, my personal experience buying luxury goods in the shopping malls of Quito, outside of which the poorest of the poor children beg for spare change or a scrap of food from drivers in SUVs entering the heavily-guarded parking decks, suggests that we may in fact be moving in the direction opposite to that of socially responsible consumerism. In Accra the sights are very much the same. In Beijing I experienced no difference. And those of us who think things are better here in the States, or even in the somewhat more progressive European continent, are very much mistaken. While bars are filled with energetic young people spending money right and left on a night they won’t remember, outside a homeless woman scrounges for food in the overflowing trashcans. Children lack medical care. Schools are falling apart. Racist laws are passed in the year 2010 and yet, we do what exactly to change it? We vote in November and then watch our politicians bicker back and forth maybe getting one or two of their promises passed. But even those “successes” are far from what we hoped.

No one can be perfect. But everyone can try harder. We must act on the information that we are so privileged to have. If this means tutoring children to fill in the gaps in the education system, then that is what we must do. If it means working in a food bank to ensure that everyone has something healthy to eat, then that is what we must do. If it means organizing ourselves in order to profoundly and positively rearrange the system that perpetuates so many injustices, then that is what we must do. I know countless people who are doing each of these things and more. With them and my own experiences in mind I’ve come to believe that the problems in the world do not have to do with people’s compassion, but rather with the messages we see.

So long as the airwaves and the news feeds are filled with information on the hottest purse and shoe combo or the trendiest clubs, then this will be the norm by which we judge society. All of us who express our compassion through our actions will be outside of the status quo. We will be the exceptions. That is why we must work fervently to flood the mediasphere with the compassion that motivates us to try harder everyday. We must make that compassion the status quo. This is the change that is spoken of so ethereally by politicians and idealists alike. Practically, however, it will only ever come about if we use the resources that we have so that we, as individuals, one after another embody the change.

We must broadcast our compassion everyway that we know how. One post at a time. We’re all connected online and so we will all see what’s going on. We’ll all see the ways we can take part in getting medical care to communities off of the grid. We’ll all see the ways that we can help get kids into school, and to stay there too. If we want it to be, this message of compassion will be all that we see. We can make it the one and only message in our society. We can tell ourselves to take care of one another. The network through which to do this is right there every time we enter our email and password. What is holding us back from making the change now?

Students Stand United in Solidarity - Have the Courage that Others Have Not

2010-05-19T10:12:00.004-04:00

Yesterday in a sit-in at John McCain’s Arizona office four student organizers in support of the Dream Act legislation that would facilitate undocumented students continuing their education were detained and three of them are now in custody of ICE. Expectations are that they will be deported. I’ve supported the Dream Act legislation for a while. I’ve written about it before for the site digiactive.org. I’ve organized several dozen of my peers to sign a petition for the legislation. And yesterday I supported it financially by donating to a fund to help with the legal fees associated with stopping the deportation of these students and getting them back in school.

In a fury of tweets and Facebook posts news of the students’ arrest spread like wildfire through the social medias, at least so it appeared to me in the moment. But I fear that the reality is quite different. The DreamActivist students have developed quite a large following with communities already predisposed to their cause—the immigrant community. Yet, in my news addiction I didn’t see one mainstream English speaking media outlet cover the story. I could have missed it, but the point is still the same. These students are voiceless in the larger picture of national politics.

After I tweeted my support for the DreamAct and fair immigration policies all day long, the DreamAct twitter account hit me up with a direct message asking what my interest in immigration reform is. I replied,

-Immigration is at the very heart of both the movement toward individual human rights and the global struggle for fairness .

-The grassroots DreamAct campaign is a model of democracy. A voice that needs to be heard. No human forgotten. Act on our dreams. Peace

I’d like to elaborate on this. The reason I care deeply about immigration is that it embodies the very essence of what is wrong in the world. Unfair immigration policies are inherently unequal and thus inhuman. Everyone has the same rights to civil liberties and basic social services. Some current policies make it illegal for hospitals and doctors to treat undocumented immigrants. The fact that anyone could ever even consider instituting such laws means that they must not understand that a human being is a human being and despite our difference we are all equal. That is the belief upon which this country was founded. No where does it stipulate that equality is only for citizens and people with papers proving they’re “legal.” Even felons in the prison system have rights to health care. So as it stands the current immigration system is in violation of everything this country supposedly represents. The politicians who don’t have the guts to do something about that are just as bad as the new law in Arizona. Their excuses can no longer be tolerated. These feelings are echoed through the bullhorns at the marches and the twitter pages all day long.

Yet, while this message has been preached among the choir of the immigration reform community, I wondered if it’s really being heard by the people who matter in terms of policy making. Perhaps calling on the most sacred documents of this country is too big of a reference for these little minded politicians to wrap their heads around. Perhaps we need to bring the argument for immigration reform down to an individual level. At the individual level the terror of certain immigration policies becomes all the more real. The heavy weight of uncertainty is almost tangible. The feeling of betrayal is overpowering. The equality that we all believe in is just nowhere to be found. An immigrant who knows this knows that she is below equal in the eyes of some people and yet there is nothing she can do about it. No vote that she can cast or speech that she can make. Appearing in public, she risks arrest and deportation. And so she goes on living in the shadows while certain politicians do what exactly to right this wrong?...

But not anymore. Arizona has once again screwed over its own policies. Arresting those four students will add fuel to an already raging fire. Pretty soon Arizona will be all burnt up. The explosion of support around the Dream Act has the potential to change the world. If students stand united in solidarity for the basic human right to learning and dignity then we can force change at the policy level and we can be the change on the individual level. Students have social media networks. We are individuals connected. United in this manner we are more powerful than any major news network or any ignorant and cowardly politician.

We must take a stand. We must act now to keep this country true to its principles. This is how democracy works. Unite.

To sign the petition for the Dream Act or to donate money in support of legal fees to free Mohammad Abdollahi, Lizbeth Mateo and Yahaira Carrillo, detained by immigration officials while exercising the must fundamental principle of our democracy, please visit www.dreamactivist.org. Support isn't something that happens on its own. We have to show it.

The Student Empowerment Coalition

2010-05-17T22:30:00.003-04:00

In launching the campaign Tuition for Peace, a movement for a tuition assistance program in exchange for commitment to community service—much like the ROTC pays for college in exchange for a commitment to service in the armed forces—my fellow student organizers and I have created a new organization: The Student Empowerment Coalition. Our mission is to bring together students from everywhere in a united stand for fairness and peace. Yes, that’s a big goal. With the campaign Tuition for Peace we can reach it. We have an idea that will benefit everyone. We have a team that is passionate about change. We have a plan that is feasible. Getting The Student Empowerment Coalition up and running is a huge step in the right direction forward.

To find out how you can take part send us an email studentempowermentcoalition@gmail.com. The Coalition belongs to everyone. That means you. Together we can change the world.

Time Is on Our Side

2010-05-16T23:49:00.023-04:00

The past few weeks have been a busy whirlwind of school, fashion, and political activism. So I’m happy in other words.

The May Day Immigration March came and went. (As has been the case since I started going four years ago, its impact on our immigration policies is hard to decipher.) The Of Rags show at FIT got people talking about our “hot” clothes. My friends Jennifer, David and Stefany have been working with me on what we’re now calling Tuition for Peace. We’ve got a website up and running, though still rather elementary. My friend Joey’s senior project play, which I had the honor to help produce, was simply amazing. In fact, it’s going to be workshoped and produced professionally this summer by a theater group here in New York! Neha and I have been setting up The Of Rags Concept Party at Nuyorican Poets Café, a great venue in the Lower East Side. We’ve lined up two great music acts, Keeping Riley and special guest Genesis Be aka Lo-Key. I also managed to put together about 50 pages worth of well-received essays (although I’m still waiting on one grade, so maybe only 40 pages were well received) and to do much better than I expected on a difficult final exam. All told, these past few weeks have been as educational as they’ve been tiresome.

I’ve learned a lot about myself while juggling these diverse tasks. One thing I know is that time management is essential. Over these past few weeks for the first time since high school I mapped out pretty much every minute of my time on my phone’s calendar feature. I stuck closely to that map. When the alarm on my blackberry buzzed, I shifted gears into whatever I had originally prescribed myself to do. This practice seems to have worked so well that it now has me thinking about the economics of time. After all, time is our most valuable resource, and yet it is so frequently the resource we waste the most.

Basically my theory is that we should set goals, figure out what we need to do to reach those goals, and refuse to fall anywhere short of them. Once we’ve met those goals, then we can do whatever we want, however productive or unproductive that may be. I think this theory can be applied on a day-to-day basis for individuals, as well as a decade-to-decade basis for all global inhabitants. While individuals must be able to freely express themselves, it is the job of global leaders to ensure that individuals’ unique goals are cohesive with the goals that we have collectively set on a global level.

As it so happens, leaders have in fact set a series of Millennium Development Goals. These are:

-Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day.

-Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people.

-Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

-Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.

-Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015.

-Reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate.

-Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio.

-Achieve universal access to reproductive health.

-Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.

-Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it.

-Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

-Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources.

-Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss.

-Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

-By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.

-Address the special needs of least developed countries, landlocked countries and small island developing states.

-Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system.

-Deal comprehensively with developing countries’ debt.

-In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries.

-In cooperation with the private sector, make available benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications.

The research that I have done does not suggest that we will meet these goals. Statistics indicate that we may actually fall severely short of some of them. Why is this?

I blame poor time management skills. The change that our global leaders have targeted won’t come about until we as individuals set our priorities in place. Yet this won’t happen without keen leadership. Of course, this is easier said then done. Nevertheless I firmly believe that those at the helm of our society must steer us all toward our collective goals so that our individual goals and aspirations follow suit.

I’m tired of waiting for this to happen. I’m not at the helm of society, but I will throw all of my weight to bring us about to where the wind pushes us forward toward the peace, justice and fairness that we already should have achieved by the year 2010. Through Of Rags and Tuition for Peace we as the individuals who see our society veering off course can push us back to where we belong. We control our own destiny. Although I fear that I will be read as too clichéd and little realistic, I believe my words are true. Certainly the currents are moving quickly, pushing us downstream far from the destination that we set when we established the Millennium Development Goals. But if we move even faster we can put ourselves back on course. Such speed is only purchased in the currency of time.

One wasted minute from every individual adds up to millennia lost in just an hour. So think about if we managed our time better. We could change the world in a matter of seconds.

Peace

Salte a la calle!

2010-04-24T12:00:00.004-04:00

Here's the list for you to find when and where the march in your area is taking place and go to it: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/MayDay2010/lists.html. In NYC we're meeting at noon in Union Square. In DC the march begins at 2:00pm in Lafayette Park in front of the White House. Obama needs to know that we're not taking any more incomplete promises on this. We won't take any excuses. The water is boiling for immigration reform. We have to keep fueling the fire below. This is the moment to seize and make the dreams of a fair immigration system a reality!

Sustainable Fashion: The Of Rags Blog

2010-04-23T17:55:00.009-04:00

www.ofragstoriches.com is where Neha, RAAM and I will be blogging about our work with Of Rags. The Of Rags blog is a wordpress site. I discovered that Wordpress, another blogging service, is really much better than Blogger in terms of controls, seeing statistics of visits and compatibility with other platforms. Soon I may transfer this blog to there. But regardless of the platform and hosting service, I'm still going to keep this blog site up even while I work on Sustainable Fashion, the Of Rags blog. I'll share most of my posts from ofragstoriches.com on this blog as well, but just not the other way around.

For me this blog, The Parallel World, is still what it says in my profile-a place for me to share my experiences in the world and to develop ideas for a larger body of work that I am putting together. The Of Rags blog will be "a platform from which to keep you up to date on the work that we’re doing to save the world one community at a time through cool clothes. Sure, we’re somewhat overly ambitious, but why not dream big? In just six short months we’ve already done a lot of work toward our goal." ...there's more but I'll let you check out the site for the whole story www.ofragstoriches.com

Peace,

Immigration Regression

2010-04-23T17:29:00.005-04:00

I refuse to believe any argument that Arizona's new immigration law is not racist and fundamentally based on discriminatory racial profiling. The law, which requires local police officers to ask suspicious looking people about their immigration status and then act as immigration officials depending as to the response, is simply outrageous. That said, laws of this nature on the state level are to be expected if immigration is not reformed federally.

I just heard Katherine Vargas of the National Immigration Forum say on Telemundo that immigration is a national issue and must be treated as such. I couldn't agree more. I've posted info all over my Facebook including the group Students for Immigration Reform Now that I started in an effort to inspire action and support for federal immigration reform. The leading resources on this is www.dreamactivist.org. Check it out and put your name on the petition if you haven't already.

The positive way of looking at the immigration situation is that this law in Arizona may trigger action nationally. Now that Governor Jan Brewer sign the bill, the pressure is on for DC to overturn what is bound to be an unconstitutional law in Arizona and to assure that no other state adopts or enforces anything of the same nature. In other words, with such an outrageous bill in place, the pressure is now there to get national comprehensive immigration reform passed or to at a minimum establish federal guidelines as to state procedures. This type of pressure cooking is exactly what inspires change according to author and activist John Ross whose talk I attended yesterday at the King Juan Carlos Center at NYU. Who cares about autonomy when human rights are at stake. We have to act now. Otherwise the pressure of human rights abuses and institutionalized racism is heating up to explode in our faces.

the color of the earth

2010-04-22T21:49:00.004-04:00

John Ross--political activist, poet, journalist, global citizen for peace--"the people the color of the earth will not be walked on."

2/3rds Minus Taxes

2010-04-21T16:55:00.006-04:00

So here’s the rest of the doorman strike story. (Part I) It didn’t happen. At the absolute last minute, as in the contract expired at midnight and I came home from the library at 1am (non even ¼ done with all of my work) and there were still security guards at my building for if the strike should go through, apparently concessions were made. But even an hour after the contract was up no one on the ground knew what was going down.

This morning when I walked down stairs and saw that Nassar, the morning doorman, was there, I shouted “yes!” I shook Nassar’s hand in congratulations for his not having to go on strike because I know that all the doormen were worried about losing months of wages. He was noticeably relieved.

This afternoon I had the chance to do a little investigating with Herman, my friend from Ecuador who works the afternoon-evening shift. The doormen will receive a 15 dollar a week raise out of which $5 will go to union fees. So at the end of it all they didn’t even get a one-way subway ticket per day out of the whole debate. By 2013 the raise will go up to 22 dollars a week, but we have to assume that the cost of living will increase too. I’ll let you do the math, but either way it’s not much. Nevertheless, as Herman quickly points out, he has a job, a little bit of a raise and he didn't have to strike for it. “Gracias a Dios por eso.”

The Hyphen

2010-04-21T15:37:00.000-04:00

Yesterday my class on philanthropy and social change skyped with Doris Buffet, Warren’s sister, who through her foundation The Sunshine Lady Foundation has given away over 100 million dollars including the $10,000 that my class got to give away. Ms. Buffet, who is in her eighties, still running strong and in the midst of co-writing an (auto)biography, said one thing in particular that struck a chord with me. She told us a story about how she recently went to a funeral of a neighbor of hers and that all that was said at the funeral was “she loved to shop.” The Sunshine Lady, as I suppose her foundation is named for her optimistic character, said that “if my tombstone says that, oh dear…There’s the date of birth and the date of death. Those things aren’t important. What matters is the hyphen in between.” As the Quakers say, let your life speak.

The Internets

2010-04-19T20:14:00.004-04:00

A Map of The World Wide Web

Today Facebook changed the fan page feature that organizations and companies like Of Rags use. As oppose to collecting fans, we now have people who “like” us. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’s too soon for me to tell if the change will have a positive or negative effect for our mission. Either way this change made unilaterally by Facebook without consulting its users, or at least the little fish like me, reminds me that Facebook as well as pretty much every other online interface save for wiki sites are corporations. Even though Facebook represents the largest public gathering in human history with some 500 million people present, it is not in fact a public good. Regardless of how it may be used, Facebook is a private company out to make money just as every private company aims to do.

I recently heard the founder of Twitter talk about how the new Silicon Valley is socially conscious. He said that his company as well as Facebook and even all that Google now has a hand in YouTube included really hope to facilitate global social change. I’m not at all skeptical of this. These technologies are among the greatest tools of democracy that the world has ever known. Yet the irony is that these interfaces themselves are not democratic. As private media companies in many ways they are no different than NBC, Viacom, or Time Warner. Nevertheless what makes Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Blogger (this site which is owned by Google and that was launched by the same person who founded Twitter) stand apart from TV or print media is that they are interfaces between users not at users. We control the content. These are pretty much the first communication technologies of this kind.

I hope that it stays that way. At heart I believe that it will. Nevertheless, every time Facebook makes a change to its format like it did today I can’t help but think about the concept of Net Neutrality. In this battle over internet service providers’ ability to regulate bandwidth available for certain websites and services we are losing quite literally. Just as courts ruled that corporations can get involved in electoral campaigns, a court has ruled in favor of Comcast Cable and against the FCC. For more on this http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/06/net-neutrality-us-court-r_n_526972.html

I wrote to my congressman to tell him that I’m very concerned with this ruling and that I believe legislation must be enacted to change it. I urge you to do the same. Keeping the internet in our hands, the hands of the consumers, the hands of the people, the hands of the masses, is the only way that our future can be crafted free from the ways of the past. For once in all of history we have the ability to communicate openly, freely and with anyone we choose. We must seize this opportunity and use this ability for our long term advantage in order to make our world the place that we all want it to be.

2010-04-17T11:55:00.001-04:00

The freshly painted shop in La Town, Accra.

Photo and paint by RAAM

"You're my luck."

2010-04-17T01:04:00.004-04:00

“We've got to work for Peace,

Peace ain't coming this way.

If we only work for Peace,

If everyone believed in Peace the way they say they do,

we'd have Peace.

The only thing wrong with Peace,

is that you can't make no money from it.”

-Gil Scott Heron

Not all that long ago, on my way back from a Gil Scott Heron CD release party on 57th st., I passed by someone asking...begging... for money. At that time I didn’t have any money on me at all. So I did what I normally do in such a situation and said “I’m sorry man, I don’t have anything on me, but good luck.” As I continued walking down Park Avenue I heard him say, “there’s no such thing as luck out here. You’re my luck.” These words caught me off guard. All of a sudden, I realized just how true they are.

Nothing changes unless we make it.

Since that day, every morning I make sure that I have change in my pockets or a granola bar in my bag. I hope to do my small part in changing a person’s luck for the better. And I hope that what I do during the rest of the day works toward peace in a way that "you can[] make [] money from it," so that one day we won't have to give things away to people on the street. Let us be good luck.

THAT'S THE POINT!

2010-04-15T18:33:00.005-04:00

Today I was told by a certain official that the policy of the US Government is to not incentivize volunteer work such as that done by members of the Peace Corps and therefore the Peace Corps will not support any movement to create a scholarship program for its volunteers because it would conflict with the policy of the US Government to not incentivize volunteer work. I responded as calmly as I could, "that is the point!" We aim to change US policy. We want to incentivize volunteer work. We want people to see volunteering for the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps as just as viable of an option to pay for college as joining the "all volunteer" armed forces. Until people do see it as just as viable of an option, there simply will not be the same incentive to give back and our policies and actions will reflect that.

So long as we have no incentive to give, we will only take. It's human nature. Nevertheless, I've experienced that by giving we can actually get such a greater reward in return. The feeling of doing good is infinitely more satisfying than any material gain ever could be. If more people can have this type of experience the world will quickly become a better place.

I was then told that the Peace Corps accepts only the volunteers who will commit to serving out of pure goodwill and not for financial incentive. To that I said that there are many students who want to volunteer out of goodwill, but the burden of paying for college makes the Peace Corps a financial impossibility. A certain official responded, "well, that's why they can do the ROTC and go into the Army."

At this point I was just dumbfounded.

-b

April 15th

2010-04-15T10:38:00.002-04:00

If government worked the way that it should people would look forward to today as a way to give back to society.

Collective? Action.

2010-04-14T23:43:00.013-04:00

The union workers in my building may go on strike. One of the doormen with whom I’ve become friends since I speak with him in Spanish about his family, restaurants, salsa dancing, and current events explained the situation to me. The potential strike is over higher wages. Even with the economic downturn, the cost of living in NYC has gone up and wages have not. Particularly for a job such as that of a doorman and building handymen it only seems fair that with rising rents there be rising wages.

While in theory this makes a lot of sense, my friend is afraid of what will happen if his Union goes on strike. He says that the last strike went on for four months and that all estimates are that this potential strike could last two months…all with out pay. During a strike the union workers only receive a $28 stipend per week to attend the union rallies. If the Union decides to strike, all workers must participate.

What’s up for negotiation is a pay increase of between 25 cents an hour to one dollar an hour. On the high end of the bargain this would only add up to about 100 dollars a month after taxes. That means that even with a pay increase it will take years to earn back the wages that are lost during the potential strike. This could be devastating for the families of union members. My friend says that he splits a $1500 rent with his sister for a three-room apartment. He then pays for food and his daughter’s college education at a nursing program. While the rent on my apartment would cover all those expenses, two months without pay could see families like his out on the street. Yet as my friend points out, his situation is much better than that of many of his colleagues for whom even a 25 cent raise is a much needed increase.

For more http://nyunews.com/#/news/2010/04/13/14doorman/

I should note that the complexities revealed in this story are particularly interesting to me in light of my post Trading with a Union of Nations on the African Union. My friend's explanation of the potential strike serves as a reminder that rare is the action, collective or not, that does not have conflicting consequences.

Optimism

2010-04-13T16:09:00.003-04:00

Negativity is a lack of creativity.

Organizing for the Long Haul

2010-04-13T15:57:00.002-04:00

I've been meeting and scheduling meetings with folks throughout the NYU community and beyond as I lay the ground work to move forward with the Peace Corps, Ameri Corps ROTC program. I've gotten a lot of great input that's helping to draw a clearer map of how we will reach our goal. While I'm confident that we could take a short cut to get there, one of the things I've learned in speaking with professors, mentors and my peers is that we need to make sure that our campaign is sustainable beyond what it will take to go from point a to point b. We want to go where only dreams have taken us before.

People are getting on board. When we take off we're going far.

Peace,
Branson

Going Green Involves Everyone

2010-04-12T15:36:00.006-04:00

A column I wrote for NYU's Washington Square News. http://ow.ly/1xeZ4

I support NYU's efforts to go green. An economy built on limited natural resources is not a sustainable model. Although innovation in green technology is key to global well-being, we have yet to come up with scalable sustainable solutions to our massive and increasing energy needs. That's where I see academic institutions, particularly ours, coming into play. I urge NYU to look at the model that my high school and middle school developed to involve the community in going green.

Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., was the first K-12 institution to receive LEED Platinum rating for one of its buildings. Sidwell renovated and expanded its existing middle school building to incorporate a wetland to recycle water from the kitchens and bathrooms for use in bathrooms and the cooling towers. The design also has a green roof, where students maintained a garden using collected rainwater. In addition, the building utilizes rooftop solar panels and other features to reduce energy consumption. The environmental benefits of the structure are easily viewable on computer displays placed at strategic locations throughout the building.

Initial critics of the project, including myself, were silenced by the building's unequivocal, multifaceted success. The middle school building uses 60 percent less energy and 90 percent less municipal water than before. Perhaps more importantly, the building project itself got the whole school community involved in fundraising efforts to continue renovating the entire campus for additional LEED certifications. Sidwell also incorporated academics in the green plan, as learning about the technology in the revamped middle school building is now part of the school-wide curriculum. In addition to the curriculum changes, having such an innovative building on campus creates a consciousness about environmental issues. It is a consciousness that continues to inspire action on both individual and institutional levels. This is the same consciousness that NYU needs to create if its efforts to go green are to truly be sustainable at school and beyond. To that end, e-mails reminding people to turn off lights and town hall meetings to voice opinions are simply not even close to being effective.

It's easy to ignore an e-mail or not be inspired by its content, but we cannot avoid going into a building. I understand that NYU must deal with an entirely different set of building codes and spatial limitations than my school in D.C. Nevertheless, buildings are without a doubt the most important piece to the puzzle. The Climate Action Plan cites that 96.5 percent of NYU's greenhouse emissions are related to heating, cooling and powering buildings. Yet the CAP also states NYU's retrofits and upgrades "are not perceived by building occupants or do not affect the actions of building users." I argue that this is the wrong approach.

The greening efforts must be apparent to every member of the NYU community, from the deans to the janitors, from the Ph.D. candidates to the freshmen. After all, for most of us, NYU is just a launching pad for the rest of our lives. As a research institution, NYU has the unique ability to spur us on to innovate sustainable practices while on campus and to send us out into the world with sustainability engrained in our very way of being. Just as Sidwell has garnered support for environmental stewardship throughout D.C., I believe that NYU's green campaign can have the same effect on an even larger scale here in New York, if not around the globe. While success depends on community involvement, the growing consequences of burning non-renewable natural resources mean that failure is simply not an option.

Empire State of Mind

2010-04-10T19:09:00.007-04:00

“Eight million stories out there and they're naked, city it's a pity half of y’all won’t make it, me I gotta plug a special and I got it made, If Jesus’s payin LeBron, I’m paying Dwayne Wade….

Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, There's nothing you can’t do, Now you're in New York. These streets will make you feel brand new, the lights will inspire you, Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York  Welcome to the bright light... 

Lights is blinding, girls need blinders so they can step out of bounds quick, the side lines is blind with casualties, who sip the lite casually, then gradually become worse, don’t bite the apple Eve, caught up in the in crowd, now you're in-style, and in the winter gets cold en vogue with your skin out, the city of sin is a pity on a whim. good girls gone bad, the city's filled with them, Mommy took a bus trip and now she got her bust out, everybody ride her, just like a bus route, Hail Mary to the city your a Virgin, and Jesus can’t save you life starts when the church ends, came here for school, graduated to the high life, ball players, rap stars, addicted to the limelight, MDMA got you feeling like a champion, the city never sleeps better slip you a Ambien.”

-Jay-Z and Alicia Keys

My apartment is 11 floors up from two subway stops right at the point where the west village turns into the east village. This means that there is a lot going on always. Now that the weather is finally reasonable I’ve been sleeping with my windows open. Not that with my windows closed it’s all that much quieter, but it does make a bit of a difference. From my bed I can hear the cars, the trucks, the work crews, the shouts, the cheers and the general drunken rowdiness down below more clearly now. These sounds are inevitable in the city and they fascinate me.

I’ve been living in New York accumulatively for over a year now. Just as Jay-Z says, the lights can be blinding. You can easily get lost in the nonsense and the craziness. But this city wasn’t built on that. Jay-Z did not become a hip-hop, fashion and business mogul by fooling around. He worked hard. That’s what this city is built on—what any great city is built on—hard work. It’s easy to forget as an NYU student or YUPPIE frequenting the LES hot spots. My travels continuously remind me though. Every time I leave the City, even if it’s just to go to DC a few hundred miles away, when I come back I see it with fresh eyes. I see the people working behind the scenes fighting for their scrap of the pile.

Sure there are plenty of ways to just give into the temptations and float by still somewhat successfully. I’m in a great position to do that if it were what I wanted to do. But empires aren’t built on floating by with the masses in mediocrity. Just ask Jay-Z.

If we all try a little harder and do so with the compassion that we all feel when we see a starving child we can actually make this world work. There are kids starving right here in the Empire State. It’s my theory that we can feed them all if we are just 10% less selfish.

Tonight I’m having a reunion get together with some friends I made in Florence. It will be the last time I spend money on a party of any sort that does not lead to a larger benefit for those who need it the most.

I’m not asking for anyone to do the same thing. I just hope that we learn from history (think Spanish Decadence). We must understand how we got to be where we are. It is our responsibility to usher in a sustainable future with as much hard work as that with which our ancestors built this Empire. To those whom much is given, much is expected in return.

Peace,

Branson

The Circle Game

2010-04-06T20:50:00.013-04:00

Today, Neha and I mailed off the information required by the Youth Venture organization so that Of Rags can receive the thousand dollars we won. Although taking home the grand prize of $10,000 would have been ten times better, this is still pretty cool. $1,000 is pretty much nothing in the scheme of things, but I'll make it go a long way, especially since I count with the support of the Reynolds Scholars program.

The organization that won is called Cycles. It's a food delivery service that aims to deliver groceries from Union Square and other farmers markets on bike. Congratulations to Michelle Dugan and Ashley Seiver, the founders of Cycles, and to all of the other Ashoka's Youth Venture seed grant recipients!

Admittedly their business model involves a lot less risk than mine. After all, they're not launching a business in Africa. As was pointed out at the African Economic Forum over and over again, the entire continent of Africa is considered risky business by investors. So I can certainly understand why a grant making organization would not decide to give $10,000 to a team led by a 21 year-old starting a fashion company in a bad economy out of Ghana, West Africa. That said, my mission is to prove them wrong. (Although I'm sure that Cycles will be a great success as well!)

By showing that Africa is worth the risk, we will in fact make Africa, or at least certain African nations as a start, a well rated area for investment. We're turning a straight line into a circle. The only way to do that is to jump in head first. Even with great uncertainty, we cannot hesitate. So now if you play a role in this experiment by buying Of Rags clothing in order to wear the difference, I will do nothing short of my best to prove to the world why Africa, the continent that western history books have betrayed for centuries, is worthy not only of our money but also of our future. Let us invest our time, our minds, and our hearts into a way of life, a brand, a future--Of Rags: Sustainable Fashion. Together we can make the world go round.

------------------------

The greatest lesson I've ever learned is that if you've tried something repeatedly and it doesn't work, then whatever you do, just do something different. The only certain thing is that doing the same thing again is bound to fail. Thank you Ben Guanciale for that lesson. It was learned hard, but learned well.

I find it somewhat ironic that what I learned on horseback I'm now applying to economic theory and a business model for sustainable development. It's funny how what goes around comes around.

I'm going to explore a little more of William Easterly's thoughts on this whole issue. He's an NYU prof after all. There's a trend developing here.

www.ofrags.com

peace,

branson

Trading with a Union of Nations

2010-04-05T17:34:00.008-04:00

Yesterday after a long bus ride on I-95 from DC to New York, I wanted to stretch my legs. I walked up to Stuyvesant Park on 15^th and 2^nd ave with the book Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher, a Rhodes Scholar Economist of note. As I sat in my favorite park surrounded by blossoming trees, chirping birds and frolicking squirrels happy for the arrival of a beautiful spring, I read about the overdevelopment of the eastern seaboard. With this setting my mind soon began to wander, as it frequently does, back to Africa.

I couldn’t help but apply what I’ve been learning in class with Professor Alistair Smith to the issue raised by Schumacher of inspiring principled action around local economic development. Professor Smith is one of the authors of a not so groundbreaking, yet, highly relevant theory on foreign aid and policy concessions. What Smith has made clear in class is that many, if not all, problems with development, politics and the economy stem back to issue of collective action.

And so with Schumacher’s consideration of small being better, in large part because it is easier to organize and stick to individuals’ principles when fewer agents are involved, paired with what I’ve taken away from Smith’s class (I should add that he co-teaches with Professor Kate Baldwin) and with what I myself have experienced framing these two theories, I wrote down some thoughts of my own. I believe that for millennium development goals to have a chance of being met any time this century the African Union must serve in effect as labor union. As Smith lays out in his theory, the underprivileged--generally the masses--struggle to organize themselves, while the elite--generally the few--can easily coordinate. This means that even though the elite are far fewer in number, they yield a much greater power when negotiating. Although their money and resources aren’t detrimental to the political success of the Elite, it’s simply a matter of political organizing on a smaller scale and thus in a more efficient way. Nowhere is this more evident than in Africa.

The solution to this sits in the hands of elected officials and their ambassadors to the African Union who claim to be working on behalf of the most underprivileged and underrepresented masses. If these officials and diplomats are serious about their jobs, they must pass universal labor laws as well as laws regulating foreign investment with the goal of benefiting Africans.

Another way of looking at it is that the way we have pretty effectively stopped large scale exploitation in the US is by unionization. These Unions give voice to the otherwise underrepresented mass of workers facing off against the well-organized management and company executives. Unionizing Africa's work force would be nearly impossible. In fact, it's not even so much the work force that's being exploited, but the political situation of states themselves. In fact there is very little African work force as a result of the exploitation. And this is exactly the issue. Far too often the capital investment that foreign firms and governments from around the world put into the Africa Continent is not used to employ Africans.

Why do these labor laws and regulations for investment need to be the same across the African Continent? 1) Individual African countries do not have the international political clout to uphold the laws by themselves or even to get them passed in the first place. I could go into great detail on this, but essentially it boils down to corruption at the highest level is harder to cover up and that by working together African nation’s will be able to take a stronger stance against the forces that will try to topple such legislation. And 2) Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We must ensure that no country is left defenseless to preying exploitation of its resources both earthly and human.

Really, this should be the mission of the WTO and the UN, but the battle may be too big to fight there, at least for a while. This is particularly so because at the UN and WTO African leaders would be facing direct opposition from the institutions who have the most to loose by ending the exploitation of Africa. So if African leaders, who only stand to gain in the long term, despite whatever under the table deals they might lose immediately, come together in the Union they have already formed they will have no opposition as they're all on the same side and at such a high profile anyone who contests the policies would be seen as betraying the African people and thus commit political suicide.

These laws don't need to be extreme. They don't need to look to chase out capital. They just need to establish a baseline of fairness. This has to happen for Africa ever to be taken seriously and to be seen not as a charity case, but as an economic player with opportunity for profitable investments beneficial to all parties.

I hope that this happens before any more serious investments are made, so that when the money comes, it comes to stay in Africa and not just to turn a profit back on Wall Street.

Of course, then the laws have to be enforced… That’s another story.

Employing Sustainable Growth

2010-04-05T10:56:00.007-04:00

My Comment on "Unemployment: White House Says Things Are Getting Better--Just Not Very Quickly" by Ryan McCarthy at The Huffington Post.

I want to know what is being done to create the five million jobs in green industries that we were promised? I realize that this may take time, but, for two reasons, I believe that it is vital to the sustainable future of our world.

1) We cannot keep look to the same old industries to create the jobs that we need. The global economy has shifted significantly since the last major economic downturn. This shift is in fact a large part of what has led to high unemployment in the US to begin with. So our domestic industries must catch up with the times. One of the areas where there is the greatest potential to do this is by going green.

2) There is a natural cap placed on the money to be made from irreplaceable natural resources, because they are irreplaceable. Thus the only sustainable industries are those which do not rely on irreplaceable natural resources, but instead on innovation--no matter how big or small the capital cost, no matter if it is scientific innovation or just clever ways to deliver social services to folks while still making a profit. These are the industries we must invest in. Certainly Government subsidies would help, but what about all that private capital out there? I've put mine into a sustainable company, but I'm just a little guy. Who is holding the major firms accountable for creating sustainable growth?

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Divergent Equality

2010-04-05T01:23:00.006-04:00

I wonder what would happen if we replaced the word "diversity" with the term "social justice"? We will never progress until we see beyond our differences to the humanity that we all share.

We can take pride in who we are, from where we came and to where we are going. We can tell our stories so that we better understand. Yet if we're ultimately fighting for equal rights, then these differences don't matter. It is what we have in common that in fact makes us all equal. And this equality is what guarantees us the right to have our differences.

Idiots Piss Me Off

2010-04-04T10:10:00.004-04:00

Democracy only works because we make it.

Many people joke about the disability of Congress to get anything done, yet few people do anything about it. Certainly there are some high profile campaigns out there and even lots of small community organizations doing brilliant work. I don't mean to discredit the great work of those organizations and campaigns, but the fact of the matter is that we're not doing enough. You and Me. The average citizen.

A glance at the international news and it's clear to me that the US, the pioneer of modern democracy, is now lagging behind in terms of citizen participation. For Congress to act on an issue we must make it worth their while. We have to remind the 535 people sitting atop the Hill that they work for us. We tell them what to do. We can't be told by anyone else what to think. Leaving our politics to play out on MSNBC or any other network, left, right or center, defies the very definition of politics. All those who do so are in fact the very definition of an idiot.

Certainly hearing the opinion of a so-called expert is valuable. Someone with an academic or professional background in a certain field will undoubtedly be able to offer insight into the intricacies and nuances of an issue that would otherwise escape the untrained eye. Or so we hope. Yet the reality is that many so-called experts paraded around on TV shows serve only to polarize issues one way or the other. In fact many so-called experts, talking heads and other folks caught up in the punditry that governs our land glaze over the nuances that make issues such as immigration reform, national security and the never ending health care debate strike a note on a personal level with the individual citizen.

Understanding how an issue affects individuals and then making a decision based on that understanding is the definition of politics. Such an understanding will only be achieved if individuals voice their feelings on an issue in such mass that collectively their voices are even louder than those of the so called experts broadcast at nearly every wavelength and frequency. The true experts are those who can sort through the multitude of opinions to present the best position based on how individuals are affected.

I don't claim to be an expert of any kind. I do, however, offer my voice on issues that affect me. In the case of this and other posts, I'm offering my opinion on politics in general, an all-encompassing issue. I feel deeply that citizens around the world must seize the power of the Internet, or whatever means they can, to ensure that their voice is heard and their opinions measured and balanced. I believe that this is what our political system relies on. I believe that if we all play our part democracy can work to ensure social and economic justice. I realize that I may sound insanely naïve. I'm not. I've taken the classes and grown up very much within the system. I understand that profound change takes time. Justice won't be had for many generations to come, but that doesn't mean that we can't work for it now and in every moment. This is the optimism and hope for which our current president was elected. We must not lose it. We have to do our part.

To that end, one of the ways that I'm going about doing my part is by commenting on articles and stories published on mainstream media websites. They give us the comment box for a reason. This is what the Internet is for. It's a small thing in the scheme of things, but I refuse to be an idiot. It's idiocy that perpetuates injustice.

The thing I most remember from all of the workshops on diversity that I attended and eventually organized throughout middle and high school is what one of my peers said in response to a particularly provocative Black History Show. “Injustice is like the moving walkway at the airport. Even if you just stand passively in one place, you’re still moving with it.” Those who can take action, no matter how small, must take it. Those who have a voice, no matter how small, must raise it. Only this way will we ensure that one day every voice is heard.

Speak up.

P.S. Never did Jesus follow a bunny looking for eggs.

Words Beats Life

2010-04-03T23:35:00.005-04:00

At the “If I Ruled the Blogosphere” forum, the message was clear. The power of the internet is that we can create our own trends by posting our own content and looking at what we choose to look at, not just what the magazines and TV tell us to look at. Magazines and TV programs struggle to keep up with the blogs and social media because there is so much content online that a trend must be hugely popular if it is to make it mainstream.

The panel, made up of leading personalities from the hip-hop blogger, producer and video artist community in DC, New York and LA, emphasized the importance of self-curation when artists submit there music to popular blogs for review. Meka, of 2 Dope Boys, and Jason Reynolds, of Ok Player, reiterated the fact that an artist’s two best songs are much more valuable for a reviewer to hear than all 15 songs on an album that actually detract attention from the two best songs and often lead to the reviewer just throwing out the submission all together.

I believe the same theory can be applied to social causes on online media. The power of the internet is that we can create our own trends by posting our own content and looking at what we choose to look at, not just what the magazines and TV tell us to look at. Yet while several hundred thousand people may choose to watch a video on Youtube, Magazines and TVs struggle to keep up with the blogs and social media because there is so much content online that a trend must be hugely popular if it is to make it mainstream. Millions of people have to visit a site over an extended period of time if an online trend is to go from fast fashion to permanent fixture, a phenomenon that only really occurs with mainstream media coverage. This takes a concerted effort backed by skill, brains, creativity and luck. To put this effort together we must first do some self-curating in order to pick the right battles.

So among other things, what I gleaned from the well attended panel discussion sponsored by the community hip-hop organization Words Beats & Life inc. (www.wblinc.org) is that we must unite our voice as average citizens in order to tell mainstream media what to tell congress and what to tell us in return. It's not democracy any other way.

The 10 Percent Factor

2010-04-02T19:50:00.013-04:00

Over the last several months I've been to quite a number of conferences and presentations on development of one sort or another--most notably: CLEAN Water for Life: Improving water quality, rights, and access worldwide at NYU's Law Center, The 2010 African Economic Forum at Columbia University SIPA and School of Law, and last night's conversation with Dr. Abraham George of The George Foundation on The Business of Poverty Alleviation: Lessons Learnt in Rural India sponsored by the NYU Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship, a program of which I am very honored to be a part.

From these and other conferences and talks I have taken away a few key points pronounced consistently by academics and professionals alike. The overarching themes of these forums have echoed my thoughts that I've expressed previously on this blog and that I'm working to develop more thoroughly in my academic papers, and put into action through my work with Of Rags and my efforts organizing communities.

These are:

+Development must move toward market based approaches.

+Nevertheless, there is a great need for immediately effecitve aid programs particularly in the field of clean water, which encompasses just about every Millenium Development Goal.

+These needs would be met immediately if the global economy put as much money into clean water as it did into bailing out the banks.

+This would make great strides in securing peace and ending the war on terrorism.

+Believing this shift of money will come about by itself is overly idealistic, optimistic and naïve.

+It will take a concerted effort on the part of global leaders to encourage average citizens to change both their spending habits and life aspirations.

+The most effective and sustainable way of doing this is in both the media and education.

+If small groups of the most underprivileged can receive a quality education that develops their capacities to think for themselves and lead their communities, many of them will be bound for success in the market place.

+This will help to shift the economic playing field, but more importantly media coverage of these successes will awaken a global consciousness that even the most underprivileged are capable of success in the glabal market place.

(Ok this is a good place to stop reading if you just want the key points and not the details. I won't hold it against you. I realize that I struggle to contain my passion.)

This consciousness is what will change the world. When I refer to consciousness I don’t mean just seeing what’s wrong and what’s right. I mean understanding the situation and one’s own role in it all. Such an understanding doesn’t have to be profound, it just needs to be enough to inspire action. (The shift to Compact Fluorescent Lights is a great example of this consciousness in action.) This understanding of the individual’s role in achieving justice for all is the essence of what Gandhi hoped to teach through non-violence. As I learned in a talk that I went to by Uday Singh Mehta, Gandhi believed that individual consciousness would inspire individual action. This is conscious citizenship and I believe that the instances of great social change that we have seen throughout human history are evidence that such consciousness is effective. Yet as things stand today it’s hard to say that conscious citizenship has spread widely.In fact, I fear that what we so often define as globalization may result in just the opposite.

Yet, the thing is that to understand the injustices plaguing humanity one does not need to walk further than out the door of one's apartment. No society is free from economic slavery. Just look at the service workers in an apartment building sorting through trash, or in the instance of my building stripping paint with toxic chemicals for minimum wage in one of the most expensive cities on the planet; suffering brain cell killing conditions and discrimination from racist tenants all to support their families back home, wherever that may be. And those are relatively good conditions in one of the nicest apartment buildings in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the world. But the one minute that a tenant may spend in the elevator with one of the construction workers is immensely overpowered by the nonstop onslaught of good-looking people telling us to buy stuff and spend our money killing our brain cells with alcohol at parties on the weekend or for many people on tuesday night...why not?!?

I'll tell you why not. The people with the money and the power to make a difference are held captive by ignorant self obsession. If the impoverished are to ever break out of the poverty trap, the well-off and those who want to be must break out of our self-imposed captivity of instant pleasure and think about long term satisfaction. Every $10 shot at the bar is 100 children not fed.

Now I'm not perfect by any means. I don't think that we have to be perfect all the time, but we have to be 10 percent better all the time. 10 percent will go a long way. For instance, the US spends approximately 550 billion dollars a year on our military and approximately 25 billion dollar a year on foreign aid. Directing just 10 percent of the military budget into foreign aid would more than triple the current US commitment to foreign aid and double the total global commitment. This increase in spending on aid will have an even more profound effect by fueling new industries in social services. As we educate the underprivileged, opening the doors to boundless opportunities, the most opportunistic field must be that of doing good.

The social entrepreneurship program that I am now proudly a part of advocates just this. Where there is desperation, there is opportunity. By innovating ways to ethically make a profit on such opportunities, we will steer the global economy back on track. We will make doing good a major industry. For the world to be sustainable, taking care of each other must become a pillar of the global economy.

A large element of the equation is the "ethically" making a profit part. This could not have been clearer at the conferences. The responsibility is that of both the capitalists and the governments. For the necessary physical infrastructure to develop in order to spur on the economic development that I'm talking about, the legal infrastructure must be there first. An improved legal infrastructure may extend the timeline on which investors can expect returns on their investments. This is where education comes in. Holisitc education focusing not only on academic achievement, but on humanistic values as well. The education system must foster the individuals who will stand for a change in whatever field they choose to enter, be it government, money management, science and technology, media, social service. In everything we do we must meassure our personal reqard by how much we have benefited people without the same opportunities we've been so fortunate to have. Large social benefit will equate to large profits.

While changing the global approach to education in low-income communities may seem like a battle too huge to fight, as Dr. George, an innovator in education, reminded me last night, change only takes a few people doing the right thing. "Publicize it, publicize it, publicize it and the rest will follow," he said.

Dr. George has developed an amazing school in India educating tomorrow leaders and social innovators. I urge you to check out The George Foundation and the Shanti Bhavan school and to get involved however you can. (http://www.tgfworld.org/home.html)

My hope is that within the next twenty years the global consciousness will become attuned to the individual’s responsibility to look after our fellow human beings. The fastest way to do this is by establishing what would be in effect an ROTC program for students who commit to serving in the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. It will direct more money into aid both at home and abroad and it will create the consciousness that is so urgently necessary. As I can attest, experiential education is by far the most profound way to learn about the world and about oneself. More US young people becoming conscious citizens will in the long run ensure the security of our nation and thus prove to be the most effective means of stomping out terrorism. You can't fight fire with fire.

In short social justice cannot occur without economic justice. This is not the same thing as economic equality. It's just ten percent more fair.

Peace,

Branson

2010-03-25T02:20:00.001-04:00

See there we go, already back up and running.

Ok sleep. But first join to become a Student for Change (you don't have to be a student) http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=106233982738492

5 x Conspiracy

2010-03-25T02:01:00.005-04:00

Why did facebook shutdown Students for Change?!?

I don’t know.

I’m not one for conspiracy theories. Really I think they rarely reflect the truth. Yet after reading the formerly top secret CIA documents regarding the 1954 staged coup of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbénz I definitely see how conspiracy theorists take themselves so seriously. The documents, the link to which I’ve attached here (http://www.foia.cia.gov/browse_docs.asp?doc_no=0000928348&no_pages=0238&showPage=0001) and I strongly urge you to at least glance at, prove that the US planned and supported the overthrow of Arbénz from the ground up because he had implemented a successful yet moderate agrarian reform policy and was beginning to implement similar reforms in the education and financial system of the small Central American banana republic. The US didn’t like this for several reasons. One, the agrarian reform took away sizable uncultivated land holdings from the US based United Fruit Company (now Chiquita). (If I could add a footnote to a blog I would note that the fruit company was reimbursed for the expropriation in 20-25 year bonds based on the claimed tax value of the land which was intentionally underestimated by UFC to avoid paying taxes to the Guatemalan government. They shot themselves in the foot to the tune of $19 million on that one. Ironic no?) Two, the US government and business interest feared that the success of Arbez might lead other neighboring leaders to try the same agrarian reform and thus eat in to United Fruit and Co’s land holding even more. And three, that big red flag.

The details of the propaganda and mythical military campaign launched by the US via Honduran mercenaries are overwhelming. For fear of saying more, just look at a page or two of the document, particularly pages 205-229.

And that’s not the last of it. Among others, the Pinochet files give the same details about the coup in Chile, and as soon as the FOIA catches up with the rest of our CIA meanderings I’m sure we'll see some pretty interesting things come to light.

Now I’m not saying the CIA shut down my facebook group, although I don’t entirely rule it out as a possibility. Most likely though it is a technical glitch (although one I've never seen before). Nevertheless I’d like to lay out my plans in the open to dare anyone to take me on.

In three days I’ve gotten 50 people on SFC (if we still exist, thanks facebook). Not bad. Certainly no 1,000,000 people for gay rights campaign, but it’s a start and I’m just one person. But now that I have fifty people on board my goal is to get 500 people by the end of March. …or so. We’ll have to see of course, but if we can get five hundred then I’ll give us two weeks to get 5,000 and then a month to get 50,000 and then two months to get 500,000. How will that work? Easy, basically each person has to get 10 people. This won’t actually happen, but if 1 in five people can get 50 people as I’ve done then the numbers work out the same. So anything in between and we’re on target. The way social networking works that’s pretty easy. The most difficult thing to do is simply send an invite to your friends. Difficult only because you don’t want to feel like one of those annoying people who sends invites to things. Well what’s the point of facebook if you don’t use it? Or alternatively you can just post the link to the group in your status a few times along with a little message encouraging people to join and why. If we want the world to change that’s a pretty damn easy way to make it. And if we can get 500,000 people showing their support for something Obama has already said he wants to see passed then congress will have to start paying attention. Once that happens it will get in the news and our viral campaign will go mainstream. With major media coverage it will hit the five million mark and the bill will get passed.

So that’s what this is about multiples of five from fifty to five million in five months. Here we go. Are you with me?

Linking the Future with Now

2010-03-20T16:22:00.002-04:00

This week has been a crash course in 2010. As I’ve spent several days focused on growing Of Rags’ online presence I’ve quickly learned the in and outs of twitter (www.twitter.com/ofrags) and I’m reading up on some of the more technical matters of online networking. This experience has opened my eyes to the incredible depth of technology in our day and age. I’ve begun to see what the increasingly connected world could look like in just a few years. We will have accounts on two or three networking sites if not all of them. Much of the content will in some way be linked back to one central website and or Google. We’ll have pages that sort through feeds that sort through tags that sort though posts. In so many ways this isn’t much different from the way things work now, except that in two years the connected community will have grown significantly. Much of that growth will be wired increasingly mobilely. In other words smart phone technology and low priced laptops will change the world. Regardless of the platform or site name in every corner of the world where people have access to the technology, they will have access to its power.

This power, like nearly any, can be used for good or for bad. For starters it’s so much easier to communicate partying now. I often wonder if that’s all facebook has come to be used for. There are so many causes and event invites that the worthy ones often get lost in the heap of crap. The internet has made trends fast and easy. Every time I logon to facebook I can’t help but think that online social media has a severe case of ADHD. One minute this is popular the next minute that—all because someone on a blog somewhere says it’s so. Yet for all of the extra extravagance that has arisen out of online social networking, so too has an enormous potential for influencing positive change.

I believe that in 2010 that is still what it is—potential, and it’s yet to be reached.

There are two things that need to happen to utilize online social media to its full potential. First there needs to be a more concerted effort to bring causes together under one roof. The internet gives power to those who know how to use it, but it also fragments our attention so much that each individual cause may in fact be detracting from the larger overarching goal of social justice. So as I see it we must remind people with different interests that those are in fact mutual. If advocates from the health care reform movement, the green movement, the immigrants rights movements, the anti-war movement, the gay and lesbian movement etc. were to come together in the same place I think they’d see that by working a one they have even more power at their finger tips than individually they could have ever imagined. As soon as all of the minority fragments working toward effectively the same goal are brought together they will become the majority and their collective goal will become much more obtainable. This has begun to happen yet where unity appears in name, rarely is there an obtainable goal for a unified movement for social justice. So that’s the second thing that needs to happen—setting an obtainable goal to demonstrate the unified and unifying power of social good played out online.

This takes actual leadership and strategic long term planning—something that seems somewhat lacking from the social media’s short attention span. But let’s not forget how our president got to be where he is applying the theory of community organizing to the tools of social networking. Let’ not forget all of the change that came about before communication with anyone anywhere was instantaneous. The internet hadn’t been invented when Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of freedom and equality. It can be done if we want it and work for it.

That’s the question though: do we want it enough to work harder for good than for the easy fix that we get with our short term party plans and gossip? The scary thing is that even with all of the passion I feel for making our world a better place, every time I look at my news feed I’m not sure what the answer is. I’m not sure that enough people understand just how important this is. I see the voices like mine struggling to gain the same traction as videos of people talking about diet pespi and french fries. And even if the message can be communicated can it be acted on?

This becomes the biggest challenge for social networkers of any type. It’s relatively easy to find an audience for a video, to get people to join a group or fan page, even to get people to rsvp to events. Yet will these clicks of the mouse online lead to legislative change where it counts? I think so. I think that if causes are strategically united and exponentially more support garnered with group membership and fan page support than the actual yield expected than serious change can come about. In other words we have to set the bar higher. To get thousand of people to show up in person we need to have millions of people show up online. Millions of people have been connected before. One example of this is the movement against las FARC organized by students in Colombia that connected millions of people worldwide and that achieved a fairly high yield at marches in cities all over the globe. Did concrete change come from these demonstrations against las FARC? The short answer is no. I believe that’s because the goals were simply unrealistic. Las FARC are a terrorist group, despite what certain Andean politicians may claim. As such they have pretty much no reason to listen to popular demands. Which leads me back to where I started—concerted organizing around clear and obtainable goals.

This is what I hope to do with the Facebook group Students for Change that I am initiating. Per my last post the group is calling for the same college tuition assistance programs for Peace Corp and Americorps that students who commit to military service are eligible to receive. This I believe is both obtainable and profoundly conducive to global progress toward socio-economic justice. Indeed it will pacifically fight the war on terrorism through cross-cultural understanding and increasing access to basic services, the lack of which cause violence and terrorism. I’ll happily take on anyone who argues that this is not an infinitely more sustainable approach to creating peace than missiles and bullets. And I understand completely that such a different policy both domestically and internationally will of course take enormous support to pass. It will require much more profound and mainstream initiatives than the proposed US Department of Peace has laid out in its quest to become a reality. Never have I gotten one invite to offer my support for it. Not one. And yet I get invites to offer my support to see people shave their hair if the group reaches 1,000,000 members. The proof is on the floor of the barbershop and in the blood that still runs in the streets. So come on world, get your act together.

The Game of Government--The Business of Peace

2010-03-15T16:34:00.003-04:00

The problem with government is that it dehumanizes the welfare states de-commodification of the individual. The way government runs we don’t see the people we are helping. Politics is a big part of this plague.

The political sphere is too often seen as a game. It’s played as though there were a do-over button and the winnings are measured only in dollars and numbers on a page—the faces ad the humanity is lost behind the TV screen. On the television networks we see the two parties bickering back and forth getting nothing done except taking lobbyist dollars. The inertia to move beyond the status quo is overwhelming and the ability for constituents to be heard as clearly as the special interest groups is next to non-existent. Token town hall meetings give politicians anecdotal soundbytes to use in their campaigns claiming connection with the common guy. Certainly not every politician begins this way, but the system is played as a game. To play the system one must play the game. But why?

Why are politics inherently corrupt? Does it have to be this way?

Politics work as a game because we have made them that way. There’s nothing written about playing Monopoly in the constitution nor in the morals and religiousity that nearly every successful politician claims to have. We have made our values more about self-fulfillment than about societal good and then we have cast any contrasting perspectives as those of terrorists, anarchists, socialist and communist dictators. When in fact they aren’t. Right and left may be easier to sell. They may be easier tools with which to manipulate policies and fuel a race to the status quo of doing nothing, but politics are not a black and white, either-or situation. We can strive toward fulfilling our individual desires so long as we also strive toward taking care of each other. This is laid out clearly in the work of theorists such as Harvard’s John Rawls and socio-economic scientists such as the European University Intitutes’s Gøsta Esping-Andersen.

Here’s one thing that would make a big difference. If corporations and politics are to be intertwined then why don’t we straighten out the relationship. Governments are supposed to regulate the markets to ensure that no one is left out. I believe the current health care debate is proof that the system as it stands now is flawed. What little regulation there is only comes after lobbyists have hacked all significant changes out of a bill to perpetuate the status quo that leaves the uninsured and the poorly insured still fighting to see a doctor and dreaming of having medicine.

Effectively what needs to happen is that there needs to be a shift away from big businesses controlling policy through lobbyists to big business controlling policy through corporate giving. For instance as opposed to flying senators around on private jets during the never ending campaign season fueled by corporate driven media, business pays for community centers, health care clinics and school facilities. Back in Washington Congress could then implement a mutually beneficial set of policies. It would still be a game, but a game based on principles of justice. Everyone would benefit.

What needs to happen between here and there? First corporations need to feel the pressure to start acting responsibly. This is where companies like mine, Of Rags, come into play. Prior to the digital age small players had a collective action problem that left them all worse off when faced with the well-coordinated handful of major corporations que cuenta con nearly infinite lobbying and marketing power. All of that is changing rapidly. The internet and all of its accompanying technologies opens the door for smaller more principled firms to organize and lobby both the policy makers and their constituents, the consumers, through low-to-no cost marketing, publicity and networking online.

We still haven’t figured out how to use all of the technologies to their full potential. When we do, so long as the major outlets online remain low-to-no cost, the playing field of consumerism and citizenship will have changed dramatically. With the united force of smaller more responsible firms as big of a player in the international economy as say GE, or better yet, Wal-Mart, the major corporations will have to adopt policies to make themselves competitive among increasingly conscious consumers.

This will lead to two interdependent phenomena. One, an increase in corporate giving and consumer consciousness will grow the non-profit sector. In fact the sector will grow so much that it will no longer be considered the non-profit sector so much as it will be just another integral part of the global economy. Ways to make money—perhaps not as much as selling airplanes, but certainly enough to live comfortably—will open up in the sector so that employees and investors will have opportunities to pursue capitalist driven aspirations while still doing good in the world. Two, this growing sector will encourage the minimization of military spending. Peace and security will be achieved through increased cross-cultural understanding as more focus is put on working with those in need as opposed to shooting at them. The hawks will be satisfied with the continued development of highly effective and efficient security technologies that will allow for military personnel to become community service personnel by leaving the dirty work up to technology. Of course the goal is to not need a military, but realistically that may be aiming too high at least for the next several hundred years.

So with all of those 850 some odd words of gibberish laid out, here’s my point… While fair trade cooperatives begin to make their mark, we need to work on policy changes conducive to the environment that we are trying to create. To realize profound change we must coordinate support across all sectors. This is the only way to be truly competitive in the global market place. We must move one step faster than anyone else because we have a steeper hill to climb and we have to get to the top first if our world is to be sustainable. To this end the United States Government has to support a greater cultural understanding of the world that it controls and it must fulfill a greater commitment to giving back.

I propose that Americorps and Peace Corps volunteers receive the same college tuition and federal loan assistance packages as members of the armed forces. Until this happens the US Government is fighting against itself in the war on terrorism.

Peace,

Branson

A Dress for All Occasions

2009-10-17T10:21:00.002-04:00

A collage of some photos that I took of one of the Of Rags dresses on model Julie Ghostlaw.

On My Conscious

2009-10-12T06:57:00.007-04:00

So it’s the start of fall break. I kicked off the break with a trip to neighboring Togo, which was certainly interesting to say the least. I got back yesterday evening after a much more expensive weekend than I had projected. Apparently Francophone countries in West Africa cost a lot to live in because their economies seem more pegged to the Euro, whereas the Ghana Cedi is tied more to the dollar. This means that everything in Togo is nearly double the price. But beyond the expense Togo seems to be an interesting place. It is a small country. The little bit that I saw of Lome suggested to me that there is a larger contemporary French influence than there is British influence today in Ghana. I also observed that Lome is a pretty impoverished place. A beautiful beach flanks one side of the capital and stretches all the way down the Togolese coast. Yet while in Lima for instance this beach is lined with million dollar homes, in Togo, all that is apparent is the wealth that once was.

But I’m back in Accra now after yet another beautiful bus ride spent looking out the window at the Ghanaian countryside. I came back to Solomon’s lodge, where NYU has me living, hoping to take a shower and clean off the layer of stale sweat that has made itself a semi-permanent presence on my body. But no luck. The water is out. This really isn’t a big deal. More than anything it is a reminder to us all that, despite the niceties that NYU provides us, we are in Ghana and the water does go out. But NYU being what it is has got a truck right outside of my window filling up the water tank at this very moment. Keeping up appearances I suppose.

While I lay here in a little smellier state than I’d like to be in, I realize that this trip this weekend and everything leading up to it has been truly mind-boggling. This fall break even though I am busy with my internship and Of Rags I still hope to perhaps subconsciously process my experience in Ghana so far.

I think taking a minute to sit back and think about what one experiences in a place is valuable. It is something that I’ve tried to do in the past. I felt successful at this goal when I spent a summer in Honduras. I kept a daily diary, I ran and I sat atop the more often than not empty community water tank looking out at the mountains every morning. There I just thought to myself about things. I haven’t done that as much here. I’ve processed my feelings quickly and turned them into energy to move Of Rags forward. But now that I may have a little extra time on my hands this week I hope to do some mental processing. I think that stopping and considering the amazingness of an experience is almost as important a part of traveling as traveling itself.

The first thing that I have been able to process so far is that there is a discrepancy between haves and have-nots that simply does not work. I am just as much a part of the problem as the next person really. Perhaps I’m a little more conscious about it than the average US citizen, simply by means of my having traveled a fair bit, but really I’m no better. I hope to be though, I hope that when I am done processing what I am living, that I will know how to live better. Maybe there is no secret key to successful fair and just living. But I will still try harder. We can all try harder.

I know countless people who work tirelessly at their jobs, who are selflessly compassionate for the impoverished and who live a comfortable lifestyle in suburbia or Manhattan. I don’t think that that needs to change. It’s not like we are guilty of intentionally causing poverty, it’s just that we could take on a much larger part in the battle to end it than we do. We can change our consumer habits and we can direct the companies that we work for to do the same. What we can’t do anymore, what I have no more patience for and what Africa is dying from, is the “someone else will do it later.” NO. We All Will Do It Now. This has to be a very serious, very conscious decision to make changes in the patterns of our living. There is no excuse for those who don’t take it that way.

I don’t mean to say that we should stop what we’re doing and riot in the streets. That’s not productive either. I just mean that on every level of our daily living we must consider what we can do to make a difference. From our work hours to our social hour we can change something about our daily routine. Maybe it’s going to the coffee vendor on the street who only sells fair trade products as opposed to Starbucks or McDonalds. Maybe it’s corporate donations instead of end-of-project corporate gifts. Maybe it’s bringing canned goods to a concert instead of a ticket. It can take on any number of forms, but the important thing is that it takes on the form. We must embody the change. There is not some third party greater power that will make it happen. We are that greater power. That is why on the very infrequent occasion that I pray, I am praying to humanity—to the brothers and sisters around me. We are the god who will show mercy, put food on the table and save the sick child. That is the god of life, truth and love. We have that god in us all, we just need to take some time out of our bustling city schedules to stop and listen to that voice inside.

We need to process what we do on a daily level just as we do when we travel, because this is one world. It’s not like we are two different people, one person here and one person back in the City. We are the same person. This is the same planet. Our friends here are just as much our friends anywhere else. So maybe if we stop and process our daily routines in the same manner that I hope to process my time in Ghana we will put ourselves one step closer to achieving the consciousness and the embodiment of change that is so desperately necessary. (That’s why Quakerism makes sense to me) But this is easier said than done. We get caught up in our stuff and forget to slow down, think and listen to that voice of consciousness inside. The change that I hope to embody after I take time here to process what I’ve absorbed is to get caught up in doing what my conscious tells me. I hope to get so caught up in Of Rags that I forget about other commitments. Of course I’ll get other things done that I need to do, I’m not completely irresponsible, but I hope to make Of Rags my main focus. I hope to be a model of a conscious lifestyle. And I hope to do this starting now.

Which leads me to the end of another long post. Here’s what I’ve been wanting to say for a while now: I’m coming back home in December. I have decided not to spend next semester traveling to Switzerland, India, China and South Africa with the International Honors Program, but instead I will return to New York and make Of Rags happen. This is what I am doing. What about you?

Of Rags: Wear the Difference

2009-10-10T05:45:00.003-04:00

Raam wearing one of the Of Rags signature shirts--Click to see a larger image:

The Ultimate Playlist

2009-10-06T07:06:00.004-04:00

On a lighter note, I listen to lots of music. Sometimes I listen to whole albums, sometimes just one song at a time, or sometimes I'll create a long playlist and listen to it on random for as long as I still feel in the mood. This is my current playlist--I call it "The groove:"

Ai, Ai, Ai...: Vanessa da Mata
All You Need Is Love: The Beatles
Berimbau/Consolacao: Sergio Mendes
Blister in the Sun: Violent Femmes
Cadê Você: Bebel Gilberto
Come Rain Or Come Shine: Bill Evans Trio
Come Together: The Beatles
Crosstown Traffic: The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Cuando Nadie Me Ve: Alejandro Sanz
Cut The Cake: Average White Band
Décollage: Bajofondo Tango Club
Drive: Incubus
E Menina: Sergio Mendes
Feel Good Again: Pete Yorn
Feel the Love: Cut Copy
Fuego: Alex Cuba Band
GAMEBOY/HOMEBOY: Beck
Glory & Consequence (live): Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals
Glory And Consequences (acoustic): Ben Harper
Groove Is On: Groove Armada
Guerras Perdidas: Bacilos
Haiti: Arcade Fire
Here I Come: Barrington Levy
How It Should Be (Sha Sha): Ben Kweller
I'll Catch You: The Get Up Kids
I'm The Man Who Loves You: Wilco
Inaudible Melodies: Jack Johnson
Irresponsable: Babasónicos
Jamas Imagine: Akwid
La Música: Haydee Milanes
Love and Peace or Else: U2
Mais Que Nada: Brasil '66 & Sergio Mendes
Men señará: Bebe
Midnight Rider: The Allman Brothers Band
No Es Lo Mismo: Alejandro Sanz
Normal: Ximena Sariñana
Prélude from Suite for Cello Solo No. 1 in G: Andrés Segovia
President: Wyclef Jean
Redemption Song: Bob Marley & The Wailers
Renaissance: Hooverphonic
Rosa Pastel: Belanova
Sister Moon: Herbie Hancock Feat. Sting
Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
"Shaft": Isaac Hayes
Tonight, Tonight: Smashing Pumpkins
Trains to Brazil: Guillemots
Why Can't We Be Friends: War
Yo Solo Se Que Solo No Se Nada: Jeremias

A School without Fees

2009-10-06T05:26:00.002-04:00

“Here’s what we are fighting for,” I said. “A school without fees. A school without fees.” At that Raam’s eyes welled with tears of excitement, of joy, of sadness that so many kids have so little. His face said it all to me. It took a minute for him to say anything in response. Finally he said with a notable choked up sound to his voice, “We are doing this. We are building a school without fees. We are making a dream come true.”

Tonight I shared Fufu and groudnut soup with some friends. Before dinner Raam and I flipped through a local fashion and pop culture magazine talking about placing Of rags in the magazine somehow. And for some reason, out of somewhere, the idea just splurted out of my mouth. “A school without fees.” That is our goal.

I realize that I am nothing but hot air until we actually start selling things, but through teamwork and hard work we will make it happen. We will need your help along the way though. I will have a website up and pictures available within the next few weeks. The inconsistencies with the internet service make it difficult to know for sure when it will be, but I will do my best to get more information available as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. Feel free.

-jbs

OF RAGS to Riches

2009-10-05T05:35:00.006-04:00

The root cause of the failure of development efforts in the so-called “third world”: too much supply and not enough demand. As long as an economy is staggered, it will not work. It seems daunting to explain; partly because thinking of the network of fundamental economic backwardness makes me think that I will one day suggest that communism is the only real answer to economic security. That won’t happen though, or at least it won’t be under the name of communism. Instead I think that I will call it working capitalism: an art based global marketplace. That is the only real answer to this so-called development thing. But if I can call my answer to it working capitalism, then I can call this development thing deconstruction. Here is how I have come to see it and here’s what we are doing about it as of now. Because this is when change happens—now. Change Happens Now.

In partnership with two gifted Ghanaians, I am launching a clothing company.

We plan to officially complete our first line of men and women’s casual wear in December. The premise behind the clothing is that every piece is a hand made, functional work of art. The premise behind the company is that it strives to be a model of successful fair trade economics. With our clothing we hope to inspire the most basic of humanistic values. We aim to capture the aesthetic based on the beauty residing in simplicity. We call ourselves Of Rags, and we wear the difference. Under this name and motto, Raam, Jerry and I hope to establish a fair trade fashion cooperative. I’ve found in my conversations recently that it’s easiest to describe my business model as a mixture of H&M and Ten Thousand Villages. We would create one brand of clothing around the fair trade collaboration of many designers in struggling conditions all over the globe. The idea is to take the fruits of the talents and visions of everyone involved in the company to a broader consumer base outside of the limited markets of each designer’s hometown. The keystone of our business is that we will give and help administer a significant percentage of our profits to foundations affiliated with each designer’s community. Through this approach we hope to address, if on only a small scale at first, both the immediate needs of the community and the deficit in the job market that holds so much of this planet in modern day slavery.

I came here originally to study Globalization. Now I’m preaching Localization. What happened? All I know is that it has taken me spending this much time and going this many miles away from the comfort of my Quaker upbringing to understand the real lesson of it all.

There is no path to peace; peace is the only way. That’s what the Quakers say. I agree to the fullest extent. We must simply do the right thing and everyone else will follow.

The UN and the World Bank serve very little purpose. They can only ever truly be the purveyors of a top down development system. What we need is a bottom up development system and we need to humble the top. No matter what the UN does nor what all of the other huge multinational NGOs in their sixty thousand dollar Land Cruisers do, the basic problem will always be here. There are not enough jobs. By the time the work gets to Africa, it’s all gone. So until the NGO’s create millions of sustainable jobs for the generations of qualified unemployed, the free medicine and food are little more than a basic band-aid on a deep gash. The only way for it to heal is naturally by itself over however long it takes. In the meantime, the band-aid is keeping moisture in and doing more harm than good, (at least according my unknowledgeable utopian view). I say that it’s time that we peel off the band-aid and let the cut scab up naturally and sooner rather than latter return to a state of unity with the rest of the body. To do this we must rid the body politic of any notion that our development efforts are working. We must adopt a completely different approach to achieve justice, peace and harmony in what is becoming an inevitably globalized world. We must go back to basic economic principles of supply never outweighing demand if we are to ever create a functioning global market place. Even though I might be able to buy the same Cheerios here in Accra as back in New York or DC, the system is not necessarily functioning. I don’t think that a system that leaves millions if not billions of people hungry, sick, distraught and ignored can possibly be called functioning. And if we remove the band-aid we must also dismantle the economic force that currently ensures the successful continuation of the status quo.

The problem is that with mega corporations controlling the world market places, it is impossible for the little guy to have a chance. And Africa is all about the little guy. This is a market-based economy. Clearly all economies are based on some sort of market place, but the economy here in Ghana is based on actual markets. This is what I realized this weekend in Kumasi, the Ghanaian city that is home to the largest market in West Africa. If I want something here, I don’t go to Wal-mart or Sears, I go to the market, buy each piece from small individual vendors and I put it together myself or I hire someone to make it. That’s how it works here. And it actually works pretty well. The issue is that with the way the world is currently globalizing itself based on western corporate interests, that market system is being challenged. One side will have to give.

I used to think that it would be great to see lots of corporate stores and an economy more similar to that of Ecuador, where malls run by multinational retailers are among the main purveyors of jobs. Nah. That won’t work. That is the side that must give. If it were working, Ecuador wouldn’t have a 67% rate of poverty. In Ghana the situation is even more dire. There are even more kids on the streets and it is even harder to escape seeing the poverty. It’s everywhere. Right next to the nicest homes and restaurants. It’s just the way of life here, but not because people want it to be, simply because the market is not big enough.

There are only but so many shoes that one person can sell to one community. After a certain level, the local market is saturated, sales slow and children go hungry. Even if business stays consistent, it remains at such a consistently low level that any real economic stability is only a piped dream.

So here’s my piped dream that hopefully one day won’t be so piped and then one day will no longer be a dream, but rather the reality. If instead of the global market being controlled by major corporate interest what if it were controlled by the little guy, what if the little shoemakers and car parts suppliers banded together to make the world one giant Kumasi market? In other words, I believe that if we change the global economic structure from one with a high barrier for entry to one where the little players can compete on an international level, poverty will end. I believe that this is the one and only way to end poverty.

Why is it the only way to end poverty? The simple economics of the situation make it a mathematic certainty that as long as the wealthy consumers of luxury goods represent a smaller population than the rest of the world, the rest of the world will lose. This is because the rest of the world that is used to manufacture the products that the wealthy consume has so many more products and people that the supply and demand structure of the system simply doesn’t work. No business can be run on a model where there is less demand than there is supply. Currently billions of people all over the world are looking for a way to become part of the supply chain for the few hundred million people at the top of the economy. The numbers just don’t add up. Even a trickle down economic theory won’t work given the current structure and the fundamental flaw in the idea of trickle down economics, which is effectively what our global economy is based on. This is particularly the case when a small handful of corporations control all of the jobs and manufacturing. The little guy can’t compete. And in the rare situation where the little guy does find some foothold from which to compete on a global level, the competition is too steep for him to thrive.

So what do we do about it? We open companies like Of Rags that are based on the bottom up fair trade model. Along with such companies we instill a different mindset of conscious consumerism in the masses through popular media. And we implement the legislation to facilitate the dismantlement of Goliath and the rise of David.

The corporations will see that the broad based social movement will shut them down if they don’t change their models and so any corporation that can run on a fair trade model will begin to do so. The corporations such as pharmaceuticals that really do have a higher barrier to entry as far as research is concerned will continue to run in a more efficient manner. And everything else that can’t survive in the new fair trade market place will just fade away and the jobs will be replaced by production based jobs a generation or two down the line. The excess in the system, particularly on the services side of the market must be shed. We must base our economy on producing a tangible item to sell, not on Citibank and Goldman Sachs.

The whole process will wreck some economies and will change the face of the world as we know it. It’s not communism though. Competition among the small players still exists. Regionalism is encouraged as different areas of the world offer different resources and goods. Money will still be made and where excessive profits once were commonplace, art will fill their place as part of the societal shift away from corporate greed.

Really this is a fight of good over evil. This is a fight of greed over generosity. To win will require generations of tough battle. But we cannot shy away from the challenge. We must rise to it. We must wear the difference with companies like Of Rags. We must be the difference by following our hearts and doing what we believe to be right instead of what a corporate lead society tells us is right. I know that I sound radical. I don’t aim to be. I am to be pragmatic. And practically there must be radical changes. But I ask you not to judge my words as aggressive. I ask you not to group them with previous socialist movements. I don’t want to dismantle Capitalism. I just want to make Capitalism work. This is the only way that it will. This is the only way to save the world.

We will start small. But small is what it’s about. The future is about the local. We must globalize the localized and not the other way around. There is only one course of action that Globalization can take if it is to be successful.

So I call upon your compassion, the compassion that is in every child everywhere, the compassion that is so often lost in the routine of corporate lead society. I call upon your compassion, the compassion that still remains inside of each of us somewhere. Maybe it is hidden. Maybe it is scared. Maybe it is too shy to be heard. Maybe it roars as loud as a lion. Use that compassion to change the world. Do the right thing. Wear the difference with Of Rags fair trade clothing. Spread the word. Be part of the movement. Share the love. Change the world.

-James Branson Skinner
04.10.09

There's no place like Rome...and Florence

2009-09-16T07:43:00.005-04:00

Totally unrelated to Ghana--some photos from Italy that I found on my camera.

2009-09-16T04:42:00.007-04:00

Fishing boats outside Elmina Castle

Sarah on the canopy walk

The resort where NYU puts us up in Elmina

Joe with a tree growing out of his head on the canopy walk

I was sweaty after running up the hill before the canopy walk.

Bats in the old magazine of the castle

The stair case up which women were brought to the governor of Elmina to be raped.

2009-09-16T03:33:00.001-04:00

Paddle! Paddle! Paddle!

2009-09-15T19:09:00.003-04:00

I didn’t really know what to expect of the experience. I still am not quite sure how it affected me. All I can say is that a tear weld in my eye when I stood in the room of no return.

I’d seen the pictures in the textbooks. We all know the documentaries on PBS. I kind of thought that it would be like that. But Elmina Castle is different. It is real.

If a picture say a thousand words, then the real thing says a million.

Of course I realized how horrible slavery was (and still is!), but I had realized it as a third hand witness. What the pictures lacks is everything that makes the experience so cruel. They lack the feeling. The feeling the mold in the air. The feeling the pain in the walls. The photos can’t explain walking the same stairs as some of the most evil men to have ever lived. The photos can’t capture the sensation of being in that room.

In other words, it was finally there for me. More than I ever had before I felt presence of terror, the presence of a suffering and a fear that until then I had never imagined, the presence of a sadness that I hope never again to know.

That’s about all I can take away right now.

Our trip to Elmina Castle showed me that the atrocities committed in the name of slave trade are real. They are not a documentary of PBS. They are not a photo in the Smithsonian Magazine. They are not a newspaper story through which I can distance myself and relate to only as though they were a fiction so different from my own world. Elmina Castle in Ghana was the point of no return for nearly 2 million Africans who were forced into slavery. The castle was the last stop in Africa before arriving in the Americas or Europe on what was the most dreadful journey known to man. There it was right there—stone, brick, iron.

What I still don’t get though is how the slave trade is able to exist today. Children and adults all around the world are kidnapped and sold into servitude of all forms. Sweatshop workers, slave away at tedious work for pennies a day with no room and board. An entire class of people has no voice in the never-ending debate over world affairs. These are all forms of slavery, some worse than others perhaps, but all are atrocities, just as the bondage of slavery was to countless African less than a century and a half ago.

The problem is that there are too many problems: slavery, economic despair, empty medicine cabinets. And the list is infinite. So what do we do when we face a wall of challenges like a dingy in a squall? I say we paddle. We paddle and we paddle. Whatever we do, we paddle. We do not give up because we simply cannot. Not when there is so much injustice and so much evil in the world. We cannot let them go uncontested. Those of use who see the atrocities have a responsibility to stop them.

I still don’t know how I will best fight my way toward that goal. But whatever I end up doing with this life, it will be for the dream of a world in which there are no longer first class and second citizens. Until then, everywhere it’s war. War. And even if it takes my whole lifetime and ten more, we know we shall win, because we are confident in the victory of good over evil. Love over hate.

Hit me with music.

-Branson

Key of Necessity

2009-09-15T05:41:00.001-04:00

“You have to really create a monster in the picture so that it will stick.”
–Eddie Dane Donton, CEO, West African AIDS Foundation

So I was given a task of responsibility. I’m pretty much in charge of getting the WAAF’s peer education program rolling this year. That means I have to call teachers and then go meet with them. I have to meet with the club heads. I have to give them support along the way. I have to design a survey to conduct as a baseline with 20 students in the program and 20 students not in the program in each of the five schools where WAAF runs a Passion Squad. I have to implement the survey and sort through its results. Of course I’m getting direction from Belinda, the official project manager, but for the most part, it’s on me, and to some extent one of the other interns, Blake. This is cool.

Well, cool, yes. Daunting, a bit so, too. I feel that much of what I’m being asked to do is a little over my head in terms of knowledge. I mean I don’t know how to design a survey or teach about HIV/AIDS. But I’m not too worried. I feel pretty confident that I can handle it. For one, because in several past experiences where I’ve had even less of a clue what I’ve been doing, I’ve managed to do a pretty decent and in some cases even great job. I’m also not too concerned because I feel that there are pretty well drawn guidelines and more importantly that things run on a reasonable pace for my lack of familiarity with the issue. That is, I’m not expected to have all of this done by tomorrow. In fact, I don’t think that much is expected to be done by tomorrow. And that leads me to note what stood out to me the most yesterday at my internship.

There is an inherent inefficiency in the office of WAAF, although inefficiency might not actually be the best word to use. When I think of inefficiency, I think of people wasting time by not doing things in the quickest way possible. So a workday at WAAF may in fact be the opposite of inefficient, but it just seems like nothing gets done. Why is this? Well, the resources, the tools and the space with which and in which we work at WAAF don’t make it easy to get things done fast. Waiting on the internet, waiting on a room, waiting on a phone, took just about as much time as actually doing things. No one wants it this way. We simply must deal with a different pace or we will be too frustrated to actually do the job.

This attitude seems backwards, but would fighting for faster computers and a new office space help anyone? Probably, somehow, in the grand scheme of things, yes. But after a month in Ghana, my impression is that if something works, there is little need to get a new one. WAAF works. Until the computers start breaking down completely and the space becomes too crowded to think, we will make do, because when people can’t afford anti-retroviral drugs, it’s just not right to buy new computers. So in fact, I’m more relieved to see a little inefficiency, or whatever we choose to call it, in the system than I thought that I would be. For me it represents proper priorities. For me it’s symbolic of the fact that the WAAF staff cares more about the people that they are helping than they do about the ease with which they can surf the internet. When resources are scarce, their allocation is the key. It seems that the door may be open at WAAF.

NYRoyalty

2009-09-13T17:44:00.002-04:00

NYU in Ghana. That about says it right there. Except we’re even more ridiculous here than we are in the Village.

If NYU is known for being rather elitist back home, it’s a six star, black card only, reservations four months in advance kind of thing here. We’re not living as students in Ghana. We’re living as kings in Ghana. And it’s not of our own doing.

NYU seems to think it fit to give us two of the nicest houses in the wealthiest neighborhood in Accra as our residences. And they also give us chofers, community resident assistant a.k.a. travel agent and tour guide, the smallest classes in the whole country, the coveted placements with the NGO’s, the on-call nurse and walk-in health care at the three most expensive hospitals in town, and a feast every night at two of the most expensive restaurants in town.

This sucks, but it is also very nice. And that’s my dilemma, which I know believe has turned into my good fortune.

I’ve been upset, frustrated and insulted by the level of babying and the level of spoiled-ness going on around here. We are carted around from the house to dinner, from here to there, from the academic center to the Legon campus, from the house to the acedemic center, and for the really ridiculous, from the house to the store and to the brand new Accra Mall for personal shopping. We have everything arranged for us, all the tape cut, all the bottled water poured, all the floors swept, and all the hands-held. Some people just won’t let go. I on the other hand got out of their grip as soon as possible. And I’ll not return until exam week.

This afternoon, on my way back from a failed meeting at my internship I avoided taking one of the two dozen taxis that stopped for me and instead, I walked through a different world. Of course I’ve done this nearly everyday, but because today is fresh in my mind, I’ll start then. Today, I walked through one of the main Islamic neighborhoods. Where as in many other parts of towns there are clubs, in this area mosques stood instead. But this is a major urban environment. Sewers lining the streets. Trash. Everywhere you turn, people hawking whatever they can get get their hands on. Beat up Nissans making three lanes out of one. It’s easiest to say that the mosques match their settings. It’s impossible to impart the feeling of that setting through words, but just believe that it is a different world. And that’s what’s so cool about NYU.

We live comfortably, but we have every possibility to break out of the comfort of catered meals and air conditioning—it just takes a little initiative. And the frustration that I feel from NYU’s babying me is more than enough to make me take the initiative and immerse myself in being in Ghana as much as possible.

So it actually works out quite nicely. And I think that is the spirit of NYU: immersion in the city with a safety net underneath. I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with that, particularly if we really do seek out ways to absorb what is here in Ghana.
But the end result is that there is no way to shake off who or what you are and represent. You can forget it and ignore it for a while, but at the end of the day you still come back to sleep in a mansion. On this point I’m slightly more equivocal as to whether or not it is good, bad, ambivalent, or just what. Yet here in Ghana I’m beginning to see that people can be whoever they are, they can come from wherever they’re from, they can have whatever they have and still get along. No one here is calling for us to abandon the opportunities that NYU has provided us in order to experience life better. But people are calling for us to appreciate how fortunate we are. I hope that all of my peers hear that call, because if any of us carry a taken-for-granted attitude through this city, I fear that the open arms which great us now may quickly close. We’re walking on the edge of ridiculousness and we must tread lightly. …Please.

-JBS
9.9.09

I woke up this morning and smiled at the rising sun.

2009-09-08T07:23:00.005-04:00

I truly don’t know where to begin. So I copped out and just went ahead and stated that. There is so much trouble in the world. There is also so much beauty. More often than not the two don’t mix. What I have seen here is not.

There is a natural mystic flowing through the air. In some cases it’s in the form of Bob Marley forever playing on the stereo. In some cases it’s in the form of the palm leaves lounging overhead, over street, over house, over home. Other times the natural mystic beams from the smile of the passerby. This past week it was in the form of friendship.

On Friday afternoon I went out to a friends place to purchase a painting. I had gone out before to look through the works of my friend’s hand. And I found the one that called to me most. So Friday afternoon I returned to my friend Kayem’s house.

His house is not so much a house as it is a room in a compound that is home to Jerry Kayem and a fair percentage of his eight siblings and at least 50 cousins. I use the word compound here, but compound not in the sense of a waterfront retreat with several guest houses and a pool. Compound is the only word I can come up with and yet somehow when I look at its root it seems to fit the situation perfectly. Jerry's house, compressed down to one room, is one part of the compound that makes the larger family home. Friday he didn’t invite me into his house as he had done before when I came over with some friends. Instead we took seats in the middle of the rough courtyard area. We sat and talked over beers that we bought from the blue room bar across the street nestled like a blade runner L.A. street shop into the corner of a stolen, or second hand, electronics mini-mall.

So we continue. Beyond the pure coolness of the situation, was our conversation and the dance moves that we eventually broke out and the painting and his family. As we talked about living, Kayem washed the hair of one of his nieces, who is trying to grow her hair like his—short and skinny mini-dreds. The other kids came to gather around and to talk to their sister. They laughed when she made funny faces as Kayem scrubbed her head gently with a wad of shredded cardboard. The rest of the family went about cleaning, cooking, bathing, doing homework and tending the family food shack out front.

That was Friday and it feels like a week ago.

-James Branson
Tuesday, September the Eighth, 2009.

Pictures from before:

One of the much nicer graves at the Buduburam Liberian Refugee Camp

A broken down latrine leaking into the street.

The overflowing latrines with maggots.

Guys at the campMother and her children in the camp

My favorite picture that I've ever taken.

Fan Milk carts. Mmm good.

Uew, Uew, That Smell...

2009-08-31T09:54:00.001-04:00

The smell is what hits first. All throughout the city, there’s a smell in the air. Spices roasting atop a chicken leg. The mist of the ocean weighted down by the humidity in a blunt but persistent atmosphere of heat. The trash burning next to the ditch carrying the load of a sewage system. The urine. A deep and bitter scent of urine hit my nose as soon as my taxi pulled off the main road and into the Liberian Refugee Camp. The urine in the streets, the shit in cans kicked aside, the deeply green colored stream of runaway sewage with it’s neon green and yellow piping that blends the sludge into the choppy dirt road, all permeate the oxygen.

And that’s what Lawrence shows me first—The broken toilets. He jokingly questions my judgment though when I assure him that I’d like to see the toilets. When he removes the lock and opens the door, the smell makes perfect sense. And it is revolting. It is inhuman. It is wrong.

The Liberian Refugee Camp sits about an hour or so outside of the center of Accra. During the times of uncontrolled violence in Liberia, the camp gave refuge to over 160,000 people. Today it has been abandoned. The 10,000 refugees who have not either died or found a way back to their home country are left in socio-econo-political limbo in a system that would have them fend for themselves with no food, no money, no jobs, and no more patience. The resulted of this: broken and overflowing toilets, endemic cholera, beatings of Liberian students, 12-year old girls prostituting themselves for a few slices of bread.

In order to work in an established business or receive funds from the UN toward higher education, one must present credentials, passports and papers. As Lawrence, a friend and my guide through the camp, tells me, “we left running onto a boat for our lives, and they think I grabbed my papers on the way out.” So there is nothing to do, no job to be had, no book to be read, no way to move forward. And with nearly 15 years out of his country, it won’t be easy for Lawrence to go home. He doesn’t even know where home is, let alone have a way to put food on the table were he there.

The situation is stuck at a dirty impasse. It doesn’t help that there not enough money to go around. Most of the UN funding for the camp was cut when the violence in Liberia began to settle down and the refugees began to feather back home. Yet not everyone could afford to make the trip and somewhere too traumatized to return. Those who remain must now deal with the fact that they are on their own. The Ghanaian government won’t help out. And it seems as though the world has forgotten about this group of refugees.

At first it is infuriating to think that so little is being done, but on the ride back I see why it is the way it is. There is so much to be done in this country. It’s not just the Liberian refugee camp that reeks of urine. There are many Ghanaian neighborhoods with the stench too. A substantial percentage of the Ghanaian population is without jobs and clean water. Now it’s the whole situation that pisses me off.

The Camp is a community abandoned. As I walk among the graves of the tens of thousands left behind, I think, it is a community left to die. The day comes. The day goes. The day comes. The day goes. The shit thickens.

Maybe Africa is like that too. Not all the continent, not all of Ghana, not all of Accra, but parts of the whole thing. There are the riches in all shades of precious minerals. There are the strategic investments. There are the success stories. But I can’t help but believe that for each part basic, there are one million parts acid. The scent of ammonia permeates the air too thickly to breath without wincing. The pH is too low to touch. The mixture burns right through whatever tries to contain it.

Many parts of what I have seen so far have me believing that Africa is this experiment gone wrong.

It’s impossible to think that anything could be working right once you’ve smelled the rot and seen the maggots making the bubbling surface of slim move from right to left and back again.

But what amazes me is that through it all there is faith and there is hope, maybe feigned at times, but there somewhere all the time. If only more of the world could feel the positivity and experience the generosity, no one would forget Africa. No one would forget the refugees. We’d work until we get the stoichiometry balanced right. No community would be left in abandon. No more would a friend call me to say that his son died of cholera.

I see the aid workers hanging out in the hotspots of Accra, and I know that they are doing their best out in the field as well. But more need to be done. I believe that the largest change that needs to be made is one of attitude and valuation of priorities particularly if we are to truly affect positively the most vulnerable populations like the Liberian refugees.. We must start to think of others first. Our consumer culture needs to shift to a culture of giving.

But setting aside my utopian ideals, there does need to be a shift in the status quo and it needs to happen now. The situation cannot go on like this. The poverty that I have seen throughout Latin America and in parts of China is dwarfed by the conditions of the refugee camp and many other parts of the city here. There is no agriculture. There is only faith in god. I just pray that faith doesn’t dwindle and burn out before substantial changes start taking place. I’m doing all that I can to see that it does not. In addition to the food that I have already delivered, I’ll be organizing amongst my peers to arrange for at least on latrine to be drained and cleaned and for supplies of rice to be left with Lawrence and his community. It would be inhumane not to do something.

They must know that people care. They must smell fresh air.

More photos to come. Bear with me as the internet connection here is rather sluggish.

WOW

2009-08-31T08:50:00.004-04:00

"Speak just a few words to let them know you're real, then just be you."

These were the most amazing 85 hours of my life. I really cannot do any of this week justice with words or photos, but I can tell you what I did and share with you some of the very few photos that I took. Wednesday morning I attended a class at University of Ghana-Legon called the Political Economy in Africa’s Development since Independence. I went to Accra’s new mall and ate at what is bound to be one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. Then I went to a street festival in the Labadi area of Accra, very near the Gulf of Guinea. After that some friends and I watched Salsa dancers on the pool deck of a local hotel, only to later make our way down to the beach to hear live reggae music. On the drive home in a friends car, some cops armed with machine guns pulled us over and extorted a good thirty some odd Ghana Cedis out of us. Apparently cars have to be registered through a separate registration process in order to drive at night. I don’t know about that, but like I said, machine guns, so we weren’t arguing about technicalities. We just gave them some money and quickly drove away. Thursday I enjoyed my first Health and Society class in the morning. In the Afternoon I was fortunate enough to find my way out to the Liberian refugee camp, with a Liberian refugee named Joe whose father was killed in front of his eyes, whose wife died of cholera, and whose son is now in the hospital with the same thing. I talked with several other Liberians while at the camp. When I got back to town, I had a great jam session with one of the other NYU students, also named Joe. Friday seven of us went with some Ghanaian friends to the village that their great grandfather left them. The spot, appropriately named Palm Village, sits about an hour and a half outside of the center of Accra. Once there, we took part in a traditional religious ceremony. I was given protection by the high priest through a process that involved shells, nails, a sword, and a bottle filled with sticks, a chicken leg and 190-proof moonshine. We sang, danced, played guitar, drum circled with master drum makers, fished in the creek, ate our catches and watched a crew of acrobats perform the most outstanding routine of physical movement that I’ve ever seen. (They are being recruited by Cirque de Solei.). Today I went back to the Liberian refugee camp with my friend Sarah. My friends at the camp took us around on a more extensive tour of the camp. They explained the impossible situation that they face and invited us to spend as much time there as we like. Rarely in my life have I felt as welcomed into a group of strangers as I have over the past few days. As I saw once again at the refugee camp, as well as on the way there and back, Ghana, and Liberia too for that matter, face innumerable challenges. I wish there was a magic button that I could push to fix the situation. There isn’t. I can only offer simple acts of kindness. That’s the best any one person can do. I hope that each little act will, if nothing else, provide the strength to make it through another day. And after the generosity that I’ve seen this week, I’m coming to believe cada vez más, that there is the potential for a little act of kindness to inspire a movement of the same kind. That is what so many people here and all over the world need, a movement of change. A change from greed to generosity. A change from hate to love. A change from despair to hope. Such change is as simple as a bag of rice. As simple as a bar of soap. As simple as the gift of a coin. And as beautiful as the beating drums and the dancing in the street under the stars.

A side note: this was supposed to be posted Saturday August 29th, but I’ve been having some problems connecting to the internet.

Hope We Can Believe In

2009-08-22T08:59:00.009-04:00

"...alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga. A belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief--I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper--that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one." -Barack Obama, 2004.

So, Accra is cool.

I had a really good first day here wandering around. I already wrote you about that. Now it's orientation week. Meh. I’m feeling pretty constrained by the ridiculous schedule and rules of this week. We’ve had one too many group activities in one too few days on way too many tour buses. I strongly dislike tour buses. But I'm listening to Bob Marley's Three Little Birds right now and it makes me realize, as I think I already did, that who cares if they baby us, I'm here in Ghana--wow. Yesterday during one of our orientation sessions on I don't remember what, I looked at all the beautiful Ghanaian people who just looked so positive and happy, and I felt it too. There really is a positive feeling in the air here. I don't know why, or what it is, but even the people who seem to be struggling on a level that we can only imagine, have a beautiful spirit about them. Of course there are exceptions, but I think they are relatively rare. On my way to the hospital a few days ago (I had a parasite) I saw these women carrying sugar cane on their heads standing under a tree smiling, laughing and dancing as best they could with big silver bowls on their heads as though they were the happiest people in the world. And I felt better. Positivity is in the water, at least more so than any parasite, because even though my stomach has definitely seen better days, I couldn't care less about the discomfort. I'm here, I'm happy and I want to enjoy it all, I want to absorb it all and carry that positivity with me wherever I go.

I definitely was successful in my objective last night when I enjoyed music at a lounge style place underneath a big tree by the side of the road. I sat there surrounded by the music, the stars, the trees and a small crowd of Ghanaians. “In Kingston time, your love will come,” sang Dan the leader of the band. (We talked after his set. I’m hoping to get together and play some songs.) I felt the spirit of the music all around me. In that moment I realized that Ghana is a uniquely cool place and I’m so glad I’m here.

What stands out about Ghana is that while the country of some 20 million people is nestled among West African nations with turbulent political histories in which violence is the most common forum to promote change, Ghana has steered itself down a more peaceful path. With such a stable political landscape, the country is flourishing. Of course there exists the inherent political corruption and thefts on all levels of society, but for the most part things run fairly smoothly. This allows for the people to grow the middle class with tourism and stable import and export policies.

There definitely is still an enormous amount of poverty and the disparity between rich and poor is mind-boggling. On my run a few days ago, I ran through an area with dirt roads and children walking around with only t-shirts on—no pants, no shoes, no underwear. I saw one little girl peeing right in the street. It’s not that uncommon a sight, as whatever bathrooms there may be, probably flow into the open sewers on the streets anyways. About two blocks away from this neighborhood, the scene began to change into a something that one would expect to see in the wealthy suburbs of a major US city. The street was paved smoother than many streets in DC. The houses were massive and some truly quite beautiful. Old trees arched over the road making for a very pleasant canopy to shade the afternoon sun. There were pristinely cut grass and shrubs in front of every gate, fence and guardhouse. And then a brand new Bentley drove by. I’d seen both ends of the system before, but this was a bit outrageous. All I can say is that I hope the owner of that car donated an additional three hundred thousand dollars to a school in the tin-roofed neighborhood next door. If not, then I hope he can’t sleep at night. Which leads me to think about what I posted last time.

How do such great fiscal wealth and such great economic nothingness exist at the same time?

It is corruption that someone should drive such a car. Not just here, but anywhere. Certainly I appreciate nice cars, but no one needs a Bentley…and for the price of just one of the British exports, ten percent of the city of Accra could have shoes. That's 150,000 pairs of shoes! But like I said this is just the inherent corruption from which few societies are free.

The other way to look at it is a hopeful one. If some Ghanaians are becoming super rich, eventually that money will reach the hands of the people who need it. We hope. And there is good reason to have such a hope. With Ghana’s stable history, creating consistent economic, educational and artistic standards across the spectrum of the whole country may in fact be a feasible goal for my generation. This is the goal of what I see as social capitalism, a concept that just last November was chosen to govern the United States. Ghana’s president, John Atta Mills, is also new to office. Sworn in this past January, he was elected on the same principles as was the man I voted for back in the US. So more than ever before I understand why Obama came to Ghana. His message is hope, and hope abounds here.

More photos to come.

-Branson