Jose Arocha’s blog

I recently watched Muhammad Yunus full of joy, sharing his story and advocating for his ideas during his Nobel Lecture of December 10, 2006, at the Oslo City Hall, Norway. I was deeply inspired and connected to his values and believe. I would like to contribute my 2 cents in promoting his lecture in this post.

Muhammad Yunus talked about poverty as the absence of human rights and the need to promote social businesses either as non-dividend and not-for-losses businesses or those owned by their customers, the financially poor, as it is the case for Grameen Bank. Muhammad Yunus also talked about the need for a new kind of social business marketplace, the need to fight terrorism in the most sustainable way by diverting the developed nations spending from war into the poverty fight. He also shared all the diversifying efforts the Grameen organization is taking to address the multidimensional needs of the poor. Out of the many creative and incredible stories, he shared the initiative of lending to the beggars of Bangladesh. The Grameen bank today lends to 85,000 beggars. Out of those, 5,000 of them decided to transform themselves from beggars to door-to-door salesmen with the help of Grameen. It is wonderful to see that there is a deep belief in enterprising rather than charity as a mechanism to bring forth a sustainable future.

It was revealing for me to learn of his beginning as a professor, emotionally connected to people, troubled by the contrasts between theory and the reality out of the door of his classroom. He started finding ways to protect the dignity of the women borrowing from lenders who abused of their financial vulnerability. As he saw results in the little he thought he did initially, he looked at the traditional banking system to solve the borrower condition. But this banking system did not respond limited by its traditional practices, its lack of trust of customers and the demand for collateral. Thus, he decided to take it in his hand, from his own pocket literally.

This story was vivid to me, raised in a town surrounded and living with poverty. A reality we became used to. As I matured, this reality transformed from being natural to intolerable to me. My fellow Venezuelans, many of them, yet today, live vulnerable to the daily abuses of the imperfect market and a state that is unaccountable and ill-powered to respond and bring dignity and prosperity. After many years, the reality of exclusion and now segregation is there regardless of the good service that media and propaganda brings to my country government. I am just a new kid around the block. I am in Yunus late 70s. And I may not reach high and deep as he has. But watching Muhammad Yunus was supportive to this early, struggling path as social entrepreneur.

As Yunus, I believe in every human being regardless of his or her social and economical condition. Every one. The financial condition, the lack of access to basic human rights or any prejudice we may expectedly live with does not take away our humanity, our dignity, our creativity, our ability to prosper when given the chance and the right conditions. I firmly agree that it is not about charity. It is about giving opportunities and accompanying and supporting each other in the process.

For many years, I have been an advocate and practitioner of innovation. One of the convictions that I have always communicated to the youth is: “The world is what we want it to be. We have the power to change it and build the future we dream. What we have now is what we human beings created for ourselves given the conceptions of the times. But this does not have to be the future. In fact, it will not be. This is just a step in the long, continuously-emerging and erratic experiment called humanity.” I gladly heard Yunus bring that message loud and clear to inspire and support the many of us making our away through social enterprising.

Honor to Muhammad Yunus and the many who around him and in many other microfinance institutions are building this wonderful new world of hope, dignity and prosperity for every one.

Lecture movie: http://nobelprize.org/cgi-bin/asxgen.asx?id=88&type=lecture&year=2006

Lecture text:  http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/yunus-lecture-en.html

The following is my comment to the post by Erik Sundelof ’s "Is a for-profit social venture impossible?" at the Reuters Digital Vision program blog

I think there may be many reasons why we are
better off being a for-profit as an alternative to a nonprofit in the
pursuit of wide and deep social impact. In my building of TAVOS, I
realized through the business planning of the social enterprise that
there were two ways to cover the high costs of a Latin American-scale
deployment: either dedicate my life and one of the others to
fundraising and not work directly with the people I want to serve or
look for income-generation strategies to make every community unit of
the initiative sustainable. I decided for the latter. Some of my
reasons were:

1. I rather devote myself to care of the people I want to serve and
let the market dynamics push my organization to listen, than devoting
my life to fundraising to end up detached from the end beneficiaries.

2. The communities I am trying to serve are highly entrepreneurial.
50-60% of the economy in Latin America is informal. That means that
Francisco in Catia, a low-income suburban neighborhood in Caracas,
wakes up every morning thinking how he will make it to bring food to
the table the next day. Francisco and 100 million other Latin Americans
are better served by bringing opportunities they could use to tap into
their spirit than by bringing charity that will leave them highly
vulnerable if the funding gets dry.

3. A for-profit will make the social impact sustainable and scalable
if we are serving well the needs of the target population. If we are
failing, the market will tell.

4. Embedded in my last comment, the for-profit approach forces
better learnings of the market and customers than the nonprofit
approach.

I do agree that there is a challenge in leading and executing with
integrity a hybrid social/business-mission venture. But I think that it
holds true for any enterprise today. There is also an interesting
discussion about for-profits with organizational and governance
structures that "lock" their social mission, for example: a parent
nonprofit or member association. But that is a whole new discussion.

Cheers,
jose

I am Jose Arocha.  My
home town is Venezuela.  My interest is to create new means, tools and
services,  so people at home can help each other.

I grew up in a country in crisis.  Much of what I saw around was
crisis, communities in misery, vulnerable, excluded from decent life, excluded
from access to decent social and public services, excluded from access to job
opportunities, with little trust in the system and many times in each other.  During my life span, poverty has gone from 33% to close to 80% today.

However, there is a reserve of people and institutions doing the work and building a future for the country.  I want to join this effort.  I also want to contribute to improve our reality into something
more hopeful, promising, positive.  I am
dedicated to create new opportunities so people at home can help each other and
increase the social, cultural and economic wealth of our  communities.

This is and has been my genuine me.

I grew up in a country in crisis. Inequity, poverty, misery were always part of my daily live. They were my neighbors, my classmates, my baseball pals, my borrowers, my friends. I grew up in a middle class avenue that crosses through, still now-a-days, a numbers of barrios with houses hosting families of dignity but with neither access to decent social services, nor jobs or good education opportunities.

I grew up in a country in crisis. I never saw prosperity in the news. All I saw, all I heard, all I read, all I remember is about the misery of the inner human condition. Communities frustrated by the continuous broken electoral promises. Communities vulnerable and dependent of the gift of the electoral turn with their hidden agendas. Communities impacted by the frequent waves of the oil economy. Communities waiting for the bureaucratic machinery to reach the end. Communities excluded of any access to decent social services. All I heard was corruption. All I read was lack of hope. All I saw was no future.

I grew up in a country in crisis. But I am learning that we can flip the page.

Since the early days of 2004, I have been working with a number of people from different parts of the world who have given me plenty of hope. Every one of us, in our own communities, alone or together, is starting to realize our little piece of this puzzle of human development. I have been very fortunate to find empathy and resonating goals. Now I have partners and volunteers to materialize our piece of the puzzle. We call it TAVOS.

TAVOS responds to the need of the communities where I grew up and to the need of many communities in similar situation worldwide. TAVOS envisions an environment that helps neighbors realize their own power for change. TAVOS will do for social services what microfinance has done for financial services. TAVOS will be a sustainable system that helps neighbors work together and materialize their access to the social services in need. The mission of TAVOS is to help neighbors in these communities aggregate and coordinate their actions so they can help themselves and others.

I grew up in a country in crisis. But my daughter will grow up in a country building its good future. This is my life commitment.

The current social and economic situation of our world is both desperate and fortunate.   The situation is desperate for some 4,000 million people, moderate for 1,750 million and fortunate for only a 100 million as reflected in the purchasing power pyramid of the world population.  This contradiction is visible in various degrees around the world.  Pick a city and you will find both the first and third world neighboring each other.  The market and the government policies have been able to address the needs of the moderate and fortunate portion of the population.  But 4 Billion people still face misery and lack every access to opportunities and solutions.  We need new paradigms for their inclusion in the moderate and fortunate tiers of the pyramid.  Creating new means to reduce poverty, inequalities and the byproduct vulnerabilities of the Latin American communities drives my thoughts and professional work. 

I want to use this space to communicate and connect with all of you interested in this goal.  I want to share about the problems, the ideas and the solutions, and learn from you.  I want to explore the possibilities and invite you to be part of the explorations.  I believe amazing things will happen when we work together and connect human talent, technology and capital around common goals.   The mission of this blog shall be to contribute in this creation, the creation of new opportunities that increase the social and economic wealth of our currently underserved communities in Latin America and around the world. 

If you find yourself connected with these ideas,  let’s communicate and work together.