Title:
Getting NGOs to Celebrate Failure, So They Can Learn
From Others' Mistakes
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
Week after week, we bring you stories about projects
to improve lives in the developing world. Projects
like banking by mobile phone or low-cost lighting
systems or even a toilet bag that recycles itself
into fertilizer. But for every success story, there
are countless other projects that fail. These are
the stories that people talk about at an event
called FAILFaire. The creators of the event recently
held their second FAILFaire. Members of the
nonprofit community came together in Washington to
talk about their projects, and why they failed.
FAILFaire is sort of like a celebration of failure.
A prize is even given to the "best" worst story. But
why celebrate? Katrin Verclas is with a nonprofit
group in New York called MobileActive. She was the
one with the idea for FAILFaire. She says the event
provides an opportunity for people to learn from the
mistakes of others. She says: "Development is a
field with finite resources, and so the less money
we waste, the better. And part of that is learning
from the things that didn't work, so that we don't
endlessly repeat them." MobileActive held its first
FAILFaire in New York earlier this year. More than
seventy people attended the event. One of them, for
example, was there to talk about his failed
nonprofit organization MobileImpact.org. Bradford
Frost had hoped to recycle used cell phones and
provide them to people in Africa. Katrin Verclas
explained some of the problems with this project,
and others like it.She says it did not work at all
because of the numbers of very inexpensive handsets
in the countries. She says they call that SWEDOW --
Stuff We Don't Want. FAILFaire takes place in a
lighthearted social setting, over food and drinks.
Ms. Verclas says the creator of a project is the one
responsible for declaring it a failure. She says
profit-making businesses talk more about failure
than nonprofit organizations do.She says: "We have
to report to donors and donors do not like to look
bad, and so we don't like to look bad as nonprofits.
And so we have a tendency to highlight our successes
and never talk about our failures." Katrin Verclas
says she hopes FAILFaire will change this problem
over time. She says members of the nonprofit
community have been surprisingly open to her idea.
For VOA Special English I'm Alex Villarreal.
Transcripts and MP3s of our reports are at
voaspecialenglish.com.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
