Micro-volunteering: Finding the Right Volunteers
In my last post, I looked at IfWeRanTheWorld.com, and asked whether making micro-volunteering ‘social’ would be enough to prove its worth. Jayne Cravens argued that micro-volunteering is useful to NGOs not because it achieves results, but because it helps them to expand and diversify their missions.
Sparked.com attempts to change the views of those like Cravens; its makers want to show that micro-volunteering is a viable way to achieve real goals for non-profits. The site itself, Jacob Colker describes, is “a very mature product”: the result of three years development with almost a quarter of a million users.
The freedom Sparked.com allows NGOs to post almost any task may mean that many remain uncompleted for a long time, but those challenges that are met are hugely valuable for the organizations that have set them.
In a beautiful illustration from the site, Colker told me of a man from Jordan who translated a nine-page document from English to Arabic for a charity based in Cincinnati, Ohio. The charity, Ronald McDonald House, is responsible for housing the families of sick children who go to the city for treatment; the document was their welcome pack. Giving up a few hours to translate the pack, the volunteer saved the charity several thousand dollars, and allowed those it helps to feel more at home in a difficult situation.
Challenge Completed!
Sparked.com shows how micro-volunteering can work if the right people are connected: that’s part of the reason why The Extraordinaries are focusing on recruiting volunteers through corporate social responsibility programmes. They want marketers, financiers, designers and social media gurus to populate their social sphere. By exploiting the specific skills of its participants, micro-volunteering can strike beyond acting as a gateway to more engagement, and do more than market a worthy organization. Its results can become concrete and valuable.
In conclusion, Jacob Colker seems rightly proud of the way Sparked.com has harnessed free time for good:
“Each task that is completed has a dollar value attached to it, and that’s a tangible amount of money that the charity doesn’t have to spend. In this economy, where budgets are being cut, we feel very strongly that sometimes the best way to fundraise is simply to save money in the first place. And if we can help facilitate that, and allow people to feel good about themselves by volunteering for an hour, and make it ridiculously easy for a non-profit to manage the full process, then we’re achieving something great.”
Microvolunteering for the masses
Taking the credit for coining the actual term, Sparked.com is the big dog when it comes to micro-volunteering. Users profile themselves on joining, and are suggested challenges posted (for free) by the many NGOs using the site. Sparked.com is a certified B-Corp, and earns profit through Corporate Social Responsibility programmes.
A jaunty, social media take on the world of microvolunteering, IWRTW encourages interaction between users, allowing them to build up a public profile of ‘micro-actions’ completed.
Not technically focused on micro-volunteering, but around ‘Change Agents’: ‘cool people we’d all like to know who are working all over the globe to tackle the world’s biggest social and environmental problems.’ Users can sign on as `Backers’, and choose to respond to their action requests. These are often micro-actions involving the web.
The site is seeking to earn its crust through targeted advertising.
This UK-based site acts as a kind of directory and information point for micro-volunteering opportunities. Users can search for actions based on their time requirement and category.
Micro-volunteering: Social Networks in the Social Sector
Jayne Cravens is a consultant to mission-based organizations and the writer of the brilliant Coyote Communications blog. She has been striving to digitise charity work since 1994, when she created one of the first websites that aimed to maximise non-profits’ use of the internet.
Cravens believes that online micro-volunteering is similar to real-world short-term volunteering opportunities, such as a beach cleanup. In terms of producing quality work, neither are very attractive to NGOs, as they are often costly and difficult to organize.
Their value, she explains, flows from a different source:
“Is involving 100 online volunteers to tag photos on Flickr for a non-profit really the quickest, most efficient, most accurate way to get those photos tagged properly, or, in fact, does it provide a fantastic way to recruit potential longer-term volunteers and even donors? Will these people end up blogging about their experience and attracting even more people?”
“Many times, I have reserved tasks – short-term and long-term, onsite and online – specifically for volunteers. Why? Because involving volunteers is rarely about getting work done, rather, I’m involving volunteers to give people a first hand look at the organization, to give volunteers a sense of ownership in that work, to add diversity to the organization, to cultivate their support on blogs, in letters to the media, or even as financial donors, and to get fresh ideas from people who aren’t as immersed in the day-to-day operations of an organization or initiative as I am.”
From Cravens’ perspective, creating micro-volunteering opportunities allows non-profits and NGOs to market themselves, gain from fresh opinions and perspectives, attract volunteers, and encourage them to engage with the organization in question.
These are undoubtedly beneficial outcomes of micro-volunteering on a fairly small scale. It strikes me, however, that as online micro-volunteering grows, so might a sense of detachment, as volunteers become further removed from both those that they’re working with, and the final fruits of their labour. The excitement that radiates outward from the onsite volunteering opportunities described by Jayne Cravens could be lost in the anonymity and 'convenience' of cyberspace.
Mike Bright, of micro-volunteering directory HelpFromHome.org, agrees:
“There needs to be more interactivity and impact reporting. There needs to be a facility to get more people physically or virtually together at the same time micro-volunteering on a given task to achieve a certain goal, to make it seem more like the real world. It needs more of a human interaction element to get the same amount of buzz that you get when a team of people in the real world achieve a volunteering goal.”
Sociality, it seems, is key to maintaining volunteers’ interest. The reason that people spend 400 million hours on Facebook each day is because it is a medium for social interaction. We check the site because we want to see how our Friends have interacted, who's updated their pages, and because we want to develop our own public profiles. If micro-volunteering can capitalize on this desire, it’s definitely on to a winner.
IfWeRanTheWorld.com Project Page
One new platform that is trying to do just that is IfWeRanTheWorld.com. Upon entering the site, users, or ‘superheroes’, land on a page which asks them to complete the sentence: ‘If I ran the world, I would…’ Within this template, they’re able to post ‘micro-actions’ that require participation from other users. You build your own profile purely through interaction: each ‘micro-action’ you take part in is added to your page as a colourful block of text, helping others adds them to your ‘Tribe’, and you can earn ‘superpowers’ by participating in certain projects. The concept feels a little like a goal-oriented Twitter. If it takes off in the same way, it will no doubt become a very useful tool for NGOs and non-profits trying to spread their messages through the social media.
IfWeRanTheWorld.com Profile Page
Yet again, though, we’re confronted with the same question that occurred in last week’s post: can micro-actions directly contribute to the success of a project? Jayne Cravens argues that micro-volunteers have the power to support NGOs in a number of indirect ways. To see micro-volunteering as a system efficient enough to warrant participation, however, I believe that micro-volunteers should be able to achieve and view concrete results for specific non-profits.
In my final post on the subject of micro-volunteering, I will be returning to Sparked.com to examine the direct action of micro-volunteering in the social sector.
Micro-volunteering: An Interview with Jacob Colker, Cofounder of Sparked.com
At TEDxNASA 2010, Ben Rigby, CTO and cofounder of The Extraordinaries, gave a simple but astounding statistic:
In the time the world spends on Facebook each day, we could build 55 Empire State Buildings.
Rigby explained how he and his colleagues are on a mission: to hijack a small portion of the millions of hours spent on the web, make good those seemingly inconsequential moments waiting at the bus stop, and allow people an easy way to use their spare moments to help charitable causes. Finding a way to tap into this time and use it constructively could, in theory, create a revolution in the social sector.
Wanting to discover more, I spoke with Jacob Colker, the company’s CEO and cofounder, about the ideas behind their micro-volunteering platform, Sparked.com:
“Close your eyes and think of volunteerism. The mental image that comes up in most people’s minds is a homeless shelter, or a food-bank, or a hospital, or a park cleanup. That’s what we’ve been taught volunteerism is. The problem is that those experiences require a very structured process. From the moment you decide you want to volunteer to the moment you’re actually able to volunteer, there’s a whole ton of hoops to jump through.”
Procedures such as interviews, criminal record checks and training present a number of off-putting obstructions to the would-be volunteer. Even once these have been overcome, volunteering is no easy undertaking.
“There’s a requirement of a time commitment of at least four to six hours. You have to set out a time, and schedule it over weeks and months, because it’s not worth NGOs going through the whole process just for one day.”
In the lives of most working people, these four to six hour-long free periods don’t exist. “74% of Americans don’t volunteer, and the overwhelming number one reason is that they don’t have time.” Colker explained, however, that The Extraordinaries’ research showed that people do have free time: it just isn’t all at once.
Sparked.com Landing Page
“We hear people saying that they’re too busy, but we also see that people are spending a lot of time online. We spend 400 million hours on Facebook, every single day. We spend 24 million hours playing solitaire every day, and we watch two billion videos on YouTube every single day. So we realized that people do have time, but it comes in 20, 30 minute, or hour long chunks, not six hours at a time. So we set out to build a platform where people can share that hour, or half hour with non-profits all over the world. And that’s the essence of micro-volunteering”.
Sign up to Sparked.com as a micro-volunteer, and you’re asked to input your interests and skills. The site then suggests challenges tailored to your specific profile: ‘micro-actions’ uploaded by hundreds of participating NGOs.
“We focus on projects that can be completed within 2 minutes and 2 hours. The reason we consider micro-volunteering to be so powerful is that it solves the problem of time.”
Sparked.com Project Page
From a volunteer’s point of view, this seems like a fantastic idea. Many of us want the opportunity to ‘give something back’ in our own time, and micro-volunteering is certainly a flexible and low-commitment option.
But how much good can such tasks achieve? Can short-term projects and incremental micro-actions actually help to solve real problems? And can micro-volunteering really compete with other online activities that have proven so addictive, such as watching videos on YouTube, or checking Facebook?
In my next post, I will be speaking with Jayne Cravens, consultant to mission-based organizations and the writer of the brilliant Coyote Communications blog. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts on micro-volunteering, and the experiences you may have had using sites such as Sparked.com.
An eye for an eye: website evaluation
New crowdsource tool allows you to exchange website feedback.
Today I came across Feedback Roulette, a new crowdsourcing feedback tool that allows you to receive feedback about your own website in exchange for giving feedback on someone else's.
Users signup simply using their email address and website URL, and are then directed to a random website that is awaiting feedback. The more websites you review, the more feedback you also receive.
Feedback can also be rated, resulting in a user-rating that shows how active and trustworthy one is. Below is the first feedback I received for the betterplace lab website. Though not extensive (I gave the feedback 3 stars for "Useful, but not detailed feedback"), it did help me to identify a problem with our search function.
An interesting tool for NGOs, who may not have the budget to launch a useability study for their websites?
Does second-hand clothing kill local textile industries?
By Olumide Abimbola
Whenever people hear that I do research on the international trade in second-hand clothing, they seek confirmation that the trade kills local textile industries in developing countries. The assertion that the trade kills local textile industry in developing countries is very logical and sensible. We can all imagine that second-hand clothing would be a lot cheaper than new, locally manufactured ones – isn’t used clothing collected for free in developed countries? How can free compete with locally produced ones? It therefore only seems sensible to assume that if there is a flood of used clothing in a country, people, being rational agents, would choose instead to buy them instead of new ones.
This assertion however depends on a set of assumptions. I describe them here as myths, and I discuss some of them below. The list is not in any way exclusive, but it addresses the main points.
Myth One – Second-hand clothing is so cheap that it is almost free.
First of all, there is the assumption that second-hand clothing is so cheap that it might as well be free. I already wrote last week that there are different categories of second-hand clothing. I also wrote that there is a category of second-hand clothing that is bought by people who are not necessarily in search of cheap clothing. Admittedly, those are mostly the high end and priciest of second-hand clothing.
The nature of the second-hand clothing market is such that there are normally different categories of clothing. There are those of high quality, while there are those that are just a little better than rags. According to some second-hand clothing traders in Cotonou, Benin, the mid-range second-hand clothing is currently selling at a higher rate than low quality Chinese products.
They complain that their share of the West African clothing market is being reduced because of the influx cheap, very low quality, Chinese products.
In other words, apart from the fact that there are high-priced designer labels in second-hand clothing shops, some poor quality Chinese product are actually cheaper than the average piece of second-hand clothing.
Of course, one could point out that second-hand clothing has already killed the local textile industry and that it is only in turn being killed by cheaper Chinese goods. This assertion would however only hold true if another myth were true. This other myth is the one that says that local textile industries in developing countries, whenever they existed, were viable purely because of market forces. This is what I turn to next
Myth Two: Textile industries used to be viable
I do not have the space to go into details here (I wrote a fairly long article on the Nigerian textile industry that you can read here) but in the briefest of summaries, I would say that truly, there were textile industries in many developing countries, Nigeria included. In fact, in Africa, Nigeria had one of the strongest textile industries. In 1987, there were about 37 textile firms, operating 716,000 spindles and 17,541 looms. And between 1985 and 1991, it recorded an annual growth of 67% growth. By any estimation, Nigeria seemed to have a very viable textile industry. However, the growth during that period was made possible by foreign (mostly Indian and Chinese) investment, which in turn was encouraged by the international textile trade regulations of the period. It was known as the Multi Fibre Agreement (MFA).
The MFA system limited the amount of textile that any single country could export to developed countries (mostly European and Northern American). This was seen primarily as a way to restrict the amount of textile China could export. Many countries, however, were not affected by the MFA system. Nigeria was one of them. Therefore, if a Chinese firm finds that there are restrictions on the amount of textile it could export from China, it could buy a Nigerian firm and any export made from that firm is not counted as part of the MFA system.
Some people have suggested that the MFA system, which was completely phased out in 2005, was partly responsible for the growth of the Nigerian textile industry in the 1980s. I should also add that it was during the same period – the 1980s – that the trade in second-hand clothing in Nigeria picked up speed. So, the textile industry was growing at the same time as the trade in second-hand clothing was.
In summary, one could say that one of the reasons that the textile industry was locally viable was because of the rules that limited the amount of clothing that certain countries that were heavy producers of textile could export to developed countries. By that same token, one can also say that it has nothing to do with second-hand clothing.
Myth Three: Second-hand clothing replaces locally produced textile products
If the argument that second-hand clothing kills local textile industries were to hold, then it would mean that second-hand clothing can replace the functions served by the clothing made by locally made textile. With examples from Nigeria, this simply is not true.
The most worn fabric in West Africa – simply called African prints – were originally produced in Europe (see the picture above). When the Nigerian textile factories were founded, some of the products they made were these kinds of fabrics. The brands that are considered of a higher quality continued to be made in Europe. Of the ones made in West Africa, the Nigerian-made fabrics were considered to be of especially high quality.
Things were to change in the 1990s when Chinese firms started exporting the same products to West Africa. Traders in the Cotonou market often told me that they used to stock Nigerian products but that they stopped doing so. The reason is simple: they could get something of similar quality in China for close to half of what they were paying on products from Nigerian factories. Naturally, a fall in the demand contributed to the decline of an already ailing industry.
I have tried to capture a very complicated topic in this short space and I am very sure that I have not touched on all the important points. For instance, I should add that poor managements, lack of infrastructure and high cost of raw materials are some of the other factors that contributed to the decline of the Nigerian textile industry. Another factor that people often forget to add is the fact that the textile industry in developed countries are so heavily subsidised that producers from developing countries can simply not compete with them.
The main task here, however, is to answer the question concerning whether or not second-hand clothing led/leads to the decline of local textile industries. I simply do not find any argument in support of that convincing.
Intern Cloud launch! Some early observations
Having found a home on the customizable social networking and discussion platform Ning, the Intern Cloud launched last week with a number of projects available for the interns to get started on. We also welcomed Eva from Serviceplan in Munich who has kindly agreed to loan her interns out to us for the pilot. Discussions with the participants via a conference call, and a meeting with Timo, Hinnerk and Pablo from MMS have already raised some very interesting points about the development of the Cloud.
The Intern Cloud as a social network?
The Ning platform allows participants to post projects and comments in the public forum of the “Discussions” board, and also to create Facebook-like profile pages, to which they can upload both photos of and information about themselves. For the interns from MMS, this public face within a social-network-like site proved an important motivator for the use of the Cloud. Timo told me that he looked forward to checking the site to see whether anyone had updated their profiles, or responded to discussions, just like the slot machine analogy used to describe Facebook by Stephen Burt in his review of The Tyranny of Email: The Four Thousand Year Journey to your Inbox by John Freeman.
Musing on the potential of the Intern Cloud as a social network, Timo, Hinnerk and Pablo considered that a valuable use of the site would be to allow the creation and development of contacts between interns. The Intern Cloud could act as a message board for interns to alert each other to new internship openings, review internships they had taken part in, or to find other interns and combine their skills for projects of their own. In this way, intern-to-intern contact can help improve the experience of career development for all those involved.
After some discussion, we came to the conclusion that the profile page would be a brilliant tool for ensuring that Intern Cloud users were responsible enough to take on important and potentially sensitive tasks for NGOs, such as maintaining their social media pages. Hinnerk suggested that interns be awarded stars which allowed them to access more challenging projects, and also raised their profile within the site, creating healthy competition among the Intern Cloud users. All agreed that a link to a CV, or perhaps to LinkedIn or Xing would be very useful in associating participants to their real-world achievements.
Motivation
While the idea of competition within the site might not be a path we necessarily want to go down, it seems vital that we consider the motivations of Intern Cloud users in order to develop more incentives for them to participate in and complete tasks. Building on Hinnerk’s idea, we could create feedback system, a little like eBay’s, which allows representatives from the NGOs to write references for the interns, and possibly to rate them on elements such as communication, attention to detail, and the ability to keep to a deadline. This system is of obvious benefit to interns, who would be able to include such references in future job applications. For their current host companies and supervisors, too, it allows more insight into the specific skills of their interns, and how they might be most effectively used within their organization.
Perhaps most important, though, would be the effect on NGOs. With the quality of the participants on the Intern Cloud ensured, NGOs will be encouraged to post more important and more interesting tasks. This will create a positive feedback cycle: the interns will be able to develop their skills at a higher level, and their reputations as effective workers will increase NGOs’ and employers’ belief in them, thus allowing them to progress further in their chosen careers.
Intern Support
Throughout our discussion, a word that came up often was ‘quality’. It is important that the interns produce work of a sufficiently high standard so that NGOs continue to post interesting and educational projects that allow the interns to develop their skills. The role of maintaining this level of quality is largely down to the interns themselves – they know their own abilities and availability better than others, and with a reference system in place, should strive to produce high quality work.
Eva of Serviceplan, however, suggested that the project would benefit from weekly meetings between supervisors within host companies and their interns. She wants to be able to support the interns in their choice of projects, and, while they are very busy at Servicplan, knows that her role in explicitly allowing them to work on Intern Cloud projects will be vital for their success. Eva is also considering encouraging Serviceplan’s permanent staff to act as consultants for the interns on certain projects, a move that would definitely set the bar high for participating interns and motivate them to participate.
Cooperation
How the Intern Cloud progresses over the next few months isn’t entirely possible to predict. It will depend on the projects that continue to be posted, the ability of the interns to complete these tasks, and the quality of the work produced. What the first week has demonstrated, though, is the importance of continuing cooperation and discussion between the three groups involved – interns, supervisors, and NGOs. The Intern Cloud (at least at the moment) is a fairly complex network, in which participants have clear and different roles and skills. This will hopefully be its most successful characteristic, as it continues to provide learning opportunities for interns, their host organizations, and NGOs.
In discussing the Intern Cloud as a social network, the question of ‘critical mass’ was raised. An important next step in the pilot might be to experiment further with the balance of interns and NGOs. More interns, and thus more interaction will undoubtedly make the site more ‘sticky’, given Timo’s comments, but would there need to be more diverse projects? And what happens if interns begin to compete for the same tasks?
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas – get in touch with me at jackorlik [at] gmail.com. Thanks to Mike Bright from HelpAtHome.org for your comments after the last post.
What happens when your used clothes arrive in West Africa?
By Olumide Abimbola
In the last blog, I discussed the second-hand clothing industry in Europe. In this, I am going to discuss what happens to the pieces of second-hand clothing once they get to developing countries. Like in the previous post, I will use examples from the place that I know best – West Africa.
Bales of secondhand clothing in a warehouse in Cotonou, Benin
After the pieces of clothing have been cleaned, sorted and baled in Britain or Germany, they are bought by West African second-hand clothing merchants. The pieces of clothing are normally packed in bales, and the price of the bales varies according to the quality of the content.
Many of these merchants would have at some point visited the offices of the exporter to make sure that the quality of the second-hand clothing is good enough for their market. They would also have agreed on the cost of bales of second-hand clothing. Once a cost has been agreed upon, the West African merchant sends the money to the exporter and in about a month or two his consignment of second-hand clothing would arrive at the port of his country.
Used clothes for the poor or design-conscious university students?
Many people often think that the only reason Africans buy second-hand clothing is because of poverty. This is actually not true. As a university student in Nigeria, I remember that many students who want designer labels would normally buy from second-hand clothing shops. It is widely known that because of the high cost of Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein shirts, clothing sellers rarely import them into the country. What one would find instead are cheap imitations, which are normally low quality products imported from Asia. The quality of the imitations are often so bad that once one sees them one would immediately know that it is not the real thing. Young university students therefore prefer to buy the ones that are sold in second-hand shops. There, they are sure that they are buying ‘original’, because even if someone else has used them, they come from Europe where, they assume, only originals are available. In fact, someone told me that the fact that they have been used and are still in very good shape proves their quality.
Opening a bale
I also remember that some students used to sell those pieces of clothing on the university campus. They would pay the traders who sell second-hand clothing in the market to be allowed to pick the best pieces of clothing from the bales – these would normally be designer labels. After picking, they would wash and iron them before bringing them to be sold on the university campus.
Some traders who sell used clothing with designer labels also sell them at shops in the parts of Lagos where banks, telecoms and oil companies have their headquarters. Those shops are normally patronised by young, corporate office workers who also want to buy good quality clothing but cannot afford to patronise the few shops that sell imported designer labels from Europe and North America.
Also, I know of many mothers who say that they buy second-hand clothing for their children because they do not think it makes much sense to buy new clothing that the children would quickly outgrow.
Bestseller: the bra
One item of second-hand clothing that is always in high demand is bra. Exporters in Europe say that they cannot fully satisfy the demand for them, and importers in West Africa say that it is the first thing to sell out in any consignment they import. When I asked women who buy second-hand bra why they do so their answer was very simple: the quality is normally very good and they are normally affordable.
As you have seen, some of the pieces of second-hand clothing that are collected, sorted and baled in Europe and North America are bought by second-hand clothing merchants from West Africa. These merchants sell them to retailers, who in turn sell them to consumers. Also, the reason that West Africans buy second-hand clothing varies. Of course, many people buy second-hand clothing because they are poor and cannot afford new clothing; but many others buy it because they believe that in a country where most of the new clothing comes from Asia, the second-hand clothing shop is the only place where they are sure to find good quality clothing or original designer labels.
Next week, I will discuss the argument that the international trade in second-hand clothing kills local textile industries. Using the example of Nigeria, I will examine whether this is true or not.
Olumide Abimbola recently defended a PhD dissertation on the international trade in second-hand clothing at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. He did fieldwork on the textile recycling industry in Britain, and the second-hand clothing markets in West Africa. He blogs at http://www.loomnie.com
Every cloud…
Here is an update from Jack Orlik about the Intern Cloud
Releasing an idea to a wider circle can be both challenging and hugely rewarding – input from others has the potential to either contribute greatly to a project, or to divert and derail it from its original aims. Last week saw the launch of the Intern Cloud from beyond the confines of the betterplace lab minds, and the beginning of its development as a fast-feedback pilot programme.
Joana of the lab organized a meeting at the office of the MMS brand consultancy. Those present were Nina, an MMS partner, Timo, an intern there, Torsten of the hugely imaginative NGO Breaking the Ice, Joana, representing both betterplace and the Humboldt Viadrina School of Governance and I, from the marketing and media agency Red Onion. Having sent out a fairly fluid meeting agenda, and a similarly open ‘mission plan’, I was worried that, perhaps, our collaborators may have construed the original idea in a way that would not benefit interns, businesses and organizations equally, as I hoped, but instead have swung it towards their more personal requirements.
Soon after the beginning of the meeting, however, it became clear that we were all on the same page – Torsten and Joana talking of giving interesting and engaging tasks to the interns, such as researching and submitting in-depth papers on social media and branding, and Nina and Timo speaking with excitement of giving the interns the responsibility of working with real clients. Particularly interesting to hear was how participation with the Intern Cloud might be structured within individual agencies: Timo and Nina suggested that one intern in each company should take charge of the Intern Cloud lead their colleagues in the projects they select.
Submitting a project
We discussed the aims of the pilot programme, its potential limits, possible other collaborators, as well as the more nitty gritty stuff of how the NGOs might submit projects they need help on, and how they might be presented to the interns and their supervisors.
Here, Google Documents provides a fantastic solution. It is possible to create a web based form which, filled out, is converted into a spreadsheet containing the answers of each respondent. Perhaps one improvement, as Torsten pointed out, would be to allow NGOs to see a receipt of their submission, as currently it is only possible to present them with a standardized thank you text.
A site for collaboration
Moving to the presentation of the projects, I think it will be invaluable to present the pilot, and the Intern Cloud in general, as an ongoing conversation between all those involved. For this reason, I originally considered using the excellent micro-blogging platform tumblr, which allows online collaboration between users.
Returning to Google, however, I found that their Sites tool could be perfect – it has a modular construction allowing the webmaster to insert widgets such as ‘Conversation Element’, which lets participants comment in an IM style application. Overall, the site feels more like a wiki than a blog, which would be very well suited to the initial pilot programme for the Intern Cloud. At this time in particular, collaborators need to be able to spot problems and discuss solutions as quickly as possible.
The main page, with a general comments board at the bottom
A project page, including discussion widgets
The project submission form, embedded into the Google site
However, I have had some problems with Google’s tool, as it seems that non-participants have somehow managed to post on conversation elements restricted to the site itself. Trying to alter the layout, too, I found that Google sites can be fairly temperamental. If anyone has any suggestions for a more suitable platform I would love to hear from you.
We are also looking for other collaborators to work with us on the pilot within the Berlin area – if you would like to get involved, please contact either me at jackorlik[at]gmail.com, or Joana Breidenbach at jb[at]betterplace.org.
Many thanks to Torsten, Timo, Nina and Joana for their help and brilliant ideas, and to those who emailed after my last post, particularly to Hannes Jähnert, who, I have noticed, has written a blog post about us.
Exposing the used clothing market
This post was written by our guestblogger Olumide Abimbola.
Have you ever wondered what happens to the clothing you donate to charity? I mean the ones you either take into the charity shops that dot the streets of German cities, or that you pack into little bags and stuff down old clothing bins by the roadside. If you are like some of the people I have talked with you probably imagine that the second-hand clothing you donate go to poor people in Germany. Or, like others, that your clothing donation is given for free to poor people in other parts of the world, probably in Africa or South Asia.
What I am going to try to do in this series of blog posts is to give you a snapshot of the international movement of second-hand clothing. I will invite you to witness how second-hand clothing connects Europeans and Americans to Africans in ways that are not so apparent, partly because second-hand clothing collectors are not always very eager to let people understand what they do with what they collect.
To kick off the series, I will start with a short description of what happens to your old clothes when they are still in Europe. I am more familiar with the British old clothes industry so I will open with that. After that, I will discuss what happens to German old clothes with the example of the most visible old clothes collectors in Germany.
Britain
In Britain, quite a number of charity organizations make a lot of their running cost from donations of second-hand clothing. Some, like Oxfam Great Britain, rely partly on walk-ins – whereby donors of second-hand clothing take their pieces of clothing into a charity store – and partly on collections in their roadside bins. Needless to say, not all of the clothing that is taken into a charity shop is sold there. Most of the charities that rely on walk-ins sell off a large percentage of their collection to those who are described in Britain as “commercial textile recyclers”. These are commercial organizations that collect, sort, bale and export second-hand clothing. Jmp Wilcox is an example of such an organisation.
The most sophisticated charities have their own registered sorting and exporting firms. What is not sold in their stores – usually most of the collections – is sent to their registered trading subsidiaries, where the pieces of clothing are packed and baled for exportation. Oxfam does this through Oxfam Wastesaver, and Salvation Army through Salvation Army Trading Company.
Sorting factory, Oxfam Wastesaver in Huddersfield, England.
Some charities give franchise to “charity fundraisers” like Clothes Aid. These organizations collect second-hand clothing on behalf of charities, and pay the charities a certain percentage of the value of the collection. All these organisations – commercial textile recyclers, charities, and charity fundraisers – also make collections at areas where English municipalities designate as recycling areas. They export bales of second-hand clothing to East European, South Asian and African countries.
In Germany - AWO Kreisverband
One of the popular second-hand clothing collectors in Germany is the labour union AWO Kreisverband Bonn / Rhein-Sieg e.v, through their AWO Altkleiderprojekt. You have probably seen their bins on the streets. The information on their website says that their main reason for collecting second-hand clothing is in order to create jobs for people with disabilities. Their workers regularly open their roadside bins up and pack the clothing into trucks that would take them to their sorting factory in Siegburg, where people with disability, who might otherwise not be able to secure any kind of job, sort, wash and sell the clothing.
A press report on them from 2006 says that about 770 pounds of old clothing and shoes is collected every month in the containers. The best of these clothing (about 1.5% of all the collections made, is sold in AWO second-hand shops in Germany. About 5% of the volume collected is sent to Poland, where the clothing is sorted and sold in Eastern Europe. The rest is either broken down into yarns to be used for the production of other clothing, or, if they are of low quality, it is turned into rags that are sometimes used for industrial purposes.
Humana
Probably the most popular second-hand clothing collector in Germany is Humana Kleidersammlung GmbH, a subsidiary of the worldwide organisation Humana People to People, which is in turn a subsidiary of Tvind, a Danish organisation that is sometimes described as a cult, a political organisation or a charitable organisation. The names Humana and Tvind generate a lot of passion, both positive and negative. There are websites devoted to exposing Humana as a cult whose main purpose is to enrich its senior members, the UK Guardian has done an investigative report on them, and the BBC has done a documentary seeking to understand them. Also, Jes Fabricius Møller, an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, maintains a frequently updated blog on the actions of the worldwide organisation.
From what I could see on the website of Humana Kleidersammlung GmbH, the German arm of the international used clothing collection subsidiary of Humana, a large percentage of the clothing they collect is sold to Humana Second-Hand-Kleidung GmbH, another subsidiary of the Humana People to People worldwide organisation. Humana Second-Hand-Kleidung sells what they buy from Humana Kleidersammlung in one of their fifteen shops in Germany. What is not sold to Humana Second-Hand-Kleidung is exported to Eastern European countries and African countries like Mozambique, Angola, Togo, Tunisia and Ivory Coast. In Mozambique, the clothing is sold to ADPP-Mozambique, another subsidiary of the Humana People to People. Although they do not say that the clothing is sold to Mozambicans, I would assume that this is the case, from what I know of the second-hand clothing trade in Africa.
Why is it important to know?
I hope I have been able to give an idea of what happens to old clothes in Europe. It should by now be evident that it is not very easy to find out exactly what happens with the clothing, as the industry is not the most transparent industry.
As you will find out in subsequent blog posts, I am not at all against the international trade in second-hand clothing. I think that it is good that clothes that are still good enough to be worn are not condemned to landfills, where they contribute to environmental pollution. It is also good that people who are unable to afford new clothing, both in Europe and in developing countries, are able to buy used, affordable clothing. I however think that the same argument in support of the rights of the taxpayer to know what is done with their tax money applies here. People who donate clothing should know, clearly, where their donation goes, and what the money that is made from the sales is used for. Apart from this, the suspicion that the whole old clothes collection is a scam does not help anyone.
Olumide Abimbola recently handed in a PhD dissertation on the international trade in second-hand clothing at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. He did fieldwork on the textile recycling industry in Britain, and the second-hand clothing markets in West Africa. He blogs at www.loomnie.com
The Intern Cloud – a pilot project for micro-volunteering
Today we would like to introduce you to Jack Orlik, a new member of the betterplace lab network. Jack is a chaser of ideas. In his second year at university, he set up an arts society, Comma, to inspire students to be more creative. In his third, he edited the Isis and helped out on a creative journal called the mays. Having left Oxford, he headed to Berlin to work on the TEDx conference and experience first-hand the global phenomenon of ‘ideas worth spreading’. This is where we met and started collaborating on Jacks fascinating idea of the Intern Cloud. A seemingly constant intern, he draws on all his experiences, using them to solve problems and create movement and change. He hopes to eventually get a real job.
Guest post by Jack Orlik
The Intern Cloud
Most people in media will, by now, have participated in an internship. Internships are fantastic opportunities for young people to learn the ropes in sectors that are traditionally difficult to enter. For employers, they offer the chance of training up and finding new employees at little or no cost. Coming into a vibrant working office is a brilliant experience, and in an ideal internship, the intern will be used to his or her full potential, contributing to the running of the company and its projects, and learning a great deal.
Unfortunately, the fact that it is a workplace, and not a school, means that only a limited amount of time and effort can be devoted to teaching interns.
As a result, the workload for interns can be fairly sporadic, with periods of great involvement interspersed with long, wasted stretches of internet surfing. Interns who arrive at a time when an office is very busy can find that they are too inexperienced to contribute meaningfully to the company that they are working for. It is not possible for them to be given any real responsibility, and, unexercised, they are unable to learn new skills or demonstrate their aptitude. Interns coming into a particularly efficient agency, or working during a quiet period in a company’s cycle, are confronted with a similar problem – the company has no resources or interest in teaching interns, and they are left to their own devices.
This situation is not beneficial to anyone. Interns, used correctly, are a valuable resource – young people, brimming with fresh ideas and skills that they are itching to put to the test. It is wasteful for them to sit at a desk, waiting and hoping that there might be something for them to do.
We think we may have a solution. We add a third player – NGOs and non-profits – to the internship relationship. When they have a free moment, interns log on to something we’re calling the ‘Intern Cloud’. The Intern Cloud will be a platform on which NGOs and non-profits can post various projects they need help in, but do not have the resources to complete. Interns participating in such projects can put their time, skills, minds and computers to use, constantly learning and contributing to worthwhile causes. This creates a momentum in thought and action that can only be beneficial to their work in the ‘host’ company they’re interning for. Back in the host company, the interns’ supervisors can see the skills they’re developing and put them to use themselves.
Everyone’s happy. Employers put their interns to the test, seeing how and where they might be useful; interns are stretched, and feel valued and rewarded; and NGOs and non-profits benefit from the ideas and hard work of a group of individuals desperate to make a difference and earn vital work experience.
Watch this pilot and be part of it
The Intern Cloud has the potential to change the way young people learn and develop their skills. It should improve the way companies hire new talent, and give NGOs a fighting chance in a world of limited resources. It could be big, but it needs to be applied and tested. Watch this space as the betterplace lab pilots the Intern Cloud, and discovers what makes a good internship into a great experience for all.
And if you are interested in joining us for the 3 month pilot phase, please do and drop Jack (jackorlik(at)gmail.com) or Joana (jb(at)betterplace.org) a note.