What does it mean to do good better? We all have an instinct to do good, to help others. We want to make sad people happy, sick people healthy, and lonely people feel loved.
We want to reach out across the world to help the hungry, stop violence and suffering, and keep people from dying from disease. The problem is that even though we want to help, we don't always know the right way to lend a hand. The good news is that like any other skill, you can learn how to do good. It's important to remember that we're always learning and growing in our approach to helping others. Consider, for example, what often happens when we hear about refugees around the world.
We think, these people have just lost everything. I should send them some of what I have. So we ship off some old clothes, sometimes things that refugees wouldn't be able to use at all.
We want to be generous, but while cleaning out the back of our closet might feel good, it doesn't always do the good that needs doing. Thankfully, doing good is something that we can learn and improve at. This is true for helping our friends, neighbors, and community, or for reaching out globally to attack major issues like poverty, climate risk, homelessness, access to education and healthcare, and more. And as a community of concerned citizens around the world, we always have opportunities to improve and learn together.
Our world needs changemakers and organizations that can face these tough problems. How can you become one of these changemakers? While good intentions and financial resources are important, there's another piece that helps us make the most of our social impact endeavors.
Doing good better. And that's why we're here. In this three-part mini-series, we're going to highlight three big ideas.
Why doing good better matters, how to love the problem, and how to test your idea to get feedback so you can learn and improve as you go. So what is social impact? We like the definition from philanthropist and social innovator Sir Ronald Cohen. Social impact refers to the improvement in the well-being of individuals and communities and the enhancement in their ability to lead productive lives.
At BYU's Ballard Center for Social Impact, we've spent over 20 years developing and teaching students these principles. We hope that by the end of this video, you'll come to understand and to love our mantra, Do Good Better, and that you'll use it in your efforts to improve our world. Maybe you're thinking, wait, there are so many people and organizations focused on helping others.
Isn't that effort enough? If someone's heart is in the right place, every little bit counts, right? Often, we assume that when we step in to help that anything and everything we do will be worthwhile.
We see our help as a gift. But not all help is actually helpful. You've probably been on the receiving end of bad help more than once. But despite our own experiences, we forget that there are ways that we could fail to help, or even make things worse.
Let's pause and think about this question. What could be some of the reasons that the money, time, and skills already being put towards social problems aren't actually working? We want to help you get a better handle on doing good better by looking at three examples of social impact initiatives that are at different stages in the learning process that we all have to go through as changemakers.
Along the way, we'll hear from Kelly Honaker, Director of Principal Giving at Water for People, a non-profit devoted to providing sustainable access to drinking water. safe bathrooms, and hygiene infrastructure to populations in need. As we go, keep the definition of social impact in mind.
How are these groups increasing the well-being of individuals and communities? How could they do good better? Here's our first example. In the 1970s, a huge group of non-profit organizations, including UNICEF, saw that people in Bangladesh needed better access to clean water.
They decided that the perfect solution would be to go in and dig more wells. More wells means more access to clean water, right? What these organizations didn't realize was that the water table in Bangladesh was contaminated in many areas with arsenic. Many of the 10 million new water wells ended up poisoning hundreds of thousands of people.
Today, people throughout Bangladesh still suffer from arsenic poisoning, which halts brain development in children, contributes to heart disease, and causes cancer. As many as 43,000 Bangladeshi people die per year because of it. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see where all of these organizations could have improved. They didn't take the time to thoroughly investigate and measure the results of their strategy, or find ways to mitigate the unfortunate side effects. People suffered and are continuing to suffer as a result.
To be clear, it's not like these well diggers didn't do any research. It was a nationwide initiative that brought together the resources of global non-profits, the Bangladesh government, and local communities. The British Geological Survey tested the water. But for whatever reason, they didn't test the water for arsenic.
The case of the Bangladesh water wells is a tragedy, but the people involved in those efforts wanted to do good. It was a lack of knowledge about best practices, not a lack of good intentions, that led to bad outcomes. Kelly Onaker describes how Water for People came to understand that they faced a similar lack of knowledge. Like the majority of water projects, unfortunately, there were high failure rates.
When entering a community as an outsider, doing a one-off project, and then exiting, you have no understanding and you've not equipped the community with the capability or understanding of what the system is, how to maintain it, even why it's important, let alone with the resources to keep it going over the long term. So it's not good stewarding of our donors funding. It's a disservice to the communities. This is just not how we want to go forward.
Water for People recognized how popular wash interventions like the one-and-done well digging, were generally ineffective. They resolved to dive deep into their target issue to understand how to address root causes of wash-related deaths, illness, and other challenges. Let's take a look at a second example and see what practices we can adopt to improve our social impact work. There are many organizations that work to provide clean water to developing countries by digging wells in areas where the water isn't contaminated. This is a good solution for those areas, right?
Let's find out. Imagine you travel to the Kenya drylands on a trip with a friend. While you're there, you meet some people who live in a local village. You notice that your new friends and their families have to walk several miles every day just to collect clean water.
That's a long way they have to walk to get water, you say to your fellow traveler. Do you know what we should do? We should see if we can raise money to come back and build them a well. Of course, this idea isn't new.
People living in Africa, as well as Bangladesh and other parts of the world, are no strangers to outsider humanitarians coming in to dig wells. In 2009, the International Institute for Environment and Development reviewed spending on rural water projects in Africa. They found that around 50,000 water points in parts of the continent had failed.
The cost? A quarter of a billion dollars, as well as millions of adults and children exposed to waterborne diseases from impure alternative sources. And that exposure?
which the World Health Organization categorizes as one of many water, sanitation, and hygiene, or wash, issues, is serious. In a 2016 study, the WHO found that an estimated 829,000 wash attributable deaths and 49.8 million DALYs, or disability-adjusted life years, occurred from diarrheal diseases, equivalent to 60% of all diarrhea deaths. In children under 5 years, 297,000 wash attributable diarrhea deaths occurred, representing 5.3% of all deaths in this age group. Jamie Skinner, the author of the 2009 IED paper, said, The water community has often focused on building infrastructure rather than on maintaining it. It's not enough to drill a well and walk away.
Water projects need to support long-term maintenance needs and engage local communities. Without this, it's like throwing money down the drain. What flaws did you see in this second approach? What would you do differently?
In the case of the Kenya water wells, we again see groups of people with good intentions working to help others. While the negative outcomes perhaps aren't as extreme as those seen in Bangladesh, the solution still falls flat because they didn't understand what long-term measures were necessary to really solve the water access problem in Africa. Remember what Kelly said about water for people's less than ideal solutions?
They pivoted by committing to a new mission statement, Everyone Forever, meaning water for everyone, forever. Instead of building as many wells and other water points as fast as they could, Water for People committed to building up areas they call districts, so that the communities there can sustain and manage long-term water access. We would sign agreements with the local governance of that district, relationships with the community, being completely transparent.
and develop partnership and then commit to working in that given location until everyone had access to sustainable services for water and sanitation in such a way that we deemed they could last forever. Making this shift wasn't easy. The organization had to scale back, focusing on a few key areas of the world where they can make a lasting impact, as opposed to accomplishing temporary success all across the world. Again, here's another case where doing what feels good isn't necessarily what makes the most difference in people's lives. And these are just two examples of a pattern that we can see throughout the social impact sector.
The world is filled with social problem-solving groups and people that generally fit into one of three categories, two of which we've talked about already. Number one, our worst-case scenario, where some organizations, like the well-diggers in Bangladesh, don't take the time to fully understand the problem and end up harming the people that they meant to help. Number two, other organizations might do some good, but because they still don't spend time asking deep questions about the issue, their solution falls flat.
Like the wells in Africa that went into disrepair, or like the organizations that focus on water access without accounting for hygiene and sanitation issues. The third category of social impact organizations is the type that the Ballard Center inspires its students to join or create. Teams that recognize the importance of careful research, on-the-ground investigation, focusing on the needs and interests of people, and partnering with them to implement long-term, sustainable solutions.
Water for People is a great example of this do-good-better philosophy. Kelly told us how Water for People drilled down in understanding their problem more deeply. They also committed to yearly reflection sessions involving local leaders from their organization, government officials, water companies, and the most important stakeholders of all, the members of the affected communities. And this highlights another important lesson.
The most meaningful way to help people is to partner with them in helping themselves. Honaker says it best. We don't blast our name on any water systems. We don't brand ourselves. These aren't ours.
The water systems belong to the community. They're intended to be owned and operated by the community, by local government and the municipal services. And I think when there's ownership, there's a natural sense of responsibility that comes. And so that's been.
really central to our work and trying not to posture this is something that we have done for you, but you have done for yourselves. Water for People does a lot that makes them incredible examples of doing good better. But here's three specific changes they made that we find especially helpful. One, Water for People was honest in evaluating their work. They realized their initial approach to addressing wash issues wasn't working and they resolved to change.
And as they changed, they used their reflection sessions to hold their own feet to the fire. Two, the organization focused their efforts in specific areas where they could have the most impact, even if that meant leaving some other parts of the world where they couldn't feasibly make that same difference. Three, they involved the people affected by their problem.
If you don't take anything else away from this video, remember this. Social impact solutions become sustainable when the people impacted are stewards and owners of the solution. Hopefully, all of these examples have shown you how digging deeper into a problem requires research, understanding, time, and collaboration, and have put you on the right path to doing good better. If you've made it with us this far, congratulations!
You are now officially part of our community of changemakers, working to make a difference in the world and to do good better. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to be the first to know about the new video resources that we share, and let us know in the comments what else you'd like to learn about next.