mtnfund

Hi Chris and thanks for the PM. I don't have any beef with any of the A's. As far as I can tell they all do a good job at what they do and deserve to be supported. I think the industry could do a much better job at looking outside of its own borders though. Climbing for instance doesn't just take place here but is a global sport. There is a lot for the industry to gain in extending its reach beyond our own borders. Orgs like KCS for example, create a lot of goodwill that enhances the image of the outdoor industry in Nepal. Being a good global citizen is important. If the industry is going to promote the recreational opportunities in other countries we could do a better job of giving back to those countries. It is interesting that there are quite a few organizations like KCS that are run by individuals from the US outdoor industry but not, so far as I have been able to discover anyway, much support going from the outdoor industry as a whole to those organizations and those countries. This is a global industry with product sales and use all over the world. I am suggesting the industry do a better job of recognizing that and re-align its social programs to reflect the global nature of its business. All the A's, with no disrespect to them, are about taking care of our own at home. That's a good start, time for us to reach out more though. Just an opinion.

Those kinds of stories are true. A couple of years ago I brought a group from Engineers Without Borders to a village in Nepal to look at the stove issue. At a nearby clinic we support we were seeing too may negative health impacts from the smoke in the air due to the living room campfires most homes used. What we learned is that it was ok to vent the smoke out, so long as we only vented it up into the attic and not clear out through the roof. In the case of these villages they stored food in the attic and the smoke kept it free of pests. In Gatlang which is near one of our health clinics in Nepal a group came and built a 3 stall toilet for the village. They didn't spend much time talking to the village about this idea though and that's where it all went wrong. The people of Gatlang had never had a toilet. They went in the fields and used rocks for toilet paper. It did not take long before all three holes were filled with rocks and the toilet is still there, filled with rocks and doing nothing. Cultural issues enter in as well as you have noted. Most all of Nepal follows the Hindu caste system, even in villages like this that are not Hindu. Tamang are not low enough in the caste system (they are low, just not dalit) so cleaning and caring for a toilet is not their place in life. We'd have had to import a dalit to the community to maintain the toilet and that would mean going to Kathmandu, finding a dalit, convincing them to move to Gatlang and then putting some sort of public funding program in place to pay the dalit to maintain the toilet. Too often I see projects take the classic - study, implement and leave approach. The toilet people did that. They studied that were no toilets, built one and left. Too bad too as the next bunch that wanted to install toilets had a hard time of it. The villagers felt ripped off from the first go around and would only accept individual toilets for each family. Practical Action Nepal was putting some in last time I was there in March. Problem is they don't have enough resources to give one to everybody so some will have and some will not. That's probably going to be a source of trouble in the community at some point in time. Funding sources make things like this problematic for the nonprofits though. They like hit and run tactics. It's hard to find foundations who will support staying long term in an area and working slowly through one problem after another. They prefer the 3 year plan at best. Year One - study the needs of an area, prepare a plan to correct, Year Two- implement the plan and Year 3 - leave and start over somewhere else. If the team in the post above hadn't gone back to check those outhouses would still be in pieces on the ground. I see those projects all over the place. If groups don't keep going back and providing the education to make them viable what happens is villages end up feeling ripped off and after a while they don't even want to discuss projects, they feel too betrayed, too many times. That 3 year plan is pretty deeply ingrained in the donor community though, its hard to find long term support to stick with something. In Mountain Fund's case, it has been possible only because a majority of our budget is from individual donors, not foundations. That's made it possible, so far, to stay in an area and work through the issues that are certain to come up once you do one thing. I'd love to hear more of your fathers stories, good lessons to learn there I bet.

I am very interested in that, if you see something particularly good please let me know, and thanks.

I would like to clarify something about this post. I will take responsibility for any lack of clarity that leads you to conclude this is about deriding any other charity. It is not. They do what they do and they do it well. But let's not be coy about this either. If you gather canned goods at Thanksgiving and give them to the Salvation Army to feed the poor that is charity. If you serve a big turkey to your family, that's having dinner. My issue is only with the practice of a great many outdoor companies (and not the charities) is that are keen to use places like Nepal (or insert Peru, Kazakhstan etc) for the purposes of a photo op showing their products being used but reluctant to spend the money those products earn on the people of those countries. That they are free to choose to do so is clear. Does that make it right? I don't think so. If these countries are good enough to use for marketing, they are good enough to make more investment in too. If they are nothing more than a convenient place to show off your products but somehow not a worthwhile place to invest your money, then I think we've done a grave disservice to the people who live there. Exploitation may sound harsh, but is it really? If a toothpaste company shows me a bikini clad woman using their toothpaste in an effort to get me to buy that toothpaste is that exploiting women? I think it is, frankly. If you show me your gear at base camp Everest but through your corporate giving practices exclude the inhabitants of the area from the process then I think you've tried to dupe me. I don't care who they give their money to, that's their business. Just don't try to sell me a bill of goods about it.

Jon does have a valid point. Saving lives will lead to greater population and that is going to have its own price to pay. Things about life are never one-size-fits-all. It really takes a very wholistic view of these issues to be helpful and not create one problem while attempting to solve another. We can look to certain benchmarks though in trying to balance the needs of people and the ecosystems. They aren't perfect either but create a loose framework at least. It sounds terrible to say this but there benchmarks for things like infant mortality. World Health and the UN track and measure that as a way to determine if aid programs are working. There are accepted levels of infant mortality. As bad as that sounds at first blush there are accepted levels for just about any of the leading causes of death in any country. Until levels are reduced to the accceptable range I am not sure anyone has asked, and then what yet? So, bringing infant mortality down in the developing world is one goal. It should be looked upon as a goal that must take place within a larger set of goals though and not happen by itself. As Jon points out, lower infant mortality without other goals, such as family planning, education, job creation and protection of the natural resources could do more harm in the long run. Nonprofits need to adopt the creed of the medical profession and first do no harm. None of this will happen overnight and if it does, well that's a problem too. The places we are talking about here, Nepal, Africa etc are called developing countries for a reason. The basic services for health, food security, education and jobs doesn't exist on a large scale. Inch by inch they can be introduced as the local community requires. Everything has be driven by the local people. The ones I see all the time do want many of the same things we do. They want their children to live, they want enough food, they want a clean and healthy environment. But the rate at which this things can be introduced into a community is an ever-changing thing. It's all tied together. Healthcare without education isn't sustainable. I see that one all the time. We can treat for parasites easy enough. The hard part is the education process on how not to get them in the first place. To us it sounds so simple, boil the water, use some iodine and problem solved. The primary villages where I work are living as if it is 2-300 years ago. Some of the concepts for public health are not in those cultures yet. A hundred years ago we didn't have the flu figured out and millions died from it. We had all sorts of strange notions about what caused it and how to treat it. So, education has to go hand in hand with healthcare for lasting change to take place. If you educate children you have to be able to create work or they will leave the village and go to the towns. The village then has a brain drain problem. That takes programs like micro-finance to jump start some sort of an economic base that will enable educated children to stay in the village, and it goes on and on like that. One day at a time, one step at a time. We are not so different in some ways. We have health issues that we have not gotten a handle on, such as diabetes. We have environmental issues that we don't fully understand. It's all a learning and growing process. We do come from a world where the water is safe to drink and human waste can be disposed of without tainting the water supply. Our issues just take place on a different plane of technology. We are very fortunate. I am not sure that if you have not been to some of these places you can really get all this. It is all unbelievable from where we sit. Diarrhea is the cause of death for 1.6 million people a year in the world. That's damn hard to understand or grasp I think. 25,000 people a day die from hunger. How can that be? That's the entire population of the small town I grew up in dying every day from hunger. I am not sure most of us can do anything with that information in our brains. It's numbers, big numbers of people dying from things we just cannot relate to. Before I started spending so much in these very poor places I couldn't do anything with that information really. What the heck could I do? Too big a problem. I now have names, faces and places though. I can grasp this one family at a time. The overall facts, the 1.6 million or the 25,000 still just are not real for me. I don't know how to make them real for you. That's how I got into this conversation in the first place. How does one go about making real things that by their very nature the average thinking person just cannot bring into the focus of reality. How on earth do you get to where the concept of 1.6 million people a day dying from something like diarrhea is real? I mean really, that just isn't supposed to happen is it? I do think all this is somehow our problem though. We are all human beings. I don't think I can count my own life as a success while I know others are barely able to hang onto life. I think for me having children had a lot to do with my thinking on that. I couldn't imagine a life where I was unable to provide the most basic things like clean water and enough food for my children and had to routinely stand by and watch them die. I don't think that in the villages where I spend most of my time there is a single family that has not lost at least one child. How hard that's gotta be. It too goes on the list called I can't fathom it. No parent should have to fathom such a thing though.

Racism? Are you fucking joking me? You GET REAL! Why does everyone believe we need to "Westernificate" everything. Disease? Who brought it there? We did. They seemed to take a shit no problem before, what has changed? If they want these things then fine, but forcing it on society is another thing completely. If they really want hospitals and such there is a great solution... MOVE TO A TOWN OR CITY WITH A HOSPITAL! These people aren't stuck there, they choose to be there and live that way. Actually, a lot of them are stuck there. Nepal, for example is 85% rural substinence farming. There are few cities and no jobs to be had in the cities. Poor farmers who feed their families with an average land holding of about an acre don't have the option of moving to city. Yes, they were able to "shit" as you put it long before we arrived. As the population density in the villages has increased the human waste problem has grown as well. In a couple of the villages we tested the water and every single water tap was contaminated by human waste. Drinking that water leads to very high rates of intestinal parasites which in turn weaken both pregnant mothers and young children significantly. A mother weakend from such illness is at very high risk of an unsucessful pregnancy and the child at high risk for death before age five. Most of the illness we see was not brought in from outside the villages but is a direct result of extreme poverty and ignorance.

Re: our involvement, food, leave no trace and Africa. Good points raised in all those posts and issues that should be considered for sure. William Easterly's latest book "White Man's Burden" is a good read on the question of when we in the west should get involved, and should not. It is also a pretty damning case study of how our involvement has not been productive. According to Easterly, one of the greatest flaws in our attempts to "help" has been to cut ourselves off from feedback of the very people we intend to help, the poor. Easterly argues quite well that too much aid has been measured not on the outcomes but on the inputs. So long as we, according to Easterly, can point to a large dollar amount of aid going in, we can avoid too much scrutiny of how effective that aid is in solving the problems of the poor it was meant for. Anyway, it's a good read on the topic. The issues we at MF work on are ones brought to us by local organizations in the country. We are not in the business of telling people in a country such as Nepal what they should or should not want. (It is too late on the cell phones though, they are aleady everywhere in huge numbers. I don't think text-messages have caught on yet, though by the time I return this fall, that may have changed.) If a Nepali organization asks for help that is another matter. It's their issue and the ideas and approaches are being driven by local people. Our intent is that the poor who are the targets of the programs have a direct line of feedback to us and can speak to the effectiveness of the programs. That can be more difficult to do than it sounds though. It is all to easy to hear what you want to hear, or for a group of villagers to tell you what they sense you want to hear, as is true in all conversations, message boards being no exception. As for poverty it is true that Africa has deeper poverty. We do work with one group who advocates for porters in Tanzania and another working with women in Uganda. That said, 7 out of 10 of the poorest people in the world actually live in Southeast Asia. The gross numbers for poverty in that part of the world are higher than in Africa. Still the poverty is deeper in Africa by which I mean the poor there are indeed poorer than the poor in Southeast Asia. When we are talking about groups of people that live on under $2.00 a day in both locations though, I don't know that it makes too much difference. Both Africa and Southeast Asia are extremely poor. Parts of Central Asia are likewise very poor. Last item from above is negative impact by climbers. I don't think that is much of an issue with the possible exception of the porter industry. From what I have heard, or seen myself there has been a lot of progress in the area of climbers being responsible. The porter issue is difficult. Without tourists there would not be jobs. With tourism there are jobs but often the porter ends up with the short end of the stick and isn't paid as he/she should be. Loads are not kept with standards that most of the industry agrees are reasonable. It's not a case of climbers setting the wages either. It is the local guide, for the most part, that does it to his own, so-to-speak. What we can do though is question the trekking company and the guides about the wages and loads and advocate for better treatment. It is a market driven issue to a great extent. Competition is high to book treks (and climbs) and that leads to a price war in which the lowest man on the ladder (the porter) often takes the brunt of the price war. If a price seems too good to be true, often it is being made good by the short changing of the porter. That holds true for Peru and Tanzania as well. Continued awareness on the part of the consumer is needed to send the message that while price is indeed important so is the welfare of the porter and if cheap price means exploitation of porters that isn't going to fly. Unless and until the in-country outfitters sense that their practices are being watched and questioned, there is little motivation to do anything but work off of price alone. thanks

Did it sound as if I were dismissing your comments? Sorry, I am not doing that. I am listening and quite sincerely to them. I get that you are sincere and offering up your best advice. I am making notes and taking it all to heart. Some people will care and some won't, that is very true. What they care about is important to discover though. Your advice is and opinions absolutely matter. Again, sorry if I came off as dismissive, not my intention at all.

Interesting points of view. A couple of weeks ago MF was questioned about supporting a group of American guides to go to Pakistan to teach women mountaineering skills. It was suggested that money shouldn't be spent on that but rather should go to providing basic needs for poor villagers. So I began to wonder, what do people value? All the cause-related marketing research indicates that the charitable activities of a company are important in making a buying decision. I wonder if that is true? Putting these questions out for discussion is an ongoing attempt to get at what is valued and what is true about cause-related marketing. I am still keenly curious about those questions. The personal attacks, well, whatever it is a free country. I am not certain why on one hand I was attacked for the personalization of a tax return, an admitted faux paux for which atonement was promptly offered, yet the discussion continues to focus on me, my personality, rather than the cause-related marketing question. Muffy's comments are helpful in understanding what matters and what does not. She is clear that her buying decisions are for the most part not influenced by corporate giving programs. She also states that she tends to give money locally. So that too is a useful piece of information as it indicates, in her case anyway, a preference for charity in local communities. If the trend were to hold that a majority favored local donations it would stand to reason that funding overseas work is not where support lies and that should be taken into consideration when determining how money ought to be spent. That's good insight to have. I don't think I should delete this and hope no one sees it. The purpose of discussion is to garner points of view. The points of view of this group on the matter of charitable giving (versus my personality) are valuable, to me anyway.

I didn't ask if they were under an obligation to donatne any money to any cause. No one is under an obligation to make donations to any cause at all. It is their money and they can do as they please with it. I am not suggesting there are terms under which they are allowed to make a profit. I've read Ayn Rand too. It's also not a question of shaming a company into doing anything. It's a question and a conversation intended to examine one aspect of the giving pratices: is it diningenuous (lacking in candor) to use impoverished mountainous countries as the backdrop for product sales and then not invest in those countries. I find it interesting that advertising photos abound with the products being used against a backdrop of some remote mountain range while seemingly, note that-seemingly, there is little interest in those places but for the photo ops. Is there an inconsistency of values in doing that? Much has been said about shareholder rights to direct profits and no one (at least I am not) is advocating otherwise. As a consumer, from whence all shareholder power is ultimately derived, should we examine such questions or just buy some stuff and not concern ourselves these matters?

So, here's a question. If the Acme Outdoor Company started building schools in Pakistan or schools in Nepal or health clinic for the families of porters in Peru, would people stop buying their products?

Peter Puget, sorry you feel that way. I edited the post to say OUR. I told you I agreed my first response was hard nosed. Yes I think my question does scream for attention. And so? Is there something wrong with an examination of the question. Is there a harm done by looking at it and having open and honest discourse about it? If so, what is that harm?

Olyclimber, I agree with you that they aren't in the business of altrusim. There is, I think, some real marketing effort to create the impression of it though. I am suggesting that some money-where-the-mouth-is practice may not be such a bad thing. And yes, you are correct that some do and I think do a great deal. I can't help but wonder though, back when Greg Mortensen started building schools in Pakistan if we (myself included) as an industry had put more stock in that practice if we'd live in a different world today. I don't mean this to be an "us or them" sort of discussion either. Mere ideas have power.

Agreed olyclimber, all points, so far anyway. What you say about investing where the stockholders and consumers can see is, or could be at least, a strong motivation. Consider this however. If your consumer and stockholder isn't going to travel to Nepal, for example, why so much use of that country and its mountains as the outdoor ideal to aspire to? Why not use Long's Peak, Wheeler Peak, Shasta or Rainier? This is where I suggest that something may be disingenuos. Are we being played for fools? Are these places only to be used to publish expedition logs that make the products look more enticing to us? If we are intended, as the advertising suggests, to pack up and go there, wouldn't we, the consumers, then SEE the investments being made? It's just a conversation.

In order that meaningful dialouge may occur on the merits of the conversation I hereby agree to call it "The Form 990 of the organization legally known as The Global Mountain Fund, Inc., but hereinafter for the purposes of these discussions known by all ye presents as The Mountain Fund" And no hard feelings Peter, that was a bit hardnose of me. Do I have a tone? The tone is meant to encourage discussion, as this is a discussion board is it not. The question posed to the group is a question, and as pointed out, not a statement of fact. It is an inquiry, so let us inquire then.