Sidekicks

By Daniela Kon (originally published on HuffPost Impact and edited for use of the Two Dollar Challenge.)

The best way for me to answer what the role of SIMA is in poverty’s end, is to refer to why SIMA started in first place, which was a rocky journey of discovering how I as a filmmaker, and we as content creators working in the social change industry can either help to perpetuate the problems we spotlight or be part of empowering those that lead us to solutions.

Truthfully, I started SIMA (Social Impact Media Awards) because I fell from a horse in Jamaica in 2012. The horse’s name was “One Love.” I fractured my knee, couldn’t walk for a while, and couldn’t continue doing the work I had done for the past seven years, which was making films with humanitarian organizations and local activists, mostly between South East Asia and West Africa.

In those seven years on the road, as most people in international aid eventually do, I became brutally mindful of the BS that clogs up the social change industry, and specifically about the lies that we, as content creators, producers, filmmakers are communicating to the public about the glorious impacts that foundations and non-profits have on impoverished communities.

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by Robin Pendoley

US culture highly values problem solvers, especially those who focus on the problems of others. We have many names for this problem solving: volunteering, service, social entrepreneurship, international development. We step into this work because it is offered as a path to a more socially just world. Unfortunately, it’s not. If you want to work for social justice, you must stop trying to solve other people’s problems.

This is not another blog post critiquing “voluntourism”. Nor is it another tirade against top down approaches to international development. Those are important arguments, but they have been made before. And, those arguments haven’t gone far enough to stop “do gooders” from causing harm with their good intentions.

Here’s the point: You can’t solve another person’s problems. You can’t. Period.

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by Sandra Macias del Villar

Picture this: It’s the weekend. You wake up and make some coffee. You open up your laptop to have a relaxing morning browsing around facebook or your favorite website. No matter where you poke and click around, chances are you end up reading grim headlines. There is no doubt our world is going through some difficult times. Between wars, climate change, racism, inequality, human rights violations, sinking economies, just to name a few, any alien taking a look at our planet earth would probably not have the best impression of our current state. And then, you take a sip of your coffee and with a click of a button it can all go away.

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By Renee Ho

So you want to end poverty.  But for starters—how do you define what it even is?

If you put 100 people in a room together, they might have 100 different answers.  Many argue for a “poverty line” —a threshold—below which a household or individual is considered poor.  Occasionally these lines are absolute; other times they are relative.  Some argue for using consumption as a welfare indicator.  Others argue for using income.  Some talk about country-specific poverty lines.  Others refer to an international poverty line set at $1, $1.25, $1.90, $2.00.  Why not $2.25?  Still others argue that there are non-monetary indicators of poverty: food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education, information, and access to services.

The debate is lengthy.  Measuring poverty is imperfect.

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by Jonathan C. Lewis

Economic and social justice work is the most selfish thing I do. Fighting the good fight is utterly satisfying, undeniably gratifying, unbounded fun. I’m a happier person because I’m a social entrepreneur.

Social entrepreneurs are, for the most part, cheerfully confident. We have a calming strength which comes with understanding our life purpose. We tend to be empowered, empowering and powerful in our professional lives. We strut a subversive swagger.

Social change work is about empathetic connection, trust and respect. Try as we might to abstract and conceptualize the fight for social, environmental and economic justice, the work takes place in the daily lives of real people. That’s the point of it.

For social entrepreneurs like me, the very notion of professional detachment is – even if intellectually appealing – anathema viscerally. Social change work is like a primal scream in protest against the sins we inherit. It’s personal for me.

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By Anjana Sreedhar and Kate Otto, Everyday Ambassador

Flyers and brochures featuring slack-jawed African infants, bellies protruding. A Southeast Asian child in tattered clothes gasping for water sits beside a polluted river. A group of girls from the Middle East stand barely taller than the babies resting on their hips.

These are only some of the “stock photos” associated with international development and poverty in developing countries. It is after viewing these photos and reading cherry-picked statistics about high infant mortality and low access to education that many well-meaning Westerners become enamored with Poverty—most of all, their role in ‘ending’ it.

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