Last Tuesday in a post about the strengths of community organisations, I wrote under the heading “Alternatives”:
“But a project that brings people together to a common cause and through which they learn about how to run a project and how to relate to others can lead to new ideas. When one door closes, maybe other doors open. Failure can inform the growth and development of the next project.
Lifestyle experiments to bring about social and economic change will almost always fail at some point. But we now have the means to record and share our experiments and perhaps by learning from others’ failures we can improve our future projects.
Setbacks can be the grounds for new initiatives that benefit from experience and not lead to dispirited activists who lack the energy to try anything new.”
The Compassionate Company
In this video Pavi Mehta tells the story of a compassionate company, the largest provider of eye-care in the world. Towards the start she explains the ground-rules under which the company grew. They have no external funding and give away 60% of income. They work exclusively for people who can’t pay, provide world-class quality, accept no donations and no fund-raising.
This approach will not work for everyone but the point is, under those extraordinary constraints something brilliant has grown. So, lacking capacity is not always a curse, maybe it is an opportunity you cannot see, just yet.