A few years ago I was swept up in a wave six-degrees-of-separation invitations from the professional networking site Linked In, most of the invitations coming from old b-school classmates at UNC.  As a good little networking MBA, I sent out as many invitations as I could too, feeling a certain thrill in seeing the breadth of my professional and social network. However after that initial rush I pretty much forgot all about it.  “Who actually uses this thing?” I remember thinking.

Then a week ago I got another invitation from an old colleague of mine at Rockwell International who wanted to reconnect and to share the news that a patent application of ours had finally been accepted (I have two patents in my name, officially making me an “inventor”, albeit the kind that doesn’t make any money for his inventions).  This old colleague wrote, “I always wondered what happened to you after you went back to school, sounds like you’re doing some interesting things!”

Those words sent me back into the Linked In universe, searching for other old colleagues that I had missed.  And after the excitement of reaching out to old acquaintances had passed, I decided to go poking around my Linked In network. It didn’t take long before I started looking for other people who also worked in the Base of the Pyramid. About 65 connections came up, interestingly enough most of them at 2 least degrees away or more: meaning I have few direct connections working in my own field.  

However, I was thrilled to find so many interesting people working in the BoP. Five year ago when I started working on BoP projects with Stu Hart and crew it was hard to find anyone that knew anything about it, but today there are numerous consulting organizations, start-ups, corporations and universities employing people to focus on the BoP. I even found a life coach! Many of these positions have been created in the last year or so, and it’s nice to see so many people branching out on there own.

Beyond the link I have listed some of the interesting people and organizations I found on my BoP traipse through Linked In. If you’re already a Linked In member, try clicking on the “badge” in the top right of this article and seeing which “Base of the Pyramid” folk are in your own network. To make future searches for BoP compatriots on Linked In easier, I’ve also asked Linked In to create a BoP Group for professionals working in the BoP. Stay tuned for the launch of that group (you can always join the BoP Working Group on Yahoo in the meanwhile).

Patrick

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Here’s an opportunity to help me support an incredible organization that we’re working with here in Rio, one that is helping local communities throughout the world solve their own problems. I have agreed to become a CatComm Champion, pledging $500 to support Catalytic Communities’ unique work with community leaders around the world, but only if I can inspire at least 50 of my friends and colleagues to each contribute $50 or more to match my pledge (for a total of at least $3000).

Catalytic Communities (CatComm) creates networks of community champions who are working to better their own communities - often marginalized squatter areas - throughout the world.  A Washington, DC and Rio de Janeiro based non-profit, CatComm is building a world where community-generated solutions are just a mouse-click away, where anyone, anywhere, confronting a local problem, can find the inspiration and tools they need to implement the solution, learning from their peers.  In November I will attend the Tech Museum Awards with CatComm founder Theresa Williamson where CatComm is being honored as a Tech Museum Laureate for its development of technology that benefits humanity (see more further below).

By joining me in this pledge, you not only magnify the financial support of hundreds of other pledges, you also become a part of this growing network of people who are helping the world to help itself.  Only when 50 friends and colleagues sign up to donate at least $50 will I make my donation of $500.  I am counting on colleagues like you to join me to meet this pledge!

To sign my pledge please go to http://catcomm.pledgebank.com/stanfordcarolina, fill in your name and email address and click “sign pledge”.  When the pledge completes in December, CatComm will contact you about how you can contribute your $50.

Thank you,
Patrick

Did you know? CatComm is currently supporting over 130 community led projects in 9 countries. Dozens of community programs would not have survived were it not for CatComm’s outreach on their behalf. CatComm runs a unique community center for over 950 squatter and community leaders across Rio de Janeiro. Communities from Khartoum to Rio de Janeiro have attracted press attention for their projects through our site. Our online database exists in English, Spanish and Portuguese. To learn more about Catalytic Communities visit: http://www.catcomm.org Past BRINQ articles about CatComm: Learning to Swim - Back in Brazil Side Effects - A Day in the Community The Power of Peer Networks - CatComm and PledgeBank

October, 2006 Catalytic Communities Awarded Prestigious Tech Museum Award “The Tech Museum Awards are an incredibly important way to call attention to some of the most meaningful innovations in science and technology in the world, and to the often unsung heroes behind them,” said Peter Friess, President of The Tech [Musuem]. “The Laureates who we honor serve as great role models to future generations of inventors and engineers, and their work reminds us that innovation can be applied in profound ways to benefit humanity and the world.” “Catalytic Communities represents the ‘best of the best’ technologists whose innovations benefit humanity, and we are thrilled to welcome them into our community of Tech Laureates,” said Amanda Reilly from The Tech Museum of Innovation. “We aim to raise public awareness on how technology can significantly alleviate many of the critical issues facing our planet and champion those innovators who are leveraging technology to provide resolution to both local and global problems.” http://www.techawards.org

“Everybody knows the proverb about how it’s better to teach a man to fish than just to give him a fish, but there’s a step beyond that: it’s better that a man’s neighbor is the one teaching him to fish, his peer.  If some expert swoops in from afar you miss half the value of the interaction because of the inequality in that relationship. But if it’s his peer teaching him? Then the man is much more likely to offer something in return.  You are much more likely to create a real sustainable relationship rather than just a new dependency.” – Theresa Williamson, Founder, Catalytic Communities

Can individuals change the world? It’s all a matter of leverage…

At BRINQ we’ve been exploring the creation of peer networks for local innovators in the Base of the Pyramid, particularly for innovation in toys and all things play! And although we’ve already written a number of recent articles about them, we thought it was a good moment to again bring up our friends in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who exemplify the power of peer networks. Those friends of course are the folks at Catalytic Communities (CatComm) , who we recently entered into a partnership with to help fundraise and expand their local world-changing network globally.

Why our intense interest in Catalytic Communities? Raw admiration for their work aside, we’re just heeding the advice of Njeri Muhia, an economics professor at Egerton University in Njoro, Kenya who mentored us on participatory methods for development. Njeri told us, "Instead of trying to build entirely new infrastructure in poor communities, first try doing something new with existing capacity and groups." In Brazil, Catalytic Communities has already built a powerful peer network of community leaders and innovators drawn from amongst Rio de Janeiro’s 750 squatter communities (favelas) and such a resource provides huge opportunities to new ventures like ours. In fact, through Patrick’s involvement with the Base of the Pyramid Protocol, we found that networks like CatComm’s are invaluable in seeking out new opportunities for business and development.

Then there’s PledgeBank, a UK based organization launched earlier this year that also leverages the power of peer networks. Pledges made at PledgeBank.com can be anything from fundraising for your favorite cause, volunteering at a local charity, to finally kicking that nasty nicotine habit. The key is that PledgeBank pledges go into effect only after you recruit enough of your peers to make the same promise: "I will do this if 1000 other people pledge to do so too!" PledgeBank therefore harnesses and encourages the power of individuals to become groups, and it doesn’t even need to be people who know one another, just ones that share a common cause.

Both organizations enable individuals to band together to create new movements, to allow the local to join with the global, and in doing so change the world. Given that similarity,it’s only natural that Catalytic Communities would decide to use PledgeBank for its 2005 fundraising drive.

"I will set up a $10 monthly donation to CatComm (or $120 annually) but only if 399 other people will too, and only if one philanthropist will match our joint donations dollar for dollar." — Patrick Donohue Deadline to sign up by: 31st December 2005 Join us in empowering a global network of community solutions! JOIN THIS PLEDGE at http://www.PledgeBank.com/catcomm/

It turns out that it’s not the big foundations but the individuals like you and I who are the most powerful philanthropic force around. Lynne Twist, author of the book The Soul of Money and award winning fundraiser (she’s raised some $200+ million for non-profits, all from individuals) gave us this statistic when we met her last week: of the $250 billion donated in the United States last year, the vast majority was donated by individuals, close to %80. And most of those individuals are in the $150k a year and under group, not just the Bill Gates of the world.

What does this all mean for business? Well, we believe that the organizations which learn to create peer effects - those that catalyze an explosion of grassroots innovation and growth - are the ones that will lead the future in the Base of the Pyramid. A successful model will not be one that just "scales", but instead one that embraces replication and adaptation. The former is about mammoth organizations whereas the latter is all about networks of individuals.

And if you don’t have that network yourself, find a way to become a peer of one that does. All you need is a little leverage…

"All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual." - Albert Einstein

Additional Resources:

• Catalytic Communities - also available in Portuguese and Spanish
• PledgeBank - and CatComm’s Pledge Challenge
• Base of the Pyramid Protocol - BoP Protocol resources at BRINQ.com
• Side Effects - A Day in the Community - BRINQ article about CatComm
• Learning to Swim - Back in Brazil - BRINQ article about CatComm

We’ve added a few new sections and pages here at BRINQ. The BRINQ Network: Friends, partners and mentors at BRINQ, there are a lot of great people and organizations who have helped make BRINQ possible and who continue to influence our work everyday. Come read about the organizations and individuals who help guide BRINQ, including Stuart Hart, Mark Milstein, Salim Mohamed, Alan Hassenfeld and many more! Discussion about BRINQ and the BoP: We’ve been getting a number of emails and calls about BRINQ and the BoP, so we started a discussion thread of our responses on the BRINQ Forums. Come take a look or chime in! [Edit: Forums are no longer available] BRINQ’s New Front Door: We’ve finally replaced our old front page with something a little more dynamic. Check it out! What’s Up Next - Updating the Base of the Pyramid Protocol: Patrick’s heading out this weekend to Racine, WI and the Wingspread Conference Center with the rest of the BoP Protocol Pilot team to report on their work in Kenya and to help design the next version of the Base of the Pyramid Protocol. A diverse set of forty professionals, business leaders, and social entrepreneurs will be participating in the intense 3-day workshop, including representatives from SC Johnson, Tetrapak, Dupont Solae, Natura, CARE, WRI, Carolina for Kibera, Ashoka and more.

“I’d love to hear your impressions,” Theresa said to me as we boarded the bus outside of Rocinha, “about what you think of the communities here vs. where you lived in Kenya.” Here was Rio de Janiero, Brazil and in Kenya was Kibera, a million-person shantytown in Nairobi, where I had just spent the previous three months living and working. Theresa and I were catching a bus to the outskirts of Rio for a visit with local community leaders and to spend a “Day in the Community”, a regular event that brings together children and neighbors from six of Rio’s favelas, Brazil’s illegal communities. Theresa and I found a seat as the bus lurched forward and I sat there wondering about her request. What preconceptions had living in an African slum given me about a South American one?

The bus picked up speed and Rocinha faded into the distance. I leaned back into the seat and rubbed the palms of my hands over my face; my head was in a whirl, not just from the warm Brazilian hospitality and strong caipirinhas of my night out before but also from the eclectic route we were taking through Rio. We had started our trip in the beautiful and trendy neighborhood of Jardim Botânico, with lush green mountains and inland lagoon, switched buses in front of Rocinha, the Americas’ largest squatter city with its two hundred thousand residents and overflowing hillside houses, and were on our way to Asa Branca, a twenty year old favela I knew nothing about, yet somehow had inadvertently impacted months before. Theresa looked at me for a moment and gave my shoulder a squeeze, sensing if not understanding my confusion. I let my hands fall back to my lap and I smiled back at her, relaxing a little before turning my gaze back to the passing communities.

Theresa Williamson is the founder and executive director of Catalytic Communities (CatComm), a Washington D.C. and Rio based organization that creates spaces to empower community leaders. These spaces, both physical and virtual, are designed to share solutions and foster new relationships, in the process growing a local/global network that catalyzes community development and engagement. I never could have predicted that a chance encounter with Theresa nine months before in San Francisco would draw me into this world-changing network. However, CatComm’s mission of creating connections is mirrored in Theresa’s personality and so it was no real surprise that here I was, stepping off the bus onto a dusty street corner in a Brazilian favela with Asa Branca’s community leader, Carlos “Bezerra” Costa, reaching out his arms to greet me like an old friend. The strangest part of it all was that despite this being my first visit to Asa Branca, I knew that I had already been there. I had Theresa and CatComm to thank for that.

Bezerra quickly started us on a walking tour of the neighborhood and I began making comparisons between Asa Branca and Kibera. My first impression was that most Kiberans would be thrilled to live in a place like Asa Branca. Sure, like Kibera there were some scrap metal shacks for homes and a river with overflowing garbage behind the community, however mixed in amongst it all were charming, locally built houses, one and two story structures of cement or wood with red clay tiled roofs and green gardens in front. Even the shacks had potted plants hanging on their outer walls, the level of care bearing no relation to the quality of the building material. And, trash-laden river aside, the community was clean and the streets were smooth, there were no open sewage trenches and we’d even see the occasional parked car and speed bumps. This is what Kibera could be like if allowed to develop, I thought.

As we walked down dusty white streets past houses, stores and bars, I noticed that Bezerra would introduce Theresa to the people on the street as “a member of my family”, each introduction provoking Theresa to flash a warm smile. Theresa explained to me that the engagement with Bezerra and Asa Branca is one of CatComm’s longest running relationships; Theresa has personally been documenting the community’s development for years and Bezerra is a regular visitor to the Casa do Gestor Catalisador, CatComm’s community hub in Rio. Asa Branca is a great example of how a community can solve its own problems: while the city government ignored it, Asa Branca organized to install its own community sewage system and to raise its streets against flooding. That project and others are documented in detail in CatComm’s Community Solutions Database, available in three languages at http://www.CatComm.org/ The database is one of CatComm’s most important tools and is the main draw to the organization, but the power of Catalytic Communities is not just captured in the solutions found on its website, nor just in the Casa where community leaders meet. Actually, what CatComm does is only a fraction of what it creates, evident in the fact that I was now sitting down to have lunch with Bezerra and his family.

Allow me to explain.

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I’ve been very happy with how far my Portuguese has come, especially after having been gone from Brazil for so long, yet my ability to communicate here is like being able to swim in a gentle sea, quando as coisas estão tranquilas, tudo bom! (When things are calm, all is good!) But while sitting in on CatComm’s open forum, a meeting for feedback from community partners and constituents, I experienced a very different world of linguistic aquatics; visualize the crashing waves at Ipanema, Brazil’s most famous of beaches, where the people are beautiful but the weak stay out of the water.

Last night, a dozen of us met inside the Casa do Gestor Catalisador, CatComm’s home and technology hub in Rio, located on the edge of the downtown, in a historic district by the bay and the center of the old slave trade. Around us on the Casa walls, on mounted wood or printed t-shirts, hung windows into the world of the favelas, the works of Brazilian photographer Maurício Hora, a man with an incredible capacity to capture the spirit of place on film. Maurício sat to my left, Theresa to my right, the rest were spread out in a circle around the room, community leaders and artists, passionate Brazilians all; not quite what my beach and bar Portuguese had prepared me for.

It wasn’t so bad at first, when Theresa began speaking I was able to follow along, she had prepped me before hand (in English) about the proposal she would present, about CatComm’s new strategy for partners and growth. Muito tranquilo. However once people started responding, once bodies leaned forward and hands started churning, my bearings slipped out from under me and the sea became choppy. At times I would grasp the topic of the conversation and understand its flow, but then just as suddenly a new wave of words, sounds, and Brazilian passion would descend upon me, and my head would be plunged into the deep, tumbling out of control and comprehension lost, finally clawing my way to the surface only to think “Meu Deus, como a gente veio pra cá” “How the heck did we end up here?”

The Brazilian love of talking on top of one another means a whole different set of cultural cues apply here, how do you tell if someone is staying civil and respectful, how do you tell what is a constructive conflict and what is not? Brazilians are a passionate people and many debate with animation and emotion, loudly at times, which are all traits that I can relate well to. How many times in Kenya did it appear that Erik and I were about to come to blows, when in fact, we were only just getting warmed up?

However it’s clear that for us to do Protocol work here, guiding a creative collision of world-views, will require a lot of preparation, both in our language and in our ability to train and support other people. The language barrier makes proactive leadership absolutely necessary. I can continue to improve my Portuguese, but the only effective way forward is to make sure that more appropriate people know what they’re doing and supporting them, there’s no other choice. Which, if you think about it, is really the only way our work in the Base of the Pyramid can come alive, working with others, training new people, supporting them, and then to some degree, letting go. It’s hard to imagine us doing here exactly what we did in Kenya: Erik, and I directly facilitating exercises and discussions. Here we would have to plan for miscommunication, slow down for better understanding. Though in truth we did not always understand what was going on in Kenya either, our Kiswahili was worse than my Portuguese, and patience was always key.

It’s funny to think about what has become one the defining aspects of my life, the constant search for uncomfortable situations and new things to be ignorant about. There’s something a little crazy about that, something a little strange about someone who has to go so far from what he knows to find meaningful work, to feel content yet not comfortable. I suppose it’s all a search for meaning and growth and as Erik loves to say, “If what you’re doing feels comfortable, then you’re probably not doing something new!” Optimal ignorance is another phrase we love to throw around: optimal is when you know enough to be respectful, but not enough to know what is impossible. You’re able to do things in someone else’s backyard that you could never do in your own. You just don’t know enough not to try. A clueless gringo has his uses after all, but at the very least he does need to learn to keep his head above the water.

Time to go swimming again.

***

Notes for the unfamiliar:

• Theresa -> Theresa Williamson, founder and executive director of Catalytic Communities
• CatComm -> Catalytic Communities, an amazing organization in Rio that provides spaces for community leaders to meet and exchange ideas, both physical spaces (the Casa) and virtual spaces (http://www.CatComm.org), inpsiring and empowering a global network of community leaders and solutions.
• Favela -> a Brazilian slum or shanty town, the word’s origins are from a particular slum in Rio, the first, historically known as Morro da Favela, but today known as Morro do Providência, where photographer Maurício Hora was born and raised. To view Maurício’s work visit http://www.favelarte.com/ An exposition of Maurício’s work is currently on display at CatComm’s Casa in Rio.
• Erik -> Erik Simanis, Co-Director of the Base of the Pyramid Protocol and team leader of the Protocol pilot team in Kenya
• Protocol -> Base of the Pyramid Protocol, a process by which multinational companies can engage poor communities to form new partnerships and to co-create new business opportunities for the communities and the company. For more on the protocol and pilot see http://www.bop-protocol.org and http://www.BRINQ.com/kenya/
• Me -> Patrick Donohue, a recovering computer scientist and MBA, refugee from the rapid to riches dot-com culture, and member of the BoP Protocol pilot test in Kenya; in Brazil to write a case study of Catalytic Communities and to practice swimming in Portuguese.