February 9, 2011
Purpose, Poverty, Pitfalls and Redemption
Sam Daley-Harris
Director, Micro-Credit Summit Campaign
Minutes of the 17th Meeting of the 69th Year
The meeting was called to order at 10:15AM by President Bob Varrin. The invocation was led by Don Edwards.. The minutes of the meeting of January 26, 2011, were read by Arthur Eschenlauer. (There was no meeting on February 2, 2011, owing to weather.))
Charles Jaffin introduced his guest, Allen Kassof, and Charles Rojer introduced his guest, Robert S. Pollack. Both guests are nominees for membership.
There were 97 persons in attendance.
Membership Chairman Jack Reilly announced that ballots would be distributed next week for seven prospective new members, and that voting on their candidacy would take place the following week. He further noted that John Bell achieved the status of Emeritus today, which also is his birthday.
Our speaker was Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS (a citizen lobby dedicated to creating the political will to end hunger and poverty) and founder of The Microcredit Summit Campaign (a global support system dedicated to proliferating microfinance as a tool for the very poor to become self-employed and lift themselves and their families out of poverty). He was introduced by Eliot Daley.
Precis of Sam Daley-Harris’ speech and Q&A exchange
Sam—I will refer to him as “Sam” throughout these minutes both to avoid having to type “Mr. Daley-Harris” fifty times and to honor the fact that he’s my dear friend and son-in-law—titled his talk “Purpose, Poverty, Political Alienation, and Transformation”, and the elements of it followed that outline.
Sam set the tone of his speech right up front with a quote from former Senator Mark Hatfield who said:
We stand by as children starve by the millions because we lack the will to eliminate hunger. Yet we have found the will to develop missiles capable of flying over the polar cap and landing within a few hundred feet of their target. This is not innovation. It is a profound distortion of humanity’s purpose on earth.
Sam reinforced the theme by quoting visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller:
The things to do are the things that need doing—that you see need to be done and that no one else seems to see need to be done.
Sam proceeded to describe his own pilgrimage from being a discouraged bystander looking out at the world’s travails with pity but a sense of impotence, to being a relentless activist who began questioning his purpose in life when a high-school classmate died tragically and later when Robert Kennedy was murdered in 1968.
He found that under his longtime cloak of indifference to the world’s pain was a deep conviction that healing the world was a hopeless task. But as he awakened to the challenge, he realized that none of the world’s pain was caused by lack of resources. There is plenty of food, fresh water, and medicine in the world for all to be well fed and healthy. What is lacking is the will to correct the immoral maldistribution of the human community’s resources.
So the focus of his hopelessness shifted: now he was hopeless about human nature. But he quickly realized that the challenge of changing human nature had to begin with himself. He was the one and only human over which he had considerable control.[Editorial aside: in Sam’s fine book Reclaiming Our Democracy he recounts the moment he realized he has to stop waiting for everyone to move at once, and he went from “I will if you will” to “I will whether you will or not.”]
Sam got deeply involved at that point. He founded RESULTS, a citizen advocacy lobby with chapters in scores of U.S. cities who meet monthly by conference call (some 200-300 on the line together) to get briefed on a current issue or legislation influencing hunger and poverty. Following the call, the members get their local papers’ editorial writers to address the issue, they write OpEds and letters to the editor, and they meet with their Congressional representatives face-to-face. RESULTS is regarded as highly influential in shaping U.S. policy and funding for these issues.
Over time, Sam became aware of Muhammad Yunus’ work with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which was the progenitor of microcredit or microfinance—the lending of small amounts of money to very poor women to enable their self-employment and building of small businesses. Yunus, who began as a traditional banker, realized that very poor people were enormously enterprising but were suffocating for lack of access to capital, so he began lending them tiny amounts of money. He says, “I didn’t have a strategy, I just kept doing what was next. But when I look back, my strategy was, whatever banks did, I did the opposite. If banks lent to the rich, I lent to the poor. If banks lent to men, I lent to women. If banks made large loans, I made small ones. If banks required collateral, my loans were collateral free. If banks required a lot of paperwork, my loans were illiterate friendly. If you had to go to the bank, my bank went to the village. Yes, that was my strategy. Whatever banks did, I did the opposite.”
Sam noted that Yunus’ own transformation from conventional banker to contrarian banker had really been less an intellectual conversion than it was aa spiritual conversion.. Yunus felt called to serve these people, doing his part to correct the maldistribution of the world’s resources—in this case, financial resources. Sam subsequently founded a worldwide organization to teach and support the microcredit process. The microcredit movement is now global, with well over 100,000,000 borrowers who are succeeding (and repaying their loans) at enviable rates.
Sam then shifted to his next theme: Political Alienation and Transformation. He began this with two more quotes, the first from the late Stephen Muller who was president of Johns Hopkins University:
Amidst the glut of insignificance that engulfs us all, the temptation is understandable to stop thinking. The trouble is unthinking persons cannot choose but must let others choose for them. But to fail to make one’s own choices is to betray the freedom which is our society’s greatest gift to us all.
Sam noted that more of us know the trivial details of celebrities’ foibles than the everyday facts of mass human suffering and injustice and wasted opportunities—one example he cited being: 72,000,000 children of elementary school age are growing up without any classroom education whatsoever. This is made possible only when most of us fail to get the message delivered by Apollo astronaut Rusty Sweikert whose perspective encompassed the entire globe. Said Sweikert:
We aren’t passengers on spaceship Earth, we’re the crew. We aren’t residents on this planet, we’re citizens. The difference in both cases is responsibility.
Sam went on to introduce us to the Alienation Index created by pollster Lou Harris to calculate just how detached people may feel from personal power and responsibility. Harris asked how many agreed with the following five statements::
1) the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; 2) what you think doesn't count very much anymore; 3) the people running the country don't really care what happens to you; 4) most people in power try to take advantage of people like you; and 5) you're left out of things going on around you.
Sam then told the story of Steve Valk, whom he described as a “poster child” for the Alienation Index when he first paid attention to the plight of the world.. But following the lead of his girlfriend at the time, Valk gradually got involved in RESULTS and, in due course, felt that he really did have some traction in moving both opinion and action at the governmental level. In one particular case, Valk and his RESULTS colleagues succeeded in changing their own hostile attitude toward their representative in Congress who disdained bills designed to alleviate human suffering, and consequently they engaged in gentle persuasion fueled by their prayerful belief that Swindall was a good man who was susceptible to the same foibles and changes of mind that they were.. Swindall eventually became a strong supporter of the very kinds of bills he formerly denounced. And Valk had swung from one end of the Alienation Index to the other..
But Sam cautioned us about smiling patronizingly when we hear about the good works of others like Steve Valk or himself. He said, “I remember in the early 1970s seeing people like the singer/songwriter Harry Chapin doing work on ending hunger and thinking, ‘I’m really glad there are people in the world like him—people who would do work on a hopeless cause.’’ Later I saw that the comedian and activist Dick Gregory ran 50 miles a day across the country to bring attention to world hunger. I was really moved that there were people in the world like him who would make such an effort on a hopeless cause. So I warn people who leave a lecture of mine thinking they are glad there are people in the world like me doing work on a hopeless cause, that that’s where I started.”
I think Sam had it in mind that we’d become activists ourselves. He closed his formal remarks with a quotation from President Obama’s tribute to the victims of the Tucson shootings, in which the President yearned for us to be as devoted and generous a country as nine-year-old victim Christina Taylor Green believed we are, and with lines from George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman”:
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature, instead of a selfish, feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me—it is a sort of splendid torch which I've got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
An excellent question-and-answer session ensued for nearly thirty minutes. Highlights include the following:
What accounted for the success of the turnaround of Congressman Pat Swindell? Answer: The members of RESULTS remembered the essential sequence of transformation: Change ourselves first, then them.
Why is repayment of microcredit loans so amazingly high? Answer: Women are more reliable borrowers than men, and loans are made to a cooperative group of five women whose individual access to the money depends on repayment by others in the group.
Does microcredit work in the U.S.? Answer: There are a number of U.S. microcredit organizations offering loans considerably larger than those in developing nations (e.g., up to $35,000).
How can we get involved? Answer: Individuals can provide funds for microcredit loans through services like TIVA and FINCA (see the web).
Isn’t overpopulation a bigger problem than maldistribution of capital? Answer: Microcredit borrowers have fewer children, and better educated children who in turn will have fewer children. Multiple approaches are needed, but root causes like poverty must be addressed for long-term change.
Who polices/regulates microcredit? Answer: Newly created standards are emerging to differentiate between the non-profit, mission-oriented lenders and those who came later when they recognized a mass-scale loansharking opportunity and are now reaping fortunes from IPOs of for-profit microcredit companies.
How can we engage ourselves more actively? Sam dictated five steps: 1) stop thinking there is no solution to the problem; 2) stop thinking ‘I don’t matter’; 3) stop acting alone—you need companions to drag you and accompany you as you move out of your comfort zone into the battle zone; 4) engage with a group that can feed you power in the form of data, access, structure, momentum; 5) nudge that organization to feed you more and more power, enabling your own voice to be increasingly influential.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30 AM.
Respectfully submitted,
Eliot Daley
Charles Jaffin introduced his guest, Allen Kassof, and Charles Rojer introduced his guest, Robert S. Pollack. Both guests are nominees for membership.
There were 97 persons in attendance.
Membership Chairman Jack Reilly announced that ballots would be distributed next week for seven prospective new members, and that voting on their candidacy would take place the following week. He further noted that John Bell achieved the status of Emeritus today, which also is his birthday.
Our speaker was Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS (a citizen lobby dedicated to creating the political will to end hunger and poverty) and founder of The Microcredit Summit Campaign (a global support system dedicated to proliferating microfinance as a tool for the very poor to become self-employed and lift themselves and their families out of poverty). He was introduced by Eliot Daley.
Precis of Sam Daley-Harris’ speech and Q&A exchange
Sam—I will refer to him as “Sam” throughout these minutes both to avoid having to type “Mr. Daley-Harris” fifty times and to honor the fact that he’s my dear friend and son-in-law—titled his talk “Purpose, Poverty, Political Alienation, and Transformation”, and the elements of it followed that outline.
Sam set the tone of his speech right up front with a quote from former Senator Mark Hatfield who said:
We stand by as children starve by the millions because we lack the will to eliminate hunger. Yet we have found the will to develop missiles capable of flying over the polar cap and landing within a few hundred feet of their target. This is not innovation. It is a profound distortion of humanity’s purpose on earth.
Sam reinforced the theme by quoting visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller:
The things to do are the things that need doing—that you see need to be done and that no one else seems to see need to be done.
Sam proceeded to describe his own pilgrimage from being a discouraged bystander looking out at the world’s travails with pity but a sense of impotence, to being a relentless activist who began questioning his purpose in life when a high-school classmate died tragically and later when Robert Kennedy was murdered in 1968.
He found that under his longtime cloak of indifference to the world’s pain was a deep conviction that healing the world was a hopeless task. But as he awakened to the challenge, he realized that none of the world’s pain was caused by lack of resources. There is plenty of food, fresh water, and medicine in the world for all to be well fed and healthy. What is lacking is the will to correct the immoral maldistribution of the human community’s resources.
So the focus of his hopelessness shifted: now he was hopeless about human nature. But he quickly realized that the challenge of changing human nature had to begin with himself. He was the one and only human over which he had considerable control.[Editorial aside: in Sam’s fine book Reclaiming Our Democracy he recounts the moment he realized he has to stop waiting for everyone to move at once, and he went from “I will if you will” to “I will whether you will or not.”]
Sam got deeply involved at that point. He founded RESULTS, a citizen advocacy lobby with chapters in scores of U.S. cities who meet monthly by conference call (some 200-300 on the line together) to get briefed on a current issue or legislation influencing hunger and poverty. Following the call, the members get their local papers’ editorial writers to address the issue, they write OpEds and letters to the editor, and they meet with their Congressional representatives face-to-face. RESULTS is regarded as highly influential in shaping U.S. policy and funding for these issues.
Over time, Sam became aware of Muhammad Yunus’ work with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which was the progenitor of microcredit or microfinance—the lending of small amounts of money to very poor women to enable their self-employment and building of small businesses. Yunus, who began as a traditional banker, realized that very poor people were enormously enterprising but were suffocating for lack of access to capital, so he began lending them tiny amounts of money. He says, “I didn’t have a strategy, I just kept doing what was next. But when I look back, my strategy was, whatever banks did, I did the opposite. If banks lent to the rich, I lent to the poor. If banks lent to men, I lent to women. If banks made large loans, I made small ones. If banks required collateral, my loans were collateral free. If banks required a lot of paperwork, my loans were illiterate friendly. If you had to go to the bank, my bank went to the village. Yes, that was my strategy. Whatever banks did, I did the opposite.”
Sam noted that Yunus’ own transformation from conventional banker to contrarian banker had really been less an intellectual conversion than it was aa spiritual conversion.. Yunus felt called to serve these people, doing his part to correct the maldistribution of the world’s resources—in this case, financial resources. Sam subsequently founded a worldwide organization to teach and support the microcredit process. The microcredit movement is now global, with well over 100,000,000 borrowers who are succeeding (and repaying their loans) at enviable rates.
Sam then shifted to his next theme: Political Alienation and Transformation. He began this with two more quotes, the first from the late Stephen Muller who was president of Johns Hopkins University:
Amidst the glut of insignificance that engulfs us all, the temptation is understandable to stop thinking. The trouble is unthinking persons cannot choose but must let others choose for them. But to fail to make one’s own choices is to betray the freedom which is our society’s greatest gift to us all.
Sam noted that more of us know the trivial details of celebrities’ foibles than the everyday facts of mass human suffering and injustice and wasted opportunities—one example he cited being: 72,000,000 children of elementary school age are growing up without any classroom education whatsoever. This is made possible only when most of us fail to get the message delivered by Apollo astronaut Rusty Sweikert whose perspective encompassed the entire globe. Said Sweikert:
We aren’t passengers on spaceship Earth, we’re the crew. We aren’t residents on this planet, we’re citizens. The difference in both cases is responsibility.
Sam went on to introduce us to the Alienation Index created by pollster Lou Harris to calculate just how detached people may feel from personal power and responsibility. Harris asked how many agreed with the following five statements::
1) the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; 2) what you think doesn't count very much anymore; 3) the people running the country don't really care what happens to you; 4) most people in power try to take advantage of people like you; and 5) you're left out of things going on around you.
Sam then told the story of Steve Valk, whom he described as a “poster child” for the Alienation Index when he first paid attention to the plight of the world.. But following the lead of his girlfriend at the time, Valk gradually got involved in RESULTS and, in due course, felt that he really did have some traction in moving both opinion and action at the governmental level. In one particular case, Valk and his RESULTS colleagues succeeded in changing their own hostile attitude toward their representative in Congress who disdained bills designed to alleviate human suffering, and consequently they engaged in gentle persuasion fueled by their prayerful belief that Swindall was a good man who was susceptible to the same foibles and changes of mind that they were.. Swindall eventually became a strong supporter of the very kinds of bills he formerly denounced. And Valk had swung from one end of the Alienation Index to the other..
But Sam cautioned us about smiling patronizingly when we hear about the good works of others like Steve Valk or himself. He said, “I remember in the early 1970s seeing people like the singer/songwriter Harry Chapin doing work on ending hunger and thinking, ‘I’m really glad there are people in the world like him—people who would do work on a hopeless cause.’’ Later I saw that the comedian and activist Dick Gregory ran 50 miles a day across the country to bring attention to world hunger. I was really moved that there were people in the world like him who would make such an effort on a hopeless cause. So I warn people who leave a lecture of mine thinking they are glad there are people in the world like me doing work on a hopeless cause, that that’s where I started.”
I think Sam had it in mind that we’d become activists ourselves. He closed his formal remarks with a quotation from President Obama’s tribute to the victims of the Tucson shootings, in which the President yearned for us to be as devoted and generous a country as nine-year-old victim Christina Taylor Green believed we are, and with lines from George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman”:
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature, instead of a selfish, feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me—it is a sort of splendid torch which I've got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
An excellent question-and-answer session ensued for nearly thirty minutes. Highlights include the following:
What accounted for the success of the turnaround of Congressman Pat Swindell? Answer: The members of RESULTS remembered the essential sequence of transformation: Change ourselves first, then them.
Why is repayment of microcredit loans so amazingly high? Answer: Women are more reliable borrowers than men, and loans are made to a cooperative group of five women whose individual access to the money depends on repayment by others in the group.
Does microcredit work in the U.S.? Answer: There are a number of U.S. microcredit organizations offering loans considerably larger than those in developing nations (e.g., up to $35,000).
How can we get involved? Answer: Individuals can provide funds for microcredit loans through services like TIVA and FINCA (see the web).
Isn’t overpopulation a bigger problem than maldistribution of capital? Answer: Microcredit borrowers have fewer children, and better educated children who in turn will have fewer children. Multiple approaches are needed, but root causes like poverty must be addressed for long-term change.
Who polices/regulates microcredit? Answer: Newly created standards are emerging to differentiate between the non-profit, mission-oriented lenders and those who came later when they recognized a mass-scale loansharking opportunity and are now reaping fortunes from IPOs of for-profit microcredit companies.
How can we engage ourselves more actively? Sam dictated five steps: 1) stop thinking there is no solution to the problem; 2) stop thinking ‘I don’t matter’; 3) stop acting alone—you need companions to drag you and accompany you as you move out of your comfort zone into the battle zone; 4) engage with a group that can feed you power in the form of data, access, structure, momentum; 5) nudge that organization to feed you more and more power, enabling your own voice to be increasingly influential.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30 AM.
Respectfully submitted,
Eliot Daley