The Importance of a Learning Spirit

Originally published at Along the Paths of Justice, the Chab Dai team blog

Charlie and I recently met with two social entrepreneurs from Australia who are interested in replicating their very successful social enterprise cafés in Cambodia as a transitional employment and training venture for survivors of trafficking and exploitation. So much of our conversation was inspiring and interesting I thought it should be shared!

Their original idea coming in was to run a four-story center, including large café, training center, and housing for their employees. Through our conversation, and the couple others they had had in the less than 24 hours since they arrived in Cambodia, their minds were already changing to adapt to the environment!

Although he now works for an NGO, the lead on this project is first and foremost a businessman, and knows this is where his strengths lie! And he really loved Chab Dai’s ethos of collaboration, and the idea of sticking to one’s core competencies. When he heard that we already have a number of aftercare program members, whose competencies lie in counseling, trauma recovery, and survivor reintegration, he quickly started to re-evaluated his plan, and started thinking about how to build a business that could support those organizations.

He was also told by a number of people that sit-down, higher end cafés have already saturated the market in Phnom Penh, but when he visited a well located gas station coffee counter and saw a hundred clients waiting for coffee at 8:00 a.m., he knew this model could be successful in other key areas of the city.

They also recognize Cambodia has the largest number of NGOs of almost any country in the world and prefer to join the cause as a socially minded business, rather than an NGO doing business. One of their top priorities is financial sustainability, and using business to prepare young survivors to integrate into mainstream economic activity.

This new social business idea is still in its nascent stages, but what I loved about meeting these two visionaries were their flexibility and willingness to learn in a new environment. They are excellent at what they do in Australia, but recognize they need to adapt their model, marketing, and plan to the needs of both the Cambodian market and the survivor group with which they want to work.

This is the type of collaboration and open-mindedness we love to see in our partners, and we are excited to see the direction that they will take when they finalize their plans.

AsiaLife Covers Chab Dai's Director!

AsiaLife magazine recently did a Q&A with Helen, Chab Dai's Founder and International Director and I thought it was fantastic! Not only do I think Helen is awesome, but the article was written by a friend - so I'm totally not biased ;)

Helen is so articulate about the issues around human trafficking. At the office, we talk a lot about the complexities of multiple vulnerability factors, issues of dignity in the media, and how best to address this injustice holistically and collaboratively. She has spent over a decade working in this sector, and thinking through all these complex cross-cutting themes.

Please go read the whole article, it is great! But for now, I thought I would share one of my favourite excerpts:

Is the increased attention on anti-trafficking helpful?I think there is a danger point that trafficking has become the sexy issue. You get a huge influx of money, attention, organisations, but if that is not coordinated, it can create chaos. We have seen a lot of people coming to address this, but they’re not necessarily doing it in a collaborative manner, and they don’t necessarily understand a lot of the complex issues within the Cambodian culture, within the history.

People are led by their heart on this issue, but sometimes they forget to bring their brain with them. You get lots of well meaning people, but they don’t really know what they’re doing. And that is a huge risk factor. A lot of people start working on this issue and get paralysed by emotion. Some people may say I’m hard-headed, but what Cambodia doesn’t need is a lot of emotional wrecks. They need people who are able to strategise for responses, to support them, to help them develop policy.