Tzedek: Together Against Poverty

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. And just like our bodies, become what we eat, our minds become the information that we consume. If you want to stay positive, it’s so important that you also listen to stories that inspire you and uplift you. In this podcast we interview leading experts dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems. And if you stick around, I promise you will not only be as informed as if you watched the news, you will be uplifted, inspired, and have more positive energy in your life. Welcome to Great.com Talks With.

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Welcome today, Great.comtalks with Kiara Blumer, who is CEO of Tzedek.org, that UK, who is an organization that is together against poverty, especially extreme poverty, and they are driven by expertise in the U.K. Jewish community. So, Kyra, welcome to today’s episode. How are you doing?

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Good. Thank you for having us.

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Beautiful. And if you’re new here, this is a daily podcast brought into you experts and organizations who are dedicated to making the world a better place. And I’m really interested to talk with you about your work to reduce extreme poverty. How would you describe your organization to someone that might not be familiar with your organization and the challenges that you’re facing?

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Sure. I’d actually like to also introduce my colleague, Ken Baker, who is here with us today, and he’s our international development and education manager. And now pathetic, pathetic means justice in Hebrew. And for us, it’s a value that we hold dear as a Jewish community, and it underpins all of the work we do as an organization. We operate on a dual mission. The first is to alleviate extreme poverty and some of the most marginalized places in the world. And we do that through a partner led, locally implemented international development, which means we lean on the expertise of local experts within their own communities. And the second is to engage the UK community in its own sense of social responsibility. So we do this through programs in schools, cultural exchanges, volunteer and educational travel opportunities.

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Interesting. So you work on two fronts. The one you have, the work you do in countries with extreme poverty, and then you have a work in the UK where you get people excited to participate somehow, maybe by having them go there, see what these conditions looks like. So let’s start there. What happens with someone? Let’s say they sign up for a volunteer program. Could you describe the process of someone getting involved in you in this fight?

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Absolutely. I’ll talk a little bit about the pipeline and then I’ll hand off to the man who truly manages these programs. So we work with a range of ages and demographics, different populations, different subsets of the population, and we create custom programming to engage them in a way that’s meaningful for them. So we start with primary age students. We run a program called Twyning, where they work with kids in Canadian schools and get to know each other. Do cultural exchanges learn about one another’s countries, communities, cultures? But more importantly, the teachers have a professional exchange and learn from one another.

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Yes, as you said, we also have some programs that involve kind of immersing young people in understanding international development by taking them to the country. So we do this in a very specific way with very careful, like especially young people to not refer to it as volunteering, but to think of it as like an educational experience where

it will be young leaders in our community who are interested in engaging with the ideas of social responsibility and social justice, but don’t necessarily have that in practice in an effective way. And they’ll come to us and say they’re part of a program which involves some kind of pre preparation and then takes them out to learn directly from our partners. We’re very conscious that our partners are the real experts in the communities they work in and in the type of work that they do. The same thing happens for us on some of our other programs, the UK based where, for example, this year we ran a summer internship and one of the things that interns were able to do was interact with our partners wisely and ask them questions about the work they were doing and how they’d come to kind of formulate this specific program. So it’s really important to us that all the young people we work with don’t just hear from us, but hear from the local people who are both experiencing the challenges but also tackling them.

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Can imagine what an intense and real experience it is for someone from the UK and experiencing something that is that different? I yeah, I was in Ghana once. So you have some work in Ghana? Yeah. And I was going to a school there I was a bit involved in and yeah, it’s ingrained in your nervous system in a way that couldn’t happen from hearing about these things in school.

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So I think what you do is it’s highly important in that area. Let’s switch to the other area where you worked with then the work that you do in countries with extreme poverty. What is your approach there?

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So very as kind of briefly mentioned before, with every partner and community, let’s say, what we do is rather than having a kind of UK professional on the ground in Gordon India, we have made in the UK who speak to our partners regularly and listens to what they believe as people who are embedded in the community is the priority of the community that they work with and that are then kind of different ways in which we try to fulfill that need. So in India, we have two networks. So we have a network in the Northeast and a network in the southeast. And those networks, all of our Pandits who have very small grassroots organizations. So they’ll come to us with the project and say, you know, this community has a lot of women who don’t have stable employment. We have this program that we can help them to learn how to run a business in this specific area. And we would agree that that contributes towards that specific need while also kind of being like a long term solution for those women to be able to be lifted out of poverty. But we also use those networks to help the partners themselves develop that capacity.

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So we ran a leadership development program for two of our partners and then they went back and they shared that learnings with the network and that has enabled them to improve their impact as organizations by what they do with us, but also the work they do independently. The other side of what we do, that sort of similar to that is work directly with community groups. So in northern Ghana, we work directly with youth groups, parent teacher groups, school management committees to help them to improve their own capacity to drive change in their communities to what they’re able to do as a result of this change. This training is to look at that community and say our community needs this thing. So we need them to have an inaccessible road, which means they can’t get to the hospital and then they learn how to go to the local government and advocate for that change themselves. So eventually what it looks like is that we can leave and they will still be able to do that, advocating they will still be able to bring about change in that community because they have the skills to do it themselves. So that’s like the overarching thing of our approach.

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So you got some different ways to help people there. And it’s based on what the community communities themselves and which I think makes a lot of sense. So do you have a way of tracking the results that you get? I guess that can be a challenge when you do a lot of different projects to have an approach to track the results of your your.

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Projects.

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Yes, so as you say, it is kind of like a few different means through which we do that, so we do kind of like quantitative measurements of improved income and things like that, or in the case of all community groups, of improved ability to do certain things that we’ve been training in them. So, for example, how many of the groups now have a kind of gender equal constitution as a group or are now communicating with their local government? And then we see what’s really important for us is to understand the kind of personal impact of what’s happening here. So we collect kind of stories and descriptions of kind of the community initiatives that have happened and how that’s benefited specific individuals or the community as a whole.

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Right. I saw on your website that you helped three thousand seven hundred forty people directly and that on average it tripled their incomes and that sounds very impressive to me. So what has led to the tripling of income? So what’s the main thing there?

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So I think really it’s that a lot of these women are living in a society where the gender norm is that the main breadwinner is the husband and they will be living in single income households in India, for example, about 94 percent of the population on a daily wage. So even that husband will only be earning a daily wage, which is only sustainable for as long as that daily wage increases. And it continues for all that. And that’s been shown throughout the pandemic to be quite problematic in terms of how risky it is as a kind of market. So they’re on a very, very low household income with only one person making the money. What these programs allow them to do is for these women to set up their own business, which first he brings in a second income, but also gives them kind of a tangible skill and a tangible business that they can take control of and run themselves all around. So they’re not relying on other people. They’re not relying on seasonal employment. They are able to go to market on any day that they want and sell whatever it is they’ve created or they’re able to raise their own poultry. And even if they can’t sell eggs at a particular period, they have eggs to eat themselves. So it’s through those kind of it may seem like small means, but for these women and these families who are living on an incredibly low income to start with, it’s very small changes that can bring about a huge change like tripling their income.

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Can’t imagine how empowering it must be for those women to be able to contribute to their families in that way. Do you? Face a lot of cultural opposition to that happening.

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And there has been yet but a huge part of what our programs, our community partners, rather, do in the communities is work with the community to build the project so they will go to the women in the community or to the groups in the community and talk to them about, you know, this is what we’re thinking. How do you think this is going to work in your community? And if that those women say, actually, you know what, I love the idea, but I don’t think that my husband will allow it, then the community will do sensitization work with the husbands to kind of encourage them to see why it’s beneficial for them as well for their wives to be bringing in money, because although it gives her more independence. Yes. And more kind of empowerment. Yes. And control, it also gives more income to the family as a whole. And often they just haven’t really thought about why it might be beneficial. And they see it as kind of just against the norms of that community. But once it’s explained to them, it’s something that benefits them as well. And once they start to see action, we often get very positive feedback from the men in the community about about that movement towards empowering women economically.

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And I guess there is the power of your approach as well to implement programs that are requested by the community so you don’t come from far away from the UK and then try to push some improvement on them that they’re not ready for. Now, I’m curious, what does the future look like for something like what would be a really great outcome for you guys in the next five, 10 years?

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We need to scale. You know, we’ve come an incredible way, we’ve started as a small grassroots volunteer led organization 30 years ago, and today we’re already working in two countries outside of the U.K. We have a professional team of five people, which really would have been unimaginable even 15 years ago. So, you know, we’re ready to scale up. Our next step is take our model that we’re already using in Ghana and expand it to other regions in northern Ghana and beyond, professionalize our network in India. And we’re kind of at a pivotal moment where we’re ready for the next thing and we finally have the professional infrastructure and the partners to do it.

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Mm hmm. They’re going to be exciting to be in that kind of position. So now imagine someone is listening to this and they can say they have never been in a country with extreme poverty. They cannot imagine what it would be like to go there. But it’s, of course, not the same thing as to go there. What advice would you give to someone that wants to be a bit more involved, let’s say someone from Sweden, but doesn’t know what are the steps I can take to become more involved here?

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I think it’s really important for people to get engaged in a way that’s meaningful for them as an individual. Different things resonate for different people. So for some, it might be taking a course on extreme poverty or international development just to learn and understand and to feel like they have a certain degree of fluency when they’re talking about these world issues. And for some people, they want to sign on to be our corporate sponsors for five years straight and underwrite fundraisers and events. And, you know, we’ve other people who just want to share their talents, their expertise, their insight, join our boards or sit in an advisory position. And I really think that this range exists for a reason and people need different outlets and different ways of getting involved. And you just need to find what resonates for you. And I’m happy to have that conversation with anyone. I’m happy to make time so people have questions. They’re welcome to follow up with me.

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That’s a very generous invitation, and I encourage anyone listening to take you up on that. Now, how can

Someone stay in touch with you? Because we’re coming up towards the end of this interview. If someone wants to kind of be updated about your progress and how you guys are doing, what can they do to stay in touch?

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So they can go to our website, they can sign up for our newsletter, our website is Siddig and we are happy to receive emails to our info etcetc Aglukkaq account and just reach out. We’ll make time. We’re not going anywhere. We’ve got endless amounts of hours for resume coffee chats. And we can and I would be delighted to host some conversations.

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Yeah, I’m on social media as well. You want to just see more about what we do? I think it’s pathetic on Instagram and also on Facebook and Twitter, where we kind of update on the work that we’re doing, what’s happening in our communities at the moment.

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Beautiful. Leon, Kyra, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with great outcome today. Highly appreciate very much for having us. Thank you. And for you listening to this, if you enjoy this kind of conversation, I would like to help us out in some way. Something you can do that would really help us is to go into your podcast app and press subscribe. They would have us in different podcast lists and then more people can listen to inspiring and uplifting conversations like the one we just had. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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