PEPY News & Updates
PEPY Philosophies
Have you read our PEPY Philosophies? We'd love it if you would! Check it out and comment below, or click here for a permanent link.
In order to empower people to make changes in their own lives–to create our vision for a world where everyone has access to quality education, increased health and environmental awareness—we believe we need to:
Build capacity in people.
Partner with other organizations.
Share the lessons we have learned.
Allow flexibility in our programs.
Work with local government systems and power structures.
Overall, we believe that the changes we want to see in the world are only possible if we invest time in people. Changes won’t result from giving things away, they won’t result from throwing more money at a problem, and they won’t happen by rushing to reach more and more places without committing the time to create high quality impacts. We are just as impatient as the rest of the people looking to make change in the world, but what we have learned through our mistakes and our slow and small successes is that investing time in a team of passionate leaders will keep us on the path to reaching our vision.
Build capacity in people.
We believe in the power of individuals to make positive changes in their communities. Our most effective programs are those that invest in individuals, and we’ve learned the hard way that improvements in infrastructure and resources without capacity development components have little impact. Check out some of these programs to see how PEPY is investing in developing Cambodian capacity:
* Empowering communities to be involved in education.
Our Primary School Development Plan Program is a three year plan in which PEPY staff work with local school support committees, school administrators, and teachers to create and implement community-driven solutions to school problems. At the end of the three year program, we expect School Support Committees to be advocates for education in their communities, to understand their rights and ministry commitments, to be able to identify and solve school problems, and to serve as the monitoring agents for government school budgets. In addition, teachers and school administrators will have opportunities for extensive training in areas they identify. In this way, PSDP strengthens schools in the specific ways they need.
* Hire staff within our target areas.
We hope in five years that individuals from the communities where we work are running our programs. At present, we have not achieved this goal and our Cambodian program managers are mostly from urban backgrounds where they were able to achieve higher education. To build local capacity, we have hired project assistants and program officers from the Chanleas Dai area who work directly with each program manager. Over two thirds of our staff are from Chanleas Dai and the surrounding area. The goal is to have them take over all positions in the future. Our whole team believes in this concept, and that’s why we believe it will work!
* Support higher education
All full-time PEPY staff who work with us for over 3 months are eligible for a full scholarship to higher education, and they are taking us up on it! On our team, we have Sela (Office Manager) getting his master’s in Tourism, Kong (Guard) learning English, Kimline (Accountant) getting her MBA, Riem Bon (Program Assistant) doing his BA, Thy (Driver) studying computers, Rithy (Program Officer) getting his BA in English, Chim Seng (English teacher) getting his BA in English, Ratana (Education Program Manager) doing a master’s in Education, and An Em (Program Officer) doing a BA as well. In addition, we are supporting 16 teachers and youth from the Kralanh/Chanleas Dai area to obtain their high school equivalency degree through a weekend program at the District of Education.
* Building youth capacity
Our Child-to-Child Program is all about capacity building, investing in young leaders, and helping them find creative solutions to problems they identify in their daily lives.
Partner with other organizations.
We believe it is important to partner with both organizations we want to learn from and ones we want to help to improve. Our goals are to not only improve our own organization but to support the movements around the causes we believe in as a whole, which means we need to let others learn from our successes and failures and share the resources we create with others working in education. It also means that instead of simply being critical of others, we speak to groups we disagree with and try to learn from and share with them. We spent our first few years complaining when we saw other organizations harming education in the areas where we worked and then realized that complaining is useless unless we do it directly to the organization itself while also suggesting ideas for improvements. We believe that partnerships and cross-organizational capacity building can raise the bar for the development industry overall. It can also help us to expand our impact from one small area in rural
* Classroom libraries
Our Classroom Libraries Program was designed as a proposal to Room to Read (a nonprofit organization which has distributed many books and built libraries in Asia and Africa) as our idea for how to improve upon their reading room program. The new model brings books into each classroom and provides more extensive and ongoing teacher training for all teachers, not just a librarian, and shows them how to incorporate books into the classroom. This partnership has lead to Room to Read focusing on only Khmer Early Literacy books for the next two years of new book printing and has inspired other classroom library models across
*Early literacy
When we found out that BETT (Basic Education and Teacher Training) was making early literacy books, we had a little dance party in our office. These are the first Khmer books that are being created using early literacy best practices, leveled readers, patterning, featured “new words”, the whole shebang! BETT has spent nearly 4 years researching and making this book series, and we are so impressed with their commitment to doing this program so thoroughly. We asked to work with them to continue to learn from their work and to add value where we could. PEPY’s team took on the task of helping to choose books for the extension of the project: lesson plans for commonly found Khmer books for grades 3-6. PEPY has only played a small role in the lesson plan development process, but we are delighted to be a part of this program, which is currently awaiting Ministry approval for use in schools across
* XO laptops
Since we became a test school for the One Laptop Per Child project (aka $100 laptops) we have initiated group meetings with other organizations using the new green laptops so we can share ideas and progress from our programs.
Share the lessons we have learned.
We believe that sharing the struggles we have, failures we face, and mistakes we make will help improve the work of the industry. Honesty throughout the NGO world is something we hope for and we try to contribute to through this website and our work with partners. Here are some ways we share what we learn:
* Our founder, Daniela Papi, writes on her blog called Lessons I Learned.
* The PEPY team started voluntourism101 to share ideas and best practices in regards to volunteer tourism based on our experiences in
* On our tours we focus nightly on article readings and discussions on relevant topics we have learned about in our development and tourism work.
Allow flexibility in our programs.
While we of course would love it if our programs reached our goals exactly as we had planned, we know that cannot happen, and never will. Typical NGO funding models require that organizations show proof that they executed their plan as proposed, and many either stretch the truth about their activities or force their employees to enact the plan as proposed, even if it has proven to be an ineffective model. We believe this is causing many problems in development work. As a result we have turned down grants that we felt would limit our ability to change how our programs are designed if the need to do so became apparent. We are able to be flexible in our programs because we have:
*Individual donors like YOU
We are funded almost entirely by private funding. Past participants on our tours or donors who have an intimate understanding of our programs are our typical funders, and this allows us the flexibility to get on the phone with them and say “You know the money you gave to support math teacher training? Well, there was some extra money, and we’d love to use it to buy replacement books for our library. Does that work for you?” or to tell them that a program we have designed is not working as well as we had hoped and we would like to redirect their funds while we restructure the program.
*A commitment to put communities, not donors, first.
When we have the opportunity for specified funding, we first ensure that it will provide for the real needs of the communities we are working in. Where donor needs come first, or will lessen the impact of our programs, we say no. In 2009, an NGO approached us to give us significant funding to support our Primary School Development Plan Program, but it would require us to tailor part of the program to meet the requirements of a grant they had acquired. As the PSDP model requires flexibility in order to be effective, we felt that taking the money would constrain the program too much. As such, we turned down the money to preserve the integrity of the program.
* PEPY
PEPY Tours funds a significant portion of PEPY Ride’s overhead each year, and donations specifically earmarked for M&G cover the rest. This allows our fundraising dollars to go directly to our programs.
Work with local government systems and power structures.
We think it is very important that the work that we do is supported by local leaders and contributes positively to the systems which will continue to operate in
Here are some ways we work with local government systems:
* Close relations with district and provincial authorities
We have a close relationship with both the District and Provincial Ministries of Education in the areas where we work. We meet with them regularly to get feedback and input for our programs as well as to find out ways to use their training and expertise to support our teacher training goals. In the Primary School Development Plan Program, the members of the District Office of Education as well as the commune and village leadership have played a strong role in both school selection and program implementation.
*Sharing with the Ministry of Education in
PEPY’s Library Program and
* Following ministry standards
We closely follow Ministry of Education policies. Our trainers use ministry policy and curriculum to build the capacity of government teachers, and the goals of our Education Program match those of the Royal Government of Cambodia. Wherever possible, we aim to support, not detract from, the government’s education plans.
A commitment to knowing our impacts:
You might call this “Monitoring and Evaluation." This is an area where, if you look at common practices of reporting, we are surely quite weak. Instead, if you were able to evaluate our team on how well they know the impacts of our programs and the changes that they need to make to fix any problems, we would rank fairly high. We of course write reports when we need to, usually for our own internal records and evaluative purposes, but our reports to donors are typically much less formal than they are to granting bodies. We would like to ramp up our reporting so that we can better share the work that we are doing with all of you who are reading this and keep more detailed written records for future staff and our own reflection process.
That said, we are comfortable with the amount of knowledge we receive about our programs’ impacts, as 75% of our staff live or spend the majority of their work days in the communities where we work and continually inform us of ways to improve. It took some time to build trust with community leaders and school administrators to get honest answers about the impact of our programs, local needs, their impressions of PEPY, and constructive advice. When you are viewed as dollar signs it is hard to get honest feedback. There has been a significant shift in how the community treats PEPY staff now that there is an understanding that we do indeed want honest feedback and will not remove our funding if we get criticism. . . . Instead we will happily receive it as it helps us improve what we do!
Primary School Development Update
By Maryann Bylander, Managing Director
It has been fascinating to watch Chanleas Dai and Prasat Knar School Support Committees work through their first respective Primary School Development Plans (PSDPs).
As part of the PSDP methodology, we’ve been working for the past 3 months with each school to build, strengthen, and train a School Support Committee (SSC), much like a Parent-Teacher Association Board in the United States.
The School Support Committees now meet once a month, and have been working with the PEPY Team to learn about the Ministry’s policies of
One of the most interesting things about working with PSDP is seeing the differences between Prasat Knar, a newly supported primary school, and Chanleas Dai Primary, where we have been working for over 4 years. Although both schools are receiving the same training, workshops and attention as part of the PSDP process, the problems they are identifying and how they choose to solve them are remarkably different.
Of course, their problems ARE different. Many of the things that Prasat Knar wants, Chanleas Dai already has. And in addition to having a beautiful library, more highly trained teachers, clean water, and school gardens, Chanleas Dai is also a different village, 20 kilometers away with unique community problems.
As part of the PSDP approach, each school is offered Standard Support (uniforms, first aid kits, water filters, and a wide variety of training and resources), and also works with PEPY and the SSC on a School Development Plan for each of the three years they participate in the program. During the planning process, the groups have the opportunity to identify problems and plan solutions of their own. As the PSDP approach is focused on initiating sustainable changes, the idea is that the community and SSC are responsible for as much of the implementation and costs of School Development Plan projects as possible. While PEPY can help with advocacy, training, ideas and small amounts of resources, the SSC is responsible for putting these changes in place.
At Prasat Knar, a remote school near the Odor Meanchey border, the main problems the SSC identified were a lack of water, poor literacy skills among students, and a lack of textbooks and resources. The SSC is already moving forward on finding creative ways to solve these problems. Through a community donation scheme, they are raising over 300 dollars to move 100 truckloads of dirt, creating a pond that will provide water for toilets and gardens at the school. PEPY’s contribution will be about 140 dollars, less than half of what the school will collect. For a library, the community is looking for ways to raise money to subsidize a volunteer teacher, or to have approval from the District for one teacher to work part-time as a librarian. We’ll provide a one-time room renovation, books, and library training, and the SSC will provide follow-ups and commit to funding a librarian. For textbooks, we’re working with other schools in the area and the District to find extra copies. If that’s not possible, the school and PEPY will work together to provide extra textbooks.
At Chanleas Dai, the SSC is focusing on providing life skills training for students, creating resource workshops for teachers, and making child friendly spaces for students to learn and play outside of class time. It is reassuring to see that after so much exposure and training, the Chanleas Dai teachers and parents recognize that the biggest things they can do to improve their school are less related to things and more related to actions.
As we move forward with our PSDP program, we’ll keep you posted with pictures and journal entries. Stay tuned!
TEDxBKK
By Eric Lewis, Intern
In 1984, a
As TED grew, its organizers recognized the interrelation of not just technology, entertainment and design, but of all fields where progress is made. Enter a new slogan: “Ideas worth spreading.” In addition to the nonprofit’s annual conferences in
I joined Cambodian PEPY staffer Rithy Thul on his first trip abroad to see the event, and we were thrilled when Daniela’s impassioned talk drew the day’s first standing ovation. She spoke about several of the topics that PEPY enthusiasts are familiar with, such as the importance of investing time in people rather than merely investing money in things.
Other conference highlights included a talk by PEPY friend Brooke Estin, who explained the “triple bottom line” of social enterprise. She puts her social business theory to practice at Kiva, a micro-lending enterprise, and Change Fusion, a consultancy for social innovation. Further, experimental musician Ronley Teper wowed us with her unique brand of music, which defies all categorization. (Exciting update: Ronley will visit PEPY headquarters in the coming weeks!) Of all the day’s speakers, perhaps none was more inspiring than the last, Prae Sunantaraks. Prae, who suffers from the currently uncurable disease retinitis pigmentosa (RP), shared the story of her gradual blindness and the beautiful insights she has gained in light of this experience. The crowd sprung to their feet with applause as Prae concluded with the Helen Keller quote, “It is better to be blind than to have sight but no vision.”
If you want to experience TEDx and Daniela’s talk for yourself, we would love to share video footage with you once it has been uploaded to the TEDxBKK website. We look forward to posting Daniela’s speech to the PEPY Team Journal as soon as it’s available!
Leadership for Literacy and Bike Repair Clubs
By Maria Hach, Program Intern
Here at PEPY we are getting ready to introduce two exciting new programs: Bike Repair Clubs and Leadership for Literacy. Both programs will see students from
Recognizing that our Bike to School Program is likely our least sustainable program—but realizing that a broken bicycle or the lack of a bicycle is often the reason given by students who have dropped out of school or who are absent for a long period—we have decided to modify this program and introduce Bike Repair Clubs. These clubs will provide technical and leadership opportunities for junior high school students who will repair bikes in their school as well as surrounding primary schools. This means that students of all ages who are registered in school can benefit from having their bikes repaired. A micro-lending aspect will also be involved, and this will be managed by club members. Students can pay back the cost of the required bike part in small amounts, on a weekly basis. This means that the family will not need to wait until they can afford to fix their child’s bike, making it possible for the child to keep attending school. Through Bike Repair Clubs, students will not only have the opportunity to learn practical skills, but also enhance their soft skills such as team building, problem solving and critical thinking by working together with their peers. It is a simple yet stimulating idea, and hopefully the kids will have a lot of fun in the process!
The Leadership for Literacy Program begins next month, and involves both
Stay tuned as we post pictures and updates from the program!
Lessons Learned from First Aid Class
By Sela Chham and Tyler Roy
From what I have experienced growing up in Cambodia, when accidents happen here, people often try and help victims by using traditional Cambodian techniques and medicine. Unfortunately, more often than not, these techniques will not help people to get better. In order to better learn how to treat injuries, proven modern techniques need to be utilized.
Because of this, on December 13th, PEPY provided a First Aid Training course conducted by the Red Cross to all of our staff so that we could learn more about healing ourselves and others. During our training we did not learn advanced medical techniques, but rather learned the skills necessary to save lives in emergencies. We learned how to immobilize fractures, treat burns, stop bleeding, and perform many more medical techniques.
These classes are essential because Cambodian ways to deal with health emergencies are often different, even from one village to another. These methods have various degrees of effectiveness, ranging from being very effective (placing banana leaves on burns) to being very harmful (dragging a motorcycle accident victim by the feet).
In our first aid classes, our staff members were asked questions by the trainer. For example, one question was “How would you stop bleeding?” One person answered “use brake fluid,” another suggested “pouring gasoline into it.” Other answers ranged from using smashed spiders and their webs to applying charcoal and alcohol.
While those may seem harmless enough, and some may even work, other treatments in Cambodia can prove to be extremely harmful. For example, if someone is electrocuted and their heart stops, instead of performing CPR or other lifesaving techniques, some Cambodians bury the person up to their neck in mud or sand and cover them with a white cloth. This is done in hopes of releasing the excess electricity that has built up in the person’s body into the ground. Some people will also shove a white cloth into the person’s mouth and ears in order to keep the person’s spirit from escaping the body. Since people occasionally recover naturally during this process, any recovery is credited to the success of the treatment, and the ineffective method of treatment will be used again.
Through our training, we were able to learn modern first aid techniques to facilitate safety and health so that we will be able to provide suitable first-aid treatment to employees or other people in the office, people in the communities in which we work, along with participants who come on a trip with PEPY. Because of the workshop, our staff now has the necessary skills to help preserve life, prevent further harm, and promote recovery.
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