See Beautiful Grant Applicant: The Chain Collaborative

The feature below is brought to you by The Chain Collaborative, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about The Chain Collaborative, please visit their website page: here.

Investing in leaders to build a future

My first passion was literature. Words. The stories that we tell each other and the stories that we tell ourselves. The stories that we live and that we endure. The stories that come to life before us and the ones that give us life. The Chain Collaborative (TCC), while a development organization, is like literature and like putting words on a page, in that through our efforts, we allow stories to come to life.

In the development world as in the world of literature, words are cavernous. They are deep and can be filled with meaning, or they can be empty, hollow. They are at once eternal, known for centuries, and also just waiting to be discovered—as words are written and not only spoken, or as sounds in new languages. Words can be mapped. You may be familiar with these words and may have visited them in different contexts: empowerment, capacity-building, sustainability. And now, more than ever, development programs must build resilience, peace, and justice. They must promote equity, diversity, and inclusion. In this context, words cease to be caverns, tombs, or labyrinths. Suddenly they are like objects, they have weight.

The words that I’ll share in this blog post will tell one story, one of the many that I could share about The Chain Collaborative. Nine years ago, I traveled to Siem Reap, Cambodia to volunteer and experience a second passion of mine: international development. When I began this journey, I’d no idea of the stories I’d be able to tell. I only knew I wanted them to be beautiful, full of light, bursting with brilliance and meaning.

While in Cambodia, I discovered that people had many notions of beauty and brilliance. Some folks around me described the children, the people, of Cambodia, as beautiful—in a way that meant their conditions of life seemed so unfathomable. How could someone so beautiful be experiencing something so ugly: poverty. But poverty has its own story, with characters called Power, Politics, and Marginalization, to name just a few, and this story can tell you why poverty lives among the beautiful.

It is also this story that has led revolutionary thinkers to claim that we must act “from each according to his [or their] ability, to each according to his [or their] needs.” TCC’s story begins when I did just that when I met Sokha Khoun as she was forced to leave her foster home in Siem Reap, despite having received a scholarship to attend university. She asked if I would provide her a monthly stipend to live in town during her studies so that she could take advantage of her scholarship. Without a home, she’d have to forfeit the opportunity.

I agreed.

Sokha is now thriving, working for a non-profit organization in Cambodia where she is able to pay on the accompaniment that I offered, allowing other girls to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them and write their own stories. When I think about Sokha, I know she is the reason I began TCC years later. She is the mission of The Chain Collaborative: to invest in Change Leaders as they build a future according to their own visions.

Though at TCC we do provide according to our abilities, it is not really according to need. Julia Kramer, in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, wrote, the “need-help model of development is closely linked to a problematic deficit model, where we recognize those ‘in-need’ for what they lack, rather than value them for what they have.”  When you give according to need, you do not recognize what people have. At TCC, we pay forward that moment of recognizing Sokha for what she had, and nurturing it: the tenacity to seek her own future, to gain scholarship, to ask for support. She was brave, humble, she had vision.

When you invest in the visions of people and in their existing capacities to be brave and humble, you invest in future leaders, you reinstate dignity in development, and you allow people to plot their own story step by step, to define their own meaning.

As a development organization now working with coffee farmers, we aim to do exactly that through our Investment Partnership Program, in which we collaborate with local leaders, invest in their capacities, and ask them to design their own futures. In the past year, we’ve also co-authored an online curriculum in sustainability, where we teach the meaning of sustainability, its history, and its interaction with the coffee industry.

Erika Koss (AWorldinYourCup.com), my curriculum co-creator and coffee sister, mapped the meaning of sustainability. The root of the word, she found, was first used by Chaucer, in a poem, where he admits that he cannot sustain the beauty of another’s eyes. It reminds me that the root of everything we do at TCC is beauty. Sustainability itself comes from too much beauty. Sustainable development is the process of creating so much beautiful, and so much light, that you literally cannot manage its brilliance.

Finally, when I think about how TCC sees beautiful, I am reminded that our real work is to create beauty that is no longer ours to manage. Through TCC, I strive to pay on Sokha’s story and experience. Yes, I accompanied her journey in a small way, but my job was never to witness and behold the beauty that ensued. I was to fade away. Everything she creates, the stories she now helps other girls to write, is not for me to experience, to behold and to have. At TCC, we are merely a part of other people’s journeys, a stepping stone and a resource they can use to lift themselves up toward their own stories and toward their own beauty. And once they take that step, like someone we love and cherish, our Change Leaders are only ours to let go, to let live, to let create. To let beauty.

Written by: Nora Burkey

Founder and Executive Director, The Chain Collaborative