Below is a full transcript of the podcast.
Kelly Torres 00:01
This episode of Ed Tech Hour is brought to you by the Educational Psychology and Technology Program at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. The Chicago School’s mission is integrating the values of education, innovation, service, and community. The Chicago School provides students innovative and practitioner-based learning experiences in which they’re able to positively impact others around the world and address issues faced by underserved populations. Through collaboration university administration, faculty, and students the Ed Tech Hour was created in order to pursue our vision of innovation and global outreach. This monthly podcast series will include thought leaders from around the world who will discuss relevant issues centered not only on technology but also the impact of technology on humanity. Speakers will provide listeners with stories of how they have impacted learners, employees, and communities through their pursuit of understanding how individuals learn and use technology to improve performance. This show provides a global medium to share and promote various issues and developments and learning how professionals are utilizing technology. By listening to this show, I hope that you’re able to develop a unique insight into how you can incorporate similar topics and trends into your own professional settings. I look forward to learning more about our topic with you throughout this episode.
Kelly Torres 01:19
Okay,well welcome. This is one of our podcasts for The Chicago School doctoral program. And today I’m excited because we have Georgina Harris here, who is recording this from Tanzania, specifically Tanga, because she runs Pamoja Leo. And Pamoja Leo is this incredible NGO over there that provides support for women in the community, so that they can raise the children they choose to mother. And this is so that no child has to grow up in an orphanage and that every child knows the love and belonging of a family. So I’m going to ask you to share more about that briefly if you could, because I think you’ll do a way better job than me.
Georgina Harris 02:08
Yeah. So Pamoja Leo, essentially, has a mission to redefine the way that children are cared for, specifically, children who are vulnerable, orphaned, abandoned, and abused. And our goal is to strengthen the resources and services available to children and their families, and also to support women to be able to provide the care that children need in a time of crisis. And we do that predominantly by focusing on what it is essentially that families need, that will prevent families from breaking down. And what services can we provide to ensure that children get the, you know, best care that they that they deserve, essentially, and doing that against the backdrop that, for a long time, orphanage care or institutional forms of care have kind of dominated and are continuing to kind of be increased, especially in East Africa and Tanzania. And we know that that isn’t really the best place for a child for a child to grow up. And we also know that families and communities really want to care for their children. And so looking to shake up the way that child protection is done. And that’s sort of a short way of explaining a big picture.
Kelly Torres 03:40
Sure, and you have so many neat programs, I mean, so what you do is you help provide medical food formula and things for grandmothers, aunts, you know, the extended family who will step in if something happens to the child’s parents.
Georgina Harris 04:01
Yeah, so we run out of what we call a Family Care Center, and we have an early childhood development space, which provides free services to children and their families who are maybe experiencing crisis or the death of a biological parent—they’ve been abandoned, or they’ve been abused and mistreated. And we work to, number one, find a safe place for them to live, whether that’s with grandma or auntie. And we also train the very first, what we call in Tanzania “fit persons,” which other people might understand as foster carers, but it’s foster carers Tanzanian and, you know, not maybe what Americans would understand as foster care. It’s a uniquely sort of Tanzanian style of foster care. And so we’ll find children a safe family to live with, whoever that might be, and then provide services. Out of the Early Childhood Development Center we have a free daycare and preschool, we provide free food to children who are enrolled in that program, we have business training classes, counseling and support services for the family, and then we also have our baby project, which specifically provides, you know, formula milk for infants who have not got a lactating mother. So it’s a whole range of services that kind of wraps around a family and a child or particularly a woman and a child so that that that woman can mother the child in their care. The majority of the time that is grandmas and aunties, I would say that was the vast majority of the centers that we do work with. Sometimes it’s biological mothers, maybe biological mothers in crisis, so that they don’t have to lose their children. Or sometimes that is, as I said, fit families or foster centers.
Kelly Torres 05:52
Sure. And that’s something that well, I’m always interested in all of your programs, but you have the Childcare Center, the Early Childhood Learning Center, where you have classrooms for the little ones, and using play-based and trauma-informed teaching practices, which is quite rare for the for that region.
Georgina Harris 06:17
Yeah, so we run a play-based curriculum, and we try and work from a trauma-informed care perspective. And so what that means is that we recognize that, you know, children in crisis need extra support to develop and thrive and grow and learn and making sure that, you know, their access to care is full of joy and fun and supportive carers, which is part of ensuring that children you know, are safe and secure in their family that they growing up in, but also get a chance to, you know, access to really high-quality, early childhood development services. So a lot of the children that will be part of that program probably have experienced, you know, undernourishment or malnutrition, you know, because they have lacked maybe a mum, a biological mother to be able to breastfeed them, or they’ve been growing up in a family where grandma took in a lot of grandchildren after the death of a mum, so food was tight. And so supporting children to feel safe and secure again, that food is abundant, and to actually maybe experience some of the joy of childhood in a time where they’ve had to maybe grow up too quickly or experience things that are quite difficult. The center really works to try and make sure that we can, you know, provide healing and play during that early childhood period.
Kelly Torres 07:43
Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, and hopefully, we’ll put a link at the end, we have a good program that is a teacher sponsorship, so you’re sending youngish women to a really good teacher training program for a year, which is, you know, I think that’s so important because it’s changing their life. And it changes their own future children, as well as the kids in your classroom, you know, that it’s just, yeah, you know, that’s a really important one as well.
Georgina Harris 08:15
What we found is what we what we do at our center is quite unique. And so we were having a few ladies come and volunteer there who are just incredibly, naturally talented with children, and working with them to sort of see the different ways that we, that we work there. And the problem in Tanzania is you have to be qualified in order to work with children. And so we were finding that a lot of the ladies that had great natural potential with children and to sort of implement this style of working weren’t qualified educators. And so yeah, the program to sponsor teachers to go through to get their professional qualification, we’ve had one lady go through, and she’s now a full-time teacher in our classroom. She volunteered for 18 months beforehand, just for the pure love of children, and not coming necessarily from you know, sometimes you think volunteering means that you’ve got a lot of resources available to you, not particularly she was a lady that lived quite close by to the center, and just really had a love for children. And so, after 18 months of volunteering, we asked her if she would like to become qualified. And then the second girl actually grew up in an orphanage and also had a love for children and wanted to get into teaching. And so she’s the second lady that’s going to go through and become qualified so that she can then go on and work with children. So it’s quite a fun program because they were able to sort of ensure that people with a passion and a real knack or nature for children have the opportunity to get the professional qualification they need to make that a career.
Kelly Torres 10:00
Sure, sure. It’s such a neat, you know, trickle out kind of system as well. So that’s, that’s exciting, I think, to hear about. You do so much, and it’s such a variety, with the same core of helping improve children’s lives. But you know, tell me about your background prior to working and setting up Pamoja Leo.
Georgina Harris 10:25
Sure. So I did my undergraduate online whilst traveling from the London School of Economics. I did a degree in International Development, and I had a specific focus on East Africa at that time. And sort of during that time, I became exposed to the volunteer tourism industry and how that directly related to children in orphanages. And so what—in a nutshell—what that kind of looks like is that 80% of children in orphanages have living, known families, and that volunteer tourism was acting as a kind of a draw to making children sort of exit the family and be in orphanages, so that they were children for people to volunteer with. It’s such a warped thing to get your head around, but this was something I came across when I was in Kenya. And it just, it just really shook me. And I became kind of obsessed, I guess, is the right word with understanding this. And it really became the focus of my degree to really look at that. So I was already on this degree path, but I kind of started to look at it from this lens. And a lot of the work I did after that into really understanding that side of things, you know, how charity can go wrong, how good intentions can lead to bad outcomes, and what was driving—from multiple perspectives—this broken system, I guess, of child protection in a lot of East Africa. And so that was what I did my undergraduate in. I then went on to do my master’s in Development Education and Child Rights in Practice from the Institute of Education again in the UK. And I also did that distance learning, but I did my master’s program whilst running Pamoja Leo as well. And so that was sort of my education background. And along the way, I sort of did a lot of courses around looking at child resilience, looking at things like alternative care, which is the name for children living outside of the biological family unit, we call that kind of alternative care space sector. And yes, that was my educational kind of background. It was sort of a weave because I was not attending a university, I did all of my sort of further learning as a distance learning student. I was able to kind of do other things along the way. And at the same time, yeah.
Kelly Torres 13:00
But I think that would resonate with our students because that’s the bulk of ours—well, all of them in our doctoral program—but it’s varied; we have some campuses as well. But that’s exciting to hear that you were able to do that … while setting up this NGO and working it. You know, so many people want to go into policy and work with governments and working with the big agencies. How did you then decide to set up promote Pamoja Leo, instead of tackling it at the, shall we say the larger level?
Georgina Harris 13:40
Yeah, so Pamoja Leo is the Swahili word for together, which is Pamoja Leo was today. And the kind of ethos behind the charity was looking at things at more of a grassroots level—what would radical acts of togetherness look like in re-creating a child protection system that is focused on locally led kind of solutions to care. And that was a really important part of it. Because, you know, the, there is a lot of great policy change around this particular field. And if people are interested in that, I’m happy to kind of mention some great policy stuff. But there was a real lack of, especially at the time, practice, a really good body of knowledge on practice. And so it was about looking at it from a grassroots level and taking it back to, families want to care for their children; communities want to be safe spaces for children. That was sort of the belief—people do want to act and care. But there was a real lack of investment in kind of that grassroots-level work. And so Pamoja Leo was more about creating models of practice that was investing in sort of the real grassroots level but then feeding up to the policy level about models of practices that work. And I feel that there’s a real sense of disconnect in promoting … like there’s a lot of work around advocacy now. We talk a lot to governments and to different actors at a higher level, because we’ve got a great body of knowledge and experience, I think, and also lifting up the voices of the people that we do work with so that it can reach sort of policy level of change. Because I think there is a real disconnect there, and a lot the problems, I think—especially in this field—had come from a lack of investment in families and in communities. That grassroots-level intervention hadn’t been the focus. And so mass institutionalizing children was just a really convenient way of handling, you know, children and families in crisis. And and also this sector had been very much dominated by not necessarily large charity, but very much Western-led charity. So, you know, the main funders of orphanages are foreigners, not local people, it was not a local solution, it was an imported solution. And in Uganda alone—I mean it’s the only country in East Africa that we’ve got statistics for—but a quarter of a billion dollars is pumped into Uganda into orphanage care every year. It’s staggering. And a lot of that is through religious organizations, church communities. You know, I think the U.S. is the largest funder of orphanage care in Uganda. And so there was a lot of assumption of what the problems were and what people needed, what children needed, and which was a lot of foreigners were pumping in money into orphanages that were essentially breaking up families. And so Pamoja Leo wanted to really sit in a gap of saying, we’re assuming that families do care, and we’re looking at what families and communities want to do, and how can we support them in keeping their children. And with that model, we saw that it really did … it works, it does work. Simply put, it does work. So it was really about trying to see a space to put together local communities to act together. And while there’s a great space for policy—and we do, and I love, you know, a lot of the advocacy work is my passion—I think there was a real need for investment into kind of the more grassroots level of stuff.
Kelly Torres 17:35
Definitely. Yeah, that’s amazing. And I’m glad that to hear how you are getting that voice at the table, if you will, at the higher level now because of the experiences that you’ve had, which, you know, so many times, we don’t listen to the people who are the grassroots, who are actually doing things. So we bring in external consultants to kind of look at that. That being said … you’ve said you took classes and you’ve described your background educationally, but what were the skills or set that you needed—were there any kinds of training—to actually do it, you know, to actually set up? I mean, you have schools, you have classrooms, you have, you know, programs and hiring people. I mean, it’s quite a large skill set. I mean, you do so many different things. Can you describe some of those that were the most helpful?
Georgina Harris 18:39
Yeah, I think having a really good board and trustees was a big first step. I think it’s never about an individual, especially in these sorts of, in the nonprofit world, it has to be about a collective of people. And so I think that was a big lesson is that it isn’t about an individual, it’s about pulling in a team of people around it. So I think that was it— it’s about seeing, it’s about being able to pull in a team of people that share a vision. I think another big skill set that I’ve learned along the way is sometimes you have to throw out what you know and learn to just sit and be patient and watch and wait. There’s a, there’s a want, I think, to try and do everything yourself. And so if you’ve got a great idea and you want to run with it, I’ve learned that sometimes the magic is in leaving space for other people to join in. And if you try and dominate anything, you don’t leave space for other people to show up. And so it takes patience, and it takes shifting your attitude, I think, from what does it mean to be proactive and make change sometimes. It means to really sit listen and learn and be patient. And it sounds strange, but a lot of the biggest achievements, you know of Pamoja Leo, were around—you know, I’ll use an example of the “fit person” program. There wasn’t any foster carers, you know, the Tanzanian version of foster care—in our region. And we now have 116 families who are trained and ready to receive children in crisis. And they’re all volunteers. People said it wasn’t possible; people said Tanzanians won’t do this. I mean, there was all sorts of horrible bias and stereotypes. And a lot of it was just in creating conversation, stepping back and listening, and waiting—and just building it. Like, what would it look like? What was possible? And so I think that was a big lesson of just learning that sometimes a good idea isn’t enough; it’s about being patient and really seeing yourself as a small part of a bigger picture. And so that was a big part of it. To be honest with you, the skill set I wish I had more of, which I definitely don’t … I’m a terrible fundraiser, and these things take a lot of money. And so I kind of had to learn that one on the job, and I wish I was a bit less naïve. When we started, I was very much, if we do good programs, people will fund it. That’s not necessarily the case. I wish I had been less naive on that front of just how much it does take.
Kelly Torres 21:21
Full-time work sometimes just to be able to do that. Definitely.
Georgina Harris 21:25
Yeah, and I think the skill set is just about being adaptable. I think you have to when you’re working for a small charity; it’s not like you have a department for this, a department for that. For small charities, you are the department; you just change hats often. Yeah, I’m doing that now. So it’s really about building a strong foundation programmatically. That was really our big aim—putting the systems in place. And we’ve kind of had to, you know, learn a lot of the other stuff on the job a little bit. And I think that’s okay, too.
Kelly Torres 21:59
Sure. And so many of these issues, I think, are the same for an NGO or a charity anywhere, even if it’s in your home country. But how do you think working internationally is different than if it’s in your home country?
Georgina Harris 22:14
I think you’ve just got to realize—what I’ve realized is—knowing your place. I mean, knowing that you automatically don’t have all the knowledge you need to be able to be fully effective. When you’re working cross culturally, there is always going to be blind spots. It just takes a lot of awareness to know what you don’t know, and to be clear about that. And that’s why I said, I think it’s quite important to have a good board of trustees and a good team. You know, we’ve been very lucky—we have a really great team of staff working at Pamoja Leo who are the experts in their culture in their area and in what social work looks like in Tanzania in context. No matter how much I know about social work or child rights, I’m definitely not going to be the best person to tell you what it looks like in a Tanzanian context. Even after a decade of being here, I’m still not going to be the best person to always say that. So I think that is a definite thing to be aware of if you’re doing something internationally. Although locally, you know, I think always knowing when we can’t be an expert in what we don’t really know—whatever that means—even if locally we might be cultural experts, we might lack something else. And what does it even mean to be an expert? In some ways, there’s a little bit of an element of making sure that you are aware of what you don’t know and not trying to… It’s when you see need or you see an issue, it’s really easy to want to be a problem-solver, especially if you’re that way inclined. Just always realizing that you don’t always have all the information to best solve that problem. And it’s a more collaborative effort. So that was it. Just navigating bureaucracy overseas as a foreigner that can be quite difficult as well. And, you know, that was tough. And it was a challenge when we first set up Pamoja Leo. It was my home, but it led into the first office we had. It burned to the ground in a bush fire, and there’s all these sorts of things that when you when you start something, you can never plan what it’s going to look like. And there’s challenges that you’ve never gonna foresee. Your home and office burned to the ground in a bush fire is just not one of the things you think of when you sign up. That’s sort of what you have to just learn to pivot and react to things that are completely out of control and out of your depth sometimes. You know, I wasn’t raised in a world where I had to have the skill set to know how to deal with all of these challenges, so it’s kind of a learn-on-the-job sort of thing.
Kelly Torres 25:07
That’s yeah, I definitely see that. I mean, having done a lot of work in the Middle East, I love that you have to pivot and just be prepared to sit at the table and listen to people before you jump in with, well, we should do such and such, you know, because that’s just that colonialist view, isn’t it, of I’m going to impose my knowledge on you. So I think that’s amazing—just listening and then seeing what ways are appropriate to help.
Georgina Harris 25:38
I found that sometimes, you know, just another thing with running a charity overseas, I think one of the big things I’ve learned over the years is to just to remain focused on what we’re doing and why. And I’m quite passionate about the idea of not being donor-focused and what it means to actually be community focused, especially in an international context, where you’ve got the majority of your donors are often from overseas. Although, we are actually increasingly focusing on fundraising in Tanzania … sometimes I think charities can bend to the whims of what their donors want. This is the challenge that we face, and to really have a strong stand and to really know what you’re doing and why. And remaining community focused, especially when you’ve got this international dynamic to focus on, it’s important for us not to always betray problems that could make the problems continually worse, you know. If we portray Tanzania as perpetually suffering, then we’re not really doing justice to the bigger problem of people seeing that it’s not perpetually suffering, and there’s great ideas that exists locally, you know what I mean? It can sometimes be hard—a lot of charity fundraising is like, oh, there’s this desperate need, but also there’s this really great solution here. And we, as foreigners, I think we made a problem worse by thinking that solutions didn’t exist, and we came over with our orphanages and rounded up all the children, instead of hearing that there were great solutions locally. So it’s remaining focused on that, like community-centric ideas, which can be hard when you’ve got a lot of international donors who’ve got all their own ideas of what the problems are and what they want to hear about, you know.
Kelly Torres 27:52
Definitely. Those are amazing points. With that—and you’ve very nicely again shared about the degree—but what would you suggest if somebody were wanting to go into this type of work? Because so much of it seems to be on-the-ground training, as well as, you know, as well as your degrees, of course. But what would you suggest to them prior to starting? You know, if somebody wants to change tracks or they’re in their younger years, what degree or training, do you think?
Georgina Harris 28:19
I think finding something that’s quite practical. I think that’s great advice. A lot of the people that I know who are doing really great work in this area are doing things like social work, and law and things like that, because I think having a good skill base is important, you know, that you can be pulling upon. I would say, apply for great grassroots organizations doing really cool work, and apply to do some of the back-office stuff. I think, there’s a lot of people especially—I get a lot of applicants who want to come and volunteer, for example, and they want to do fieldwork. They want to come to Tanzania and go out in the field. I actually think better than that is come and work in the office, you know, and get the nitty gritty of it. I think that is great experience. I think coming overseas and doing fieldwork, probably as a foreigner, will not really be the best fit for you. Fieldwork is probably best done by people that get the context in the field. But come and do the office work. Come and see what that looks like, you know, from a programming element from, you know, just all the nuts and bolts—from fundraising to reporting to impact assessing—all of that stuff. I think coming and getting experience in that area is a good idea. I think that’s a really—especially if you can come and work, you know, in a team. If you’re interested in cross-cultural work, come and do cross-cultural work. I’ve had university students come over, and they want to lead a team … and it’s an interesting dynamic to watch unfold when they’re asked to be led by somebody from Tanzania because they’re more qualified than you to be leading. And I think it’s an interesting dynamic to see play out, with people not really realizing that they’re not experts and coming as a learner. That’s important as well. Specifically, if people are interested in alternative care. There’s some great courses. There’s a course on this platform—you know these open learning platforms?
Kelly Torres 30:21
Like Coursera or something?
Georgina Harris 30:23
Yes, there’s one called Future Learn that has a really great course on alternative care. And if anyone’s interested in, kind of, you know, being part of the alternative care movement, I guess, in that sense, and working towards family-based care and shifting away from institutional forms of care, Future Learn has an amazing course, like really good for that specific field. I think doing some of those courses is really useful.
Kelly Torres 30:37
Oh, that sounds neat. Yeah, thanks for sharing that.
Georgina Harris 30:40
I do also think having a strong policy and legal understanding of your sector is important. You know, know what you’re talking about before … I’ve met, again, a lot of people will come with great ideas, but not really, with respect to what is Tanzania saying about this specific area? What are their goals? Reading all the national plans of action, reading, you know, all around what is the African Union saying about this area? What is the UN saying about this area? You know, knowing the bigger picture, I think, is valuable as well to come in and really well informed on a policy level, too.
Kelly Torres 31:18
Yeah, yeah, important background information. And can people can people volunteer, either? I mean, you did mention that you have people coming in on site, but do you also want people to volunteer remotely?
Georgina Harris 31:34
Yeah, we do work with volunteers. We prefer working with longer term volunteers. And we also majority, pretty much all of our volunteer work is not field based. So it will be working predominantly in the office on things like programming, research, or working on our monitoring and evaluation systems, things of that nature. Helping them with fundraising, that kind of stuff, but it’s a great dynamic environment to—but we do not really offer client-facing volunteer roles.
Kelly Torres 32:12
Well, it’s important not to … children are not exhibits, so they don’t want volunteers coming in and out of their lfe. Especially in the daytime, you know, the ones that come in for the day on a bus. So many places … Southeast Asian, and they do this, it’s really sad to see. So I can understand—you’re great at protecting that.
Georgina Harris 32:36
Yeah, we do accept volunteers remotely as well. Currently, yeah, we’re looking for a few different volunteers at the moment, so like, positions. … Yeah. So if people will…
Kelly Torres 32:48
We’ll put a link for that here. So last thoughts here—because I know how busy you are. If you could wave a magic wand, what is the future for you, yourself, and for Pamoja Leo?
Georgina Harris 33:14
Oh, yeah, I mean, our big vision is to really share that family-based care does work. And we want to share that far and wide, that it’s possible. And we specifically focus on children zero to five, and to really see a shift in the way that people think about programming for, you know, vulnerable children under the age of five across Tanzania, and why overseas, you know, we really want to reach out to more and more people to understand the harms of institutional care, how they can, you know, prevent that in the ways that they travel, the way that they volunteer, the way that they donate. And so our vision is to spread the word and the models of care that we’ve developed, and we are looking more and more at that. We don’t necessarily want to expand in the sense of replicating little Pamoja Leos everywhere, but we want to be able to share the work with other NGOs, so that they can make, you know, the models their own in their context. And that’s a big vision of ours. And then do a lot more work on the advocacy front is a big, yeah, big vision of ours.
Kelly Torres 34:24
Wonderful. Well hopefully you can see all of those goals—you have some amazing goals, I know that— and get the research and to the market, and yeah … just really grow that because that would be exciting to see—to see more organizations, plus also the government entities, really picking up, changing the way we do things.
Georgina Harris 34:46
Change the way we care. I think that’s the big thing is to check to change the way we think about caring for children. The way we think about orphanhood, for example, the way we think about vulnerable children is we’ve got to start to see them as part of a much wider context and much wider circle. Everyone needs their people, and making sure that, yeah, we all invest in solutions that remember that.
Kelly Torres 35:09
And I think even those of us who aren’t working in the sector need to be very much aware of this. And, and doing research. I mean, we know now, we’re starting to learn about don’t go and ride elephants. And having ridden elephants, you know, a long time ago now, you know, we need to bring that same knowledge to people who are talking about visiting children.
Georgina Harris 35:35
Yeah, absolutely. I think even if you don’t work in the child protection space, or in the NGO space, but a lot of people travel, and just making sure that people are aware, you know, if a tour operator offers to go and visit an orphanage, I just wouldn’t use the tour operator. I mean, really, it has to be that clear. And let them know why. Because children aren’t tourist attractions. And the repercussions of this is huge. I mean, it’s literally changed the way that children were, have been looked after—for a whole generation of children have really had what support was available to them altered by creating an industry around institutionalizing children. And it’s sad, and we all hold responsibility for that, no matter who we are. And also the way we give, you know, are we investing in this idea that there are children with nobody? Or are we making sure that we invest in solutions that give them a somebody, and we invest in resources for their, their people? And I think, again, there’s a lot of different things that we can do in the ways that we give to charity in the ways that we travel, that can incentivize, you know, making sure that families have the right resources.
Kelly Torres 36:46
Certainly. I mean, knowing you over the years has just opened my eyes. So I am very, very grateful. Because I don’t think we’re having these discussions in the same way that … well I think we are now. We’re starting to because of people like you. So that’s fantastic. I appreciate all of your work and the good ideas that you’re spreading. So thank you.
Georgina Harris 37:11
And thank you!
Kelly Torres 37:13
Sure. And while we’re on the thank-you’s, thank you for taking part in this, because, again, more ways to get the word out about all the good ideas, but also, you know, the hope is that it’s, you know, it’s not just this NGO that people … or this line of NGO work, but it could be anything. There’s many areas that people could go into helping and volunteer with. And so we’re hoping that this will inspire people to do some things like that. And last thoughts just to inspire people to get involved with an NGO?
Georgina Harris 37:52
Absolutely. I think good intentions are great. I think getting involved with an NGO is definitely heart led in the sense that it’s great to have the passion and ignite that. And then you’ve got to use your head, think it through, open your ears, be ready to listen and learn. And I think if we can find the balance between those sorts of three things: wanting/having the passion, having the right knowledge, and then opening our ears to listen. That’s where the magic really happens. And I think it’s about, you know, having that fine balance between those three things. And then it’s golden. But, you know, not being too heart led, not being too head led, and not, you know, just sitting back and doing nothing. And it’s finding that sweet spot in between those three things that I think is really important.
Kelly Torres 38:39
Well, and I think that’s an awesome note to end on. So, we’re going to stop it here, and thank you for your amazing words of wisdom. We appreciate it. All right, take care.
Kelly Torres 38:53
Thank you for listening to this edition of Ed Tech Hour. I’m Dr. Kelly Torres, the department chair of the Educational Psychology and Technology Program at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. This podcast was completed through the support of our dedicated faculty, staff, and students. To learn more about the Educational Psychology Technology Program, or if you’re interested in being on the Ed Tech Hour podcast, please reach out to me at [email protected]