From providing education to girls in Afghanistan to cultural programs in India and central Australia, the Wollongong-based Indigo Foundation has achieved big things in 14 years, as JODIE DUFFY discovered.
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It was out of a sense of disillusionment and sheer frustration that the Indigo Foundation was born.
Fed up with Australia's aid funds going to waste on projects that made only small differences to Third World communities, Mount Pleasant's Sally Stevenson believed she had a solution.
She asked a group of like-minded friends to join her in establishing an independent, not-for-profit charity that would make a real difference on a range of international projects.
''We have this cultural predisposition to think we are better because of our privileged life, which really is just a matter of circumstance."
On its website, Indigo's slogan sums up the charity's philosophy: "The first thing we offer is respect."
In what Stevenson calls "grassroots partnerships", the aim is to hand over power to marginalised communities, so the people involved decide what is needed and how funds are best spent in achieving their goals.
Now with 100 committed members and a database of around 800 people in Australia, Indigo raises $250,000 a year through private donations. The funds are to support 13 programs in Afghanistan, Central Australia, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, South Sudan and Uganda.
Indigo is run by a core team of 30 dedicated volunteers who give up their time and annual leave each year to travel overseas to ensure the projects are on track. There is no office, rather volunteers work from home connecting to their community each month via a range of available technology - including regular post, satellite telephone and Skype.
Stevenson, who is the charity's chairwoman, explains the decision to help a community is made on whether Indigo's four principles can be met - community ownership, sustainability, transparency and equity.
"The first priority is to listen to their needs and concerns and then we talk about whether we are able to help them," says Stevenson. "That would mean being able to build a relationship with them around those four guiding principles."
Government and non-governmental aid agencies demand a procedural approach designed to control the funds, with much of the money Stevenson says going to pay Western-born consultants for advice.
"A lot of the aid money actually doesn't get to the communities," she says. "A lot of development aid is also very cookie-cutter stuff.
It can be the same thing for each community. We feel that each community is unique and has its own needs and challenges. With our approach, the community gets what it wants because they own and drive the project."
While Indigo can offer expertise, if that is required, it doesn't implement a project. Instead it supports local not-for-profit organisations to do that work.
"We think that's the catalyst for change in a community. We work with local communities to access resources and have control over the decisions that determine their basic needs and human rights."
One of Indigo's success stories is a project which began in Borjegai, a remote part of Afghanistan, in 2003.
The Hazara people had a "collective desire" to educate their children, including the girls, seeing education as a way out of poverty. At the time classes were being held in tattered tents with volunteer teachers. Indigo started in the community with a small gesture of replacing the 20-year-old textbooks at the school, at a cost of $5000.
It has since paid for the salaries of professional teachers to train local teachers and provided funds to help build five school buildings, including a girls' high school.
The community has contributed almost half of the cost in the form of land, labour and cash. Over the 11 years, 4500 students, 45 per cent of them female, have enrolled at the village schools. There have been 550 high school graduates, with about 300 attending university - of which 10 per cent were female. Some of the girls have returned to the village as teachers.
"Because there were three tribes in the village, we made it that everyone had to sign off on the money, everyone had to be fully transparent," says Stevenson.
"They had to work together and they've now come back to us and said the whole project created a level of harmony they hadn't seen before. That's because they had a clear, mutual goal and that was to educate their children."
Stevenson was this year awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her work in social welfare both here and overseas.
An activist during her university days, in the early '90s she spent a year in Nyrippi, an Aboriginal community 500 kilometres west of Alice Springs. Working as co-manager of the general store, she was confronted with extreme poverty, alcohol abuse and violence. It was during that time she became aware of her own racist thoughts.
"I think being a privileged white, middle-class person who went to university, I thought I wasn't racist," she says. "But when you're confronted with some really challenging behaviour, your reflexes can be racist and I had to take time to reflect on myself."
Next came a desire to learn more about social justice, so Stevenson completed a Masters in Peace Studies and then a Masters in Public Health.
"A lot of my career has been around my own personal growth. That's why at Indigo we first listen and focus on what the community wants, not on what we think is best for them. I think we have this cultural predisposition to think we are better because of our privileged life, which really is just a matter of circumstance."
Stevenson has spent years working in aid and development for organisations like AusAID, the United Nations and the World Bank.
She has been hired to advise countries on the best way to finance immunisation programs, has set up the first Aboriginal credit union in the Northern Territory and she's worked for the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF - Doctors Without Borders) as Head of Mission in some of the world's most impoverished countries, such as Ethiopia and South Sudan.
While Indigo is now running almost at capacity, there are plans to replicate similar charities in other parts of the country. Stevenson is also keen to push her approach to other NGOs delivering international aid.
"A lot of what we do is not necessarily about technology or big amounts of money. It's about appropriate amounts of money. Which means we can take risks. We work a lot on the relationships. We need to work with people in good faith and with trust. We need to believe in what they are doing."
Over the 14 years Indigo has had to pull out of two projects - one in East Timor and the other in Congo, both due to a lack of transparency over money.
"In those cases, we were concerned about where the money was going," she says. "We had to pull out because it was unable to be resolved. But we don't look at it as a failure. It's a risk we take.
''In East Timor, for example, we were able to achieve 90 per cent of what we set out to do and that's a good thing. We recognise that community development is going to be a long-term endeavour. The key is you don't need huge amounts of money to make good change and that's why we are able to take these risks."
At the start of the year, Stevenson landed a job at the Warilla Women's Centre as its chief executive officer.
"I love working at the Women's centre," she says. "We do a huge amount for marginalised women in the region. But our funding will go to a competitive tendering process next year so we are concerned about our future. We're not a big player.
''We see up to 1500 women a year. Women with complex needs such as domestic violence and mental health issues. We provide an integrated and safe approach to health and I think we are keeping a lot of people out of hospital. With a budget of $500,000 the social return to the government is high."
In just over seven months in the job, she has made big changes, hiring a dietician and diabetes educator and setting up a phone counselling hotline.
Now 47 and a single mother of two children, Stevenson has also been offered a remote position with MSF to mentor Heads of Missions who maybe struggling in the field.
‘‘I will travel to the country in the first instance but then I’ll take on a more arms length role,’’ she says.
‘‘Being a Head of Mission can be isolating, you are the person in the country responsible for a project, so mentoring someone in the field is something I can do from Wollongong. It’s really rewarding to be able to help someone in that way.’’