Friday, November 28, 2008

Voice from the Field: Eduardo Torres Navarrete

Eduardo Torres Navarrete is the director of CAMPO, a longtime Coffee Kids partner in Oaxaca, Mexico. The organization recently celebrated 20 years and the opening of a regional training center funded by Coffee Kids (see coverage of the event on our blog). Coffee Kids staff sat down with Torres briefly during the celebration to ask a few questions.

On program development:
“You must say something, you have to start with an idea and when the people say something and it comes from inside the community and they are expressing a want or a need, that’s when it begins. If you don’t question things, if you don’t think, if you don’t imagine, there’s nothing that can move you. But with one word, why does this happen? Why is there poverty? Suffering? Injustice?

“Challenges provoke us to look at what we have. That’s what motivates us, and this is one of the interesting aspects of CAMPO, we are going to experiment. We are going to produce and we are going to demonstrate that these things can be successful. If we don’t believe we can succeed, we have nothing.Unless you start you won’t achieve anything, but these words will guide you and take you where you want to go.”

Advice for other organizations:
“I believe every organization confronts the idea of what you are and what you should be. We should be better, we should be more democratic. The ‘should be’ can become an obligation over time.”

“But what do you want to be? What do you want to be and do? And this is the only suggestion I have, that you do everything that comes to mind. Invent, propose, experiment, fail, and in that way you will move your own development forward. For organizations that are old like us, you must leave your fears. Dare to try new things. Trying something will never fail you. If our organization doesn’t transform, it will die. And we’ve been able to transform over the years. It’s a challenge, its never easy, but it’s necessary.”

On success of programs:
“If you ask CAMPO how many poor people are there after all of these years? Well, there are fewer poor people, but we don’t work for that. We work to give people the power to address what they want to see. We have seen many things happen and we’ve seen people helped. We’ve worked in a lot of ways and lot places.

“We know the radicals, we know the conservative, and we understand those who have no hope. We’ve never tried to work in a box or in a certain way. We have tried to give support to the people to realize their own internal power to develop their community in the way they want to with knowledge and awareness and this is what I believe is the most important.

“The rest is just numbers.”

On their new training center:
“In the mission of CAMPO, we talk about exercising rights. There are many who demand for their rights and look for respect of rights. And we say, let’s stop demanding and demanding and demanding. We need to exercise our rights to health, to housing, to food, to education.

“This training center is an option for the people, an option with open doors. We capture rainwater, we recycle grey water, treatment of water, composting, all sorts of projects. We try to integrate all of them so people can see ways to make it work in their communities. Not every project will work in every community, but here visitors will have a chance to see all of these systems integrated and have the opportunity to find what works, learn from CAMPO and take it back to their communities.

“We have 25 different projects on display here. These projects can be seen in many places, but we’ve brought it all together here in one space. To put it all together and integrate each piece it and open it up to the community so people can come in and see how to do it, this is part of our mission.”

On the support of Coffee Kids:
“In my 20 years with CAMPO, we’ve been fortunate to have the support of a number of organizations. A large organization from Holland helped develop a lot of our programs. And then there is a small organization named Coffee Kids that took the bet on this training center project that no one wanted to fund. We sent it all over to Germany, Belgium. At one point, we weren’t sure how to make it work. But Coffee Kids understands the importance of these demonstration projects.

“Size and amount of money isn’t what is important, it’s what the organization carries inside that can transform the world. Whether or not we succeed or not is not important, but good intent and learning from your challenges is what is important, and, like CAMPO, Coffee Kids understands this.”