In his much acclaimed book The White Man’s Burden (2006), William Easterly has made a sharp distinction between the planners and the searchers, when it comes to foreign aid.

Although Easterly’s thesis leaves ample room for question marks and doubts (as shown by a.o. no less an authority than Amartya Sen), the general line of thought, that planned foreign aid is much less successful than searched foreign aid, has continued to spark the imagination of everyone involved with foreign aid programs ever since.

Says Easterly, the two foremost parameters almost solely owned by the searchers, in contrast with the planners, are Feedback and Accountability. Searchers know if something works only if the people at the bottom give feedback, he remarks, and lack of feedback is one of the most critical flaws in existing aid. But there is more: Feedback works only if somebody listens, and Feedback without Accountability is nothing much more than a “Don’t like my Driving? Call I-800-Screw You!” car bumper sticker.

     

The divide between planners and searchers in foreign aid mirrors a long-standing historical dichotomy in Western intellectual history about change. As any corporate change manager will confirm, to choose between Karl Popper’s utopian social engineering and piece-meal (democratic) reform, or between Edmund Burke’s revolution and social reform, remains a key challenge, in whichever environment change might be desired or needed.

Lately, the management of change has become a major subject in management studies all over the world, and the tenets of utopian social engineering have come to be favoured less and less by professional change implementeers. More and more, gradual, organic and dynamic change has become the cornerstone of succesful change implementation programs, both in the profit and non-profit sectors – all the more so, when programs of Sustainable Business & Corporate Social Responsibility (People-Planet-Prosperity) are concerned. True community change is possible only when the process contains the six community change conversations as identified by Peter Block, viz. the conversation of invitation, the conversation of possibility, the conversation of ownership, the conversation of dissent, the conversation of commitment, and the conversation of (mutual) gifts.

At Bodhgaya, Anand and Jeevan Deep are not envisaging to change the world.

Merely, through a sustainable educational program, and with continuous application of Block’s six conversations, and perpetually listening to the community feedback, we are aiming at reaching out a helping hand to the Dalit & Scheduled Castes communities, creating an environment in which they can help & develop themselves.