Signs for the campsite

When we had our first meeting with the community, we talked about ways to make the campsite more official. People have been camping and picnicking under the giant cotton tree for years, but now that the community was going to start caring for and directly benefiting from visitors, we needed to show that things were a little different. Since no one lives full-time at the site, we decided on three signs and drafted the text for them there and then.

The first sign, above, marks the turn for the campsite from the road down to Nana's Lodge. The second, below, is to remind visitors not to throw their garbage in the toilet and to keep things clean. Garbage attracts flies, and since we're adding ash, leaves and sand to the toilet on a regular basis, the wood base and thatch of the toilet is pretty fly-free.

The young boy in the photo is Claudius, an Uptown local who kept me company while I painted the campsite rules sign, helping me amend the text when I ran out of space and carry the sign under the tarpaulin when it started to rain. When I dripped white paint between the lines, he tore off the outer husk of a ripe coconut, dampened it with water collecting on a leaf and made me an effective paint eraser. It's his arm in the Robertsport Community Campsite sign above. He's 12 and I invited him to start talking to young people in the community about ways Robertsport Community Works can support their needs. It would be great to have a rotating youth member on the Community Board.

The welcome sign was a challenge, as the smallest brushes they sell at hardware stores here were clearly too big for all the information we wanted to include. I used our camping kitchen knife to pare off half the bristles. Benjamin, who made the thatch around our toilet, tied the cuttings to a stick with some twine he found lying around and made me a smaller paintbrush. Without him, we would not have been able to fit the campsite@robertsportcommunityworks.org email on the sign.

As I was painting, it was fun to discuss the text and the signs' purpose with everyone who passed. At one point, I had a crowd of about five people debating how we'd fit the rest of the welcome text on the shrinking real estate of blue. As you can see, we managed well.

Legal Support

Robertsport Community Works is delighted to announce the beginning of a partnership with Alfred Brownell, the leading environmental attorney in Liberia. Thanks to a series of referrals and a highly visible "Green Advocates" sign near the center of Monrovia, we found ourselves speaking with a man who not only shares our vision and concern for Robertsport; but also a man who grew up in the very same neighborhood of Robertsport that we are working with today.

This improbable piece of good fortune charged our meeting with energy and vision. It was inspiring to see how harmoniously we think and plan for the community. We look forward to working closely with Mr. Brownell in the coming years and are grateful, already, for his generous help registering Robertsport Community Works with the necessary ministries.

Starting the Women's Sewing Cooperative

Small businesses have the potential to lift people out of poverty. They teach entrepreneurial skills, financial literacy and encourage people to network and innovate, in the process making empowered and impactful choices.

Employ a woman, development literature tells us, and she'll spend the money on her family's health, nutrition and education. Employ 20 community members, like Nana's Lodge next door to the Community Campsite, and their salaries go to family members and friends in a pattern more like widening ripples in a pool than a little trickle-down.

As Robertsport Community Works starts up, income-generating projects for community members are high on our priority list. We're interested in how to supplement the income of the greatest number of people in Robertsport with a wide array of environmentally-minded and culturally enriching microenterprise projects, everything from sustainable agriculture to community-based tourism and recycling.

First, we're making bags. To be more specific, Bintu, Vivian and Tina (from left to right) are making bags with my direction, sewing West African batik cloth called "lapa" by hand into market bags that retail for $10. More about how to order these bags and other products in a future post.

In the meantime, the four of us are figuring out how to create a viable business model that compensates work on each of the phases of the product: the person who selects and buys the lapa in Monrovia and brings it to Robertsport, the sewer, the person who distributes the lapa to places it can be sold in and outside of Liberia, and the person who markets the products in a way that promotes the cooperative and the community.

At the moment, we're working on product samples of small and large market bags, figuring out costings, determining rates of production and starting to enforce quality control. Our expanded product line will include yoga mat bags, aprons and short kimonos. Each of the cooperative's product tags will have a photo of the woman who made it and a bit about the project and Robertsport Community Works.

Our microfinance advisor is constantly reminding us that people work well with incentives, so rather than divide the profits in a cooperative fashion as I originally suggested, we're moving towards a more capitalistic model that gives all the sewer's profit directly to the woman who made the bag. Each market bag will have, by the strap, small embroidered initials identifying the sewer. In addition, we're silkscreening the cotton tree logo and www.robertsportcommunityworks.org on the outside and inside of the strap, respectively. I hope that this move towards branding will start to develop a Robertsport Community Works brand that is the equivalent of seeing a "Rainforest Alliance" or "Fair Trade" sticker on a product.

We're also expanding the project, with new women being trained by other members the cooperative. Each woman will receive a starter kit that includes scissors, needles, thread and a measuring tape -- a cost of approximately $1.50 that she'll pay back in installments upon selling her bags. There is some risk here: give a woman a lapa and a starter kit and she may not come back with a sellable bag, but that's a risk I'm willing to take as we start working to build relationships with the community. At the end of the day, it's about giving people opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty, not about ensuring immediate return on investment. In the long term, I believe we can have things both ways.

June 2009 budget update

In the interest of organizational transparency, we'll be posting a monthly list of Robertsport Community Work's income and expenditures. This information will also be chalked onto the back of our Robertsport Community Campsite sign for the community to see and respond to.

Here's where we are on a project by project basis:

Robertsport Community Campsite

Income (camping fee is $5 per person per night)
10 June 2009 - $10
26 June 2009 - $5
27 June 2009 - $5
28 June 2009 - $5
June sub-total - $25

We have two four-person tents that we're renting on the weekends (for a $20 deposit and complete with laminated instructions and tent inventory), but as we don't own them, we're not sure whether the money will go to the Community Fund or towards repaying their owner's substantial investment. If it's the former, expect to see the income they generate listed here.

Expenditures
Small welcome signs (2) - $12
Large information sign - $20
Gallon of navy paint - $14
Quart of white paint - $6
Paintbrushes - $6
Cutlass - $5
Grass cutter - $4
Receipt book - $3
Carbon paper - $3
Thatch for toilet - $20
Bush clearing - $5
June sub-total - $97

Beach Cleanup Project
Expenditure
Wheelbarrow - $35
Trash can (2) - $10
Leather gloves (5) - $10
Shovel - $5
Rake - $7
Sub-total - $67

Community Sewing Project
Expenditure
Lapa (2) - $5
Sewing supplies - $1
Sub-total - $6

Community Fund total: $125

The future Robertsport Community Campsite

One of our first projects involves organizing and formalizing the use of the land around the ancient cotton tree into an eco-friendly campsite. We're talking composting toilets, a sheltered cooking area and a compost heap, a freshwater camping shower, plus strategically positioned hammocks,a designated parking site and an environmentally friendly way to reuse or recycle the waste generated by our campers.

After consulting with campers and the community, we've decided to charge 5 USD per person per night, which will go to campsite maintenance and the Community Fund. Campsite maintenance means first building and then sustaining the amenities listed above -- small comforts which will hopefully encourage people to support the community and stay at the campsite, instead of driving a little further down the beach. The Community Fund will support micro-enterprise and other projects backed by Robertsport Community Works, which you'll be hearing more about in future posts.

To establish and communicate about the campsite's new policies, we're painting three signs. The smaller one, which you see here in its in-progress version, will be placed near the thatch that surrounds our pit toilet and read, "Keep our toilet clean. No garbage, please." The second small one will say, "Welcome to Robertsport Community Campsite." The large sign will welcome people, ask them not to litter, point towards the toilets, explain the fee, announce who to call for security, and also include a disclaimer of some sort absolving us of responsibility should a coconut fall on someone's head, etc. The blackboard side will list the organization's finances, which we'll also post monthly on this blog, as well as any announcements we might want to communicate.

At the moment, the payment system involves us collecting cash and a receipt book. Eventually, the security staff will be trained to issue receipts and collect funds, which they'll give to the RCW treasurer and then to us to put in the RCW account. We'll set up a PayPal account to facilitate this process as well.

We're all about bringing together best practices from like-minded organizations around the world and making them happen in Robertsport, so please post suggestions and comments freely. We hope to see you soon at the Robertsport Community Campsite!