Have you heard of a super shelter?
It’s an emergency cold weather shelter that traps radiant heat from a campfire to provide life saving warmth for the occupants. And it uses basic materials you can find in any DIY store.
You can make one at home. In fact, it can be folded up into a small pocket sized package.
It’s why I contacted several Muslim charities during yet another winter appeal they all do every year.
I barely got a reply.
The handful of replies I did get were very corporate sounding emails to effectively tell me they’re not interested.
Why would that be? A solution for cold weather emergencies that can be mass produced and at a fraction of the cost for the packages they were fundraising for.
It would only take 2 or 3 rounds of supply to make an area largely winter safe so why wouldn’t they want to solve the issue instead of responding to emergencies year after year?
(And why do we wait for there to be an emergency?)
I asked two friends who worked in major Muslim charities why I had such a bad response.
They told me most charities make more money from emergency appeals.
In other words… they are NOT incentivized to solve issues. Because once the issue is solved they are no longer needed.
This is a brief introduction to a concept I want you all to understand if you want to form effective organisations:
The most effective organisations disband and close shop once their project is complete.
But you can’t do that if you have a bloated organisation. It’s why I said keep no more than 7 people.
P.S.
I wrote a short introduction on the benefits of becoming a subscriber.
P.P.S.
You can read more about the foundation to building an effective jama`ah: YOU.