Our Partnership for Inclusive Development: Trickle Up Program

By Janet Heisey, Trickle Up Program

MDG #8: Develop a global partnership for development

In 2002, Mobility International USA (MIUSA) entered into a partnership with five members of the InterAction consortium of development organizations.  Through a generous grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), MIUSA provided these organizations with three years of technical assistance and training on creating and sustaining inclusive development programs. Janet Heisey of Trickle Up Program explains the support that an international development organization needs in order to be inclusive. 

The Trickle Up Program (TUP) implements microenterprise development projects in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and the U.S.  We work in partnership with local agencies, usually grassroots nongovernmental organizations and community-based organizations, which implement our microenterprise program in conjunction with other programs.  These partner agencies are the key to the success of Trickle Up. Since the partner agency is responsible for selecting the people who become Trickle Up entrepreneurs, they are also key to our becoming more inclusive of people with disabilities.

Trickle Up’s partnership with MIUSA was successful in enabling us to become a more inclusive organization; two important sets of relationships facilitated Trickle Up’s work in this regard. First, MIUSA's relationship as a mentor to TUP staff was vital. MIUSA served as facilitator, catalyst and technical supporter for the project partner organizations to become more inclusive. Second, Trickle Up found the networking element of the project to be particularly useful for promoting south/south collaborations, between our partner agencies, other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Disabled People’s Organizations (DPOs), and international NGOs.

MIUSA began the project by providing an initial training that increased TUP staff motivation to include people with disabilities. Our staff quickly realized that since one out of six people living on less than a dollar a day has a disability and that as many as 80% of working age people with disabilities are unemployed, Trickle Up’s mission to help the lowest income people take the first steps out of poverty through microenterprise was a natural fit.  Working with people with disabilities would help us achieve our mission to work with the poorest people and this target population could benefit even more than others from the economic independence that microenterprise can offer.

Because Trickle Up is a small organization, there was little bureaucracy that prevented us from bringing an initiative on inclusion to the partner agencies.  We conducted a survey to see what our partner agencies were already doing, and found that many agencies were already including people with disabilities in their programs and hiring staff and volunteers with disabilities.  This meant that many agencies had some experience with outreach and inclusion on which to build. Overall, we have found our partner agencies to be tremendously receptive to increasing their work with people with disabilities.

Given this receptiveness at headquarters and at field level, following the MIUSA training, Trickle Up developed an action plan and ensured that commitment to inclusion existed at all levels of the organization.  New inclusive strategies were developed for:

• How partner agencies identify Trickle Up entrepreneurs
• How new partner agencies are identified
• Recruiting new board members, staff members and volunteers
• Drafting funding proposals
• Reflecting work with people with disabilities in publications.

While Trickle Up could have developed an action plan without MIUSA, it would not have been as successful.  MIUSA staff members were instrumental in ensuring the action plan was well considered and in providing support and technical assistance.  MIUSA encouraged Trickle Up to develop achievable targets for inclusion as a way to establish benchmarks and track progress.  Most importantly, they kept us on target with monthly reminders to revisit the action plan, reminding us to focus on inclusion when many other tasks and priorities threatened to take over.

South/south cooperation

Commitment to inclusion at headquarters level is important, but commitment at the local level is the key to ensuring sustainability of the initiative. For Trickle Up, this meant facilitating links between DPOs and Trickle Up local partner agencies, to ensure that planning and programming incorporates input from people with disabilities at the outset.  This south/south cooperation is key to ensuring the organization has locally relevant information and a local resource for finding practical solutions to the issues at hand.

DPOs can help community-based organizations, NGOs or field offices to:

• Understand the local context and the particular challenges that people with disabilities are facing in that region
• Develop strategies for inclusion
• Identify local governmental, international and local NGO resources available to the organization and to people with disabilities within their communities

MIUSA staff visited our project in northern Mali to provide technical support to the Trickle Up field team and to meet with our 15 partner agencies.  The staff in Timbuktu had outlined Trickle Up’s commitment to including people with disabilities throughout our programs and the partner agencies were enthusiastic about inclusion, but they were having some very practical difficulties with being inclusive.  For example, because of mobility issues, people with disabilities were struggling, not always successfully, to attend entrepreneur meetings. Non-disabled entrepreneurs were frustrated when disabled participants didn’t show up.

MIUSA invited local DPOs to a networking meeting with Trickle Up partner agencies, and encouraged them to work together to find solutions to access issues that were preventing the full inclusion of people with disabilities. MIUSA also established links with the local office of Handicap International, who joined the network meeting as a resource.  Handicap International was able to marshal the forces in a way that TUP did not have the resources or expertise to do.  During the workshop, TUP partner agency staff became so enthusiastic about inclusion that they started talking about advocating for the rights people with disabilities in their community.

MIUSA showed us through this workshop that bringing DPOs into an existing network was the key to success.  The Trickle Up partner agencies had already developed good working relationships with one another, and adding the local DPOs to this strong network was very powerful.  Throughout this project, it has been Trickle Up’s experience that, on the whole, partner agencies on the ground have already embraced the idea of inclusion, but need practical resources to put the ideas into practice.  The role of an international development organization can be to facilitate valuable in-country partnerships, by linking our existing networks with national and local DPOs, and other community-based and nongovernmental organizations.

International DPOs such as MIUSA can play a valuable role as mentors to international NGOs, as they work to bring the issue of inclusion to the fore in their organizations. Trickle Up still has a long way to go in terms of becoming a fully inclusive organization, but lessons learned from our relationship with MIUSA provide a key to how we can proceed.

Contact:

Trickle Up Program
104 W 27th St # 12
New York, NY 10001-6210 
Tel: (212) 255-9980
Email: info@trickleup.org
Web: www.trickleup.org