UP | uncultured project

Hi! If you just found this website because of this CNN.com article let me give you a quick introduction. I’m Shawn and “The Uncultured Project” isn’t a charity, organization, or anything formal. Think of it as “citizen journalism” meets “citizen philanthropy”.

I raise funds online (as an individual – alas, not tax deductible) and I give 100% of what I raise away to charitable causes. And I mean 100% – I even have a friend who covers the PayPal fees of your donation (for now at least). I then show you were the money goes via YouTube and/or Twitter. Sometimes both as you can see in this video.

Most of my work focuses primarily on Bangladesh because I have an ancestry there and still have a few aunts & uncles who live there (although they’ve kinda shunned me for pursuing a project like this – but that’s another story). But, poverty exists everywhere – even around your street corner. That’s why I decided to focus on the LA Regional Food Bank – you don’t need to go overseas to help people.

If you have a few minutes to spare, you can watch my food bank video by clicking here (it’s 3 minutes long). If you want to know more about “The Uncultured Project” you can watch this (it’s also 3 minutes). And if you have a bit more time, please do check out this video of a water project I did in Bangladesh that took over a year to complete (it’s a 4 minute video).

If you are wondering how to support my work – well, donating isn’t the biggest way. The biggest way is by helping me build a bigger voice on YouTube. Please consider signing up for a YouTube account (it’s free) and subscribing to my channel on YouTube. The bigger the voice this project can get, the better the chances that sustainability and more opportunities can come around the corner.

I also want to give a shout-out to my friends Hank & John Green (who were also quoted in that article). Without Hank & John, I wouldn’t have started to accept online donations from the public (they also get automatically notified every time you make a project donation). Also a huge thanks to my friends working at YouTube (many of whom I got to meet IRL) who made this interview with CNN possible.

Stick around. There are lots of hurdles – but I’m positive the best is yet to come.

So what was I doing in Kenya? I had mentioned before that I had tagged along with Vestergaard-Frandsen. It turns out that the CEO of Vestergaard Frandsen decided to single-handedly create the world’s largest privately funded global health campaign.

It was so big, in fact, that even CNN decided to cover it:

The way I see it, the CEO of Vestergaard Frandsen basically packed his bags, liquidated a huge part of his personal savings, and went to Kenya to see how he could make a difference. Why does that sound familiar?

I definitely feel a kinship with Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen – and his willingness to spend his own dime to do this is one of the many reasons I am proud to support these guys in whatever way I can.

I really thought I was going to be witnessing history with this YouTube/Davos partnership. What I feel we got instead was a missed opportunity.

I was kind expecting – or at least hoping – that when YouTube partnered with the World Economic Forum at Davos, they would be doing the same kind of thing that YouTube did with the Presidential debates. At the CNN YouTube Debates, the Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates were asked questions submitted by the YouTube community. The candidates would listen to the question and then respond. CNN even flew a few of those YouTubers down to the debates so that they would have an opportunity to make a follow-up question or comment. Even if the debate didn’t move beyond canned responses – at least there was citizen interaction.

That I believe was what was missing with YouTube and the Davos Question.

First, since those submitting videos were asked to keep their videos under 3 minutes, I kind of assumed that meant there would be a 10 to 30 minute screening of the best videos for world leaders to see. What happened instead, was that a handful of videos were cut into a two minute montage sequence. As you can see here, half of that montage sequence was devoted to restating the original Davos Question (“What can we do in 2008?”, “Hello Davos!”, “Wow, that’s a big question. Big big question”, etc.,.). The remaining minute was just a quick laundry list of requests and ideas (lower poverty! more renewable energy! invest in kids!). What could have been the opportunity for powerful ideas and discussions to emerge ended up looking more like a wish list to Santa Claus.

Second, just like regular YouTube users submitted their answer to the Davos Question, world leaders, celebrities, businessmen, and future youth leaders were able to record what they’re take was on the question. But, for the most part, this was nothing new. Bono, of course, asked us to support the Millennium Development Goals. The executive director for UNICEF made a similar plea. There were a few surprises of course. It was good to see youth leaders like Whitney and Juan there with some good ideas. I was a bit surprised that most important issue the Director of the American Center for Disease Control chose to raise was “Exercise!”. What was absent, however, was any evidence of interaction with the community.

I was really hoping that the world leaders at Davos would be watching some of the videos and then commenting and responding. Ideally, it would have been nice if these leaders would have gone back to YouTube later to check and see what the response to their videos were. They called this “The Davos Conversation” but it didn’t feel much different than watching an interview on TV. There were a few exceptions, the US Director of Education decided to voice her agreement to a video by a YouTuber pleading for greater investment in children. And Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, decided to respond to a question raised by a YouTuber about Google’s potential to help in electronic voting.

If The Uncultured Project has taught me anything it’s that, if you are not satisfied with the way things are being done – you have to offer your own solution instead of critiquing others. This is where the World Social Forum can come in….

Why can’t the World Social Forum take the same technology (YouTube) and use it to the full potential the the folks at Davos did not?

[Update: Since writing this post, the contest has closed. I ranked second with over 900 votes. Feel free to check out my videos on YouTube. Thanks for those who voted. First place went to LuddenMedia. They're great guys - check em out.]

The contest closes in a few hours, and I’m currently in second place. You can still vote at this link – the poll is on the left side. For some unknown reason, no matter how many friends I get to vote (or how many friends of friends vote), I’m always trailing from the first place by almost exactly 90 votes. It’s almost like magic!

Who is in first place? It’s a YouTube series about a bunch of college kids – some of whom have come from hell (and are demons) and others have come from heaven (and are angels). They are plotting to either save or damn the regular mortals in the dorm. Ummm…. No comment.

I have this friend who went to MIT. Taking a very sterile and logical approach, he said to me quite bluntly “I don’t see how getting ‘Phil’d’ in helps the poor”. It doesn’t? In fact, this whole filming thing doesn’t technically help the poor now does it? If I put the camera down and focused 100% on helping the poor (as people like Mikey Leung do or charities like Save the Children which came to the disaster area without any cameras or camcorders), I’d get more done. It takes time to film, transfer, charge batteries, buy new tape, edit, and upload video you know.

But, then no one would know about many of the things I’ve seen (be it my work or the amazing work done by others). And that would mean that people would have to continue to rely on information mediums which – for people in my generation – may not give much importance to. How many people in my generation watch CNN regularly? Now compare that to how many of us are religiously reading our newsfeeds on Facebook. This doesn’t mean my generation has the wrong priorities. It just means that we absorb information through different ways.

Which is why I’d like to win this contest. Sxephil is just a regular YouTube member like me – but with a large audience (with over 49,000 subscribers). If, through his YouTube channel, people can be exposed to important issues, views, and topics they might not have been exposed to in their normal routine than maybe – just maybe – they might be interested in learning more or maybe even be inspired to do something about it. But people have to know that such work exists in order to have that choice.

So, with all due respect to my MIT (instead of Irish) educated friend – getting “Phil’D in” does help the poor.

“We really got to make sure that we educate – not just the [local] people, but also ourselves,” explained Nick Downie. Downie, a British national, had come as Operations Co-ordinator for an alliance of Save the Children charities from around the world to come and help those affected by Cyclone Sidr. I had accompanied Downie for a day, earlier last week, to a remote region of the disaster area that could only be reached by either boat or helicopter.The location for Downie’s plea for education could not have been more imposing. We had just walked for 30 minutes along a path full of make-shift refugee housing and buried bodies. The largest grave we had found had over 13 newly buried bodies – over two-thirds of which were children. In the middle of the interview, I interrupted him. There was a powerful smell that made it almost impossible for me to breath. “Is that smell the dead bodies? Or the dirty water?” I asked…

With the official death toll currently being reported at 3,268 (source: Bloomberg.com), the loss of life caused by Cyclone Sidr already exceeds that of the September 11th attacks. With new bodies being found everyday – a great many of them children – the official death toll is most certainly expected to exceed the total number of coalition causalities caused by the Iraq War. However, despite the ever increasing scale of this tragedy, the plight of Bangladeshis affected by Cyclone Sidr seem to have faded from international headlines.

Although I am reporting from Dhaka, I often rely on British and American news sources for the latest facts and figures. However, finding the latest news on Cyclone Sidr from CNN and BBC is almost impossible. This is strange given that the story is anything but over. During my time in the field, I was fortunate enough to have not stumbled across any dead human bodies. A great many of my colleagues, however, were not so fortunate. Even as late as yesterday night, I was hearing reports of new bodies being found and in need of burial.

Although generous people from around the world are uniting to help donate to disaster relief, aid is still slow in coming. On my trip to the Bagerhat Disaster Area, I had brought 70 blankets which I had paid for with my own money to give away. 30 of which, I brought along with my trip with Nick Downie to this remote region of the disaster area. It turns out, that these 30 blankets were the first aid (of its kind) in this particular region. Whatever sense of accomplishment I felt was overridden by grief. 30 blankets never seemed so little an amount in my life.

“We’re very comfortable back in our homes – whether we’re in London or Toronto,” explained Downie – referring to our respective hometowns. “We just got to do whatever we can,” he added.

One thing is certain – we certainly can do more than just provide a 30 second spot for this news story.

This article has been also posted on NowPublic.com, you can read the same story here.

[Note: My YouTube channel/videos have been nominated in spotlight contest. Votes determine the winner - and I am currently in second place. You can vote for the next three days at PhillyD.tv - there is a poll on the left side of the page.]

Coming to Bangladesh has given me a greater appreciation for all the freedoms we enjoy in America and elsewhere in the Western World. Sometimes I think we forget just how free things are over there. In the United States, if my cellphone wasn’t working and if I couldn’t get online with my computer, I would just assume that I wasn’t getting any reception and that I had a bad internet connection. I could never imagine, as did actually happen here in Bangladesh, that the government would order the shutdown of cellphone networks and internet access gateways.

In America, when I watch 24-hour news programs like CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, I know they can each have their own bias – but they are allowed to say what they want. I could never imagine that the government would forcibly shut down any one of these stations because one of them said something the government didn’t like. But that’s exactly what happened to CSB – Bangladesh’s only 24-hour news network. After airing footage of anti-government protests, the government shut down the station. (I am linking to the CSB entry in Wikipedia because the government not only took the station off the air, but also shutdown their website as well)

Eventually, I’m sad to say, this kind of censorship changes how you react. So, when I and others were consistently unable to access many Bangladeshi blogs hosted on Blogspot – my first reaction was to assume that this was a new form of government censorship. Blocking blogs is not something new – Pakistan and Turkey do it presently for WordPress.com (and, previously, were also blocking Blogspot.com). But, sometimes – as it seems to be in this case – this was just a technical glitch that affected multiple users on multiple ISPs. Unfortunately, governments that choose to limit free speech usually don’t make press releases stating that they are going to be doing so.

Life would be much easier if every government that wanted to censor or limit free speech would make a press release saying “Oh hai! Im in ur internetz – censorinz ur speech” (and if the press release was worded like that, life would also be much cuter).