Yesterday, we announced that Invisible Children is making major changes in 2015. Our fearless leader Ben Keesey wrote an Op-Ed for Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times. Read on for Ben’s explanation of the upcoming transition, and his take on we can all learn from it.
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The Fight to End the Lord’s Resistance Army Violence
By Ben Keesey
The paradox of running a nonprofit is that the closer you get to achieving your mission, the closer you get to putting yourself out of a job. As the CEO of Invisible Children, a nonprofit working to end Africa’s longest running armed conflict, I’ve always looked forward to the day when our organization would no longer be needed. That day is close.
When we started Invisible Children in 2004, we believed that the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) were so horrible, that there assuredly was some mechanism that existed from the “powers that be” to fix the problem as long as we told enough people. Looking back on this ten years later, I realize that this was very naive. We now know that solving any problem in this world takes the terribly hard, painstaking work of private individuals working on behalf of their sisters and brothers with incredible perseverance.
If you set out to change the world, I can assure you that you that it will be 1,000 times harder than you think. You will make mistakes. You won’t know how to get where you’re going. You probably won’t even know where to start. But that is the power of it all: you have to step into the scary unknown and learn along the way. This is why I have so much respect for the agents of change that have come before us, who have had to go through huge challenges and reinventions of their models to make the impact that they have.
I am announcing today that we will be making major changes to our U.S. operations to prioritize our most essential political advocacy and central Africa programs through 2015. This will be the biggest transition that we have ever gone through. When we started Invisible Children in 2003, the L.R.A. conflict was called ‘the most-neglected humanitarian emergency in the world” by UN Undersecretary General Jan Egeland. The L.R.A. had over 2,000 fighters and was responsible for up to 1,000 deaths per week. The UN estimates that the L.R.A. has been responsible for the abduction of over 30,000 children.
Ten years later, those numbers have changed dramatically: the L.R.A. fighting force has been reduced to under 200 fighters; killings by the group have decreased 92 percent in the last three years; nearly 2 million people have returned home from displacement; and Joseph Kony has been forced to a remote corner of Sudan.
So, with funding short, we are going to reduce the scale of our U.S. operations drastically. We won’t be having roadie teams that visit schools or making new videos. We won’t be hosting major awareness events. Instead, we will have a lean, experienced team doing the hard work in the trenches on Capitol Hill and in the heart of central Africa, maintaining the critical programs that are directly protecting communities targeted by the L.R.A. and transitioning full operations of these programs to local communities by 2016.
The work of the local partners that we’ve supported in central Africa is one of the core reasons that so many members have left the L.R.A. peacefully and that communities are now safer. This work must continue so that we can see a permanent end to the L.R.A.
To all the brave people who are pursuing missions that are addressing some of our world’s greatest needs, I hope that you, too, have a reason to be unemployed soon.
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