Gene Falk, the Executive Director and co-founder of mothers2mothers and a 2008 Skoll social entrepreneur, visited the Foundation yesterday with his colleague, Robin Smalley, also a co-founder and the organization’s International Director.  Mothers2mothers uses a mentor mother approach - HIV positive mothers working with HIV positive pregnant women - to stop transmission of the virus to newborns, something largely eliminated in the developed world but still a huge challenge in Africa.  Gene and Robin gave us an update on mothers2mothers’ amazing growth:  from reaching 20,000 clients in 2005 in one country, they now reach 300,000 clients in seven countries.  With an estimated 1,500,000 pregnant women infected with HIV annually worldwide, this means mothers2mothers serves 20 percent of the global target for its services, an impressive number.  And they continue to expand.

Gene has a great set of lessons that he’s learned in the process of “building a program for today, but an organization for the long term.”  I think they’re worth repeating:

• • Do one thing well - beware mission creep.
• • Don’t say yes unless you mean it  - don’t morph what you do just to try to meet funder requests.
• • Magical thinking isn’t a strategy - we may all want something to be different, but we need to work with what we have.
• • Pay people fairly for what they do  - mothers2mothers pays their local community mentor mothers, whom they train intensively on the preventive medical practices and coaching techniques needed to make the program successful. (Sadly, this concept is not widely embraced among providers of public health assistance in Africa, many of whom still insist on volunteer community health workers.)
• • “Development” and “Advancement” are euphemisms for sales, marketing and investor relations - call things what they are.  There’s nothing wrong with this.
• • Technology won’t solve everything - mothers2mothers isn’t about the medicine, it’s about behaviors and practices.
• • Neither will process - it’s not about outputs, it’s about impact.
• • Neither cash nor caring are scalable commodities - you need to constantly replenish these.
• • Overhead is not evil - the best ideas, without an effective organization to deploy them, won’t succeed.