Jenny Pearson (VBNK): Capacity Development in Post-Conflict Cambodia

In this episode of RightsStarters, Rupert Abbott meets Jenny Pearson on the seafront in Brighton & Hove, England. Although both were born and raised in Brighton, they first came to know each other through their work in Cambodia.

Jenny arrived in Cambodia in 1995, while conflict was still continuing in parts of the country and just as Cambodia was beginning the long process of rebuilding after decades of war. Initially volunteering with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), she went on to found VBNK, an organisation that would spend decades strengthening the leadership, management and effectiveness of Cambodia's civil society and development sector.

Jenny reflects on the path that took her from probation officer in the UK to founding VBNK in Cambodia, why established approaches to capacity development often failed in a society shaped by trauma, and how creativity, trust and continuous learning became central to VBNK's work.

Together, Rupert and Jenny explore what it means to build organisations in complex contexts, how founders adapt as their organisations evolve, and why communication, ongoing learning and humility remain essential to lasting social change.

Show Notes

In this episode, we cover:

• Jenny Pearson's path from Brighton to Cambodia
• Cambodia's reconstruction after decades of conflict
• Founding VBNK and strengthening civil society
• Trauma, trust and organisational change
• Creativity and continuous learning in capacity development
• Localising leadership and founder succession
• Advice for aspiring social impact founders

About Jenny Pearson

Jenny Pearson is the founder of VBNK, a Cambodian organisation dedicated to strengthening leadership, management and organisational effectiveness across the country's development sector. She is internationally recognised for her work on capacity development and is the author of Creative Capacity Development: Learning to Adapt in Development Practice.

Links

• VBNK: https://www.vbnk.org/

Note: This episode includes an automatically generated transcript, which may contain errors, particularly with non-English language and names.

About RightsStarters

RightsStarters is a podcast about turning ideas into action, through conversations with founders shaping social change.

Hosted by Rupert Abbott, founder of RightsStart Alliance.

Follow the podcast to hear future episodes.

Learn more: https://www.rights-start.org

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:05

I'm in Brighton and Hove on the south coast of England to meet with Jenny Pearson. And like me, Jenny was born and raised here in Brighton. But we know each other through our work in Cambodia. But Jenny arrived in the mid-1990s as conflict still continued in parts of the country, and at the same time as Cambodia was trying to rebuild. Jen is a specialist in capacity development and she went on to found VBNK. And VBNK is an organization that works really to strengthen the effectiveness of the people and the organizations contributing and that have contributed to Cambodia's development. I think this is going to be a conversation about certainly rebuilding, about leadership, and what it takes to help individuals and organizations grow, adapt, and create lasting impact in sometimes a very complicated and complex and difficult context. Welcome to Right Starters. Good morning, Jenny.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Good morning, we're back.

SPEAKER_03 1:40

Jenny, thanks so much for meeting with me today. You can start by you just introducing yourself.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Hello, I'm Jenny Pearson, and I was the founder of an organization in Cambodia called VBNK. I have since left that organisation and Cambodia and come back home to Brighton to retire.

SPEAKER_03 2:01

So Brighton's home. So where are we sitting now?

SPEAKER_01 2:04

We're sitting on the seafront at Hove, a short distance both from my home and yours. One of my favourite cafes on the Brighton seafront. We've got a seagull buying our almond croissant very greedily.

SPEAKER_03 2:18

You've just reminded me that that's a risk. Yes. I forgot when ordering the croissants. People who don't know, it's not just Brighton, is it? But we have these huge seagulls. Beautiful. They live into their twenties. And if you've got a croissant or a sandwich or fish and chips, you're in danger. You're in danger. Let's hope we can get away with this. I'm just gonna move mine here. Yeah, we hear all it's order, isn't it, between what were two towns. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

And it's a favourite spot. It's a very broad promenade, and there are walkers and joggers and people just sitting enjoying the sunshine. It's a really nice part of the city.

SPEAKER_03 2:55

Yeah, lovely to be together. So you grew up here in Brighton. And yeah, tell us a bit about that.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Yes, I did. I as I said I was born here in the city and lived the first sort of ten years of my life in two different areas. And then we moved out, moved along the coast to Peace Haven. And then when I was a teenager, went independent, I moved back into Brighton into a bedsitter. Always a very significant part of my early years. And I always knew if ever I was going to retire to anywhere, it would have to be back to here.

SPEAKER_03 3:30

We're talking 60s then, when you were growing up here.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

1950s and 1960s. And I'm old enough to have seen the Beatles and the Stones perform live at the Hippodrome in the 19 early 1960s. So that really dates me.

SPEAKER_03 3:46

So what was Brighton like in the 60s then?

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Brighton was absolutely fabulous. It did it got a bit notorious at times with things like the Battle of the Muds and Rockers at Bank Holidays and things like that. But it was a really fun place to be. It was full of life and music and places to go. It was it was a nice place to be, to be young and enjoying the freedom of early years before you get responsibilities in life.

SPEAKER_03 4:12

And it actually connecting to your career, we'll touch on it later, but at that period that's when that's when Sussex University started as well, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Yes, when one of the places we lived was Coldeen, which is on the outskirts of the city, and it wasn't a city in those days, it was still a town, and Brighton and Hove are two separate towns. But we used to go on Sunday afternoon walk to into Stammer Park, which is a beautiful odd area of green, rolling hills, so on. Wonderful history as well. It was used in the war by the Canadians who were practicing use of tanks and so on before the invasion in Normandy. But suddenly there was a big part of the park that we weren't allowed to go to anymore because they were building the University of Sussex. So I do remember the university being built, and it was so it was quite nice in later years. I went back there and did a master's.

SPEAKER_03 5:02

So you were in Brighton, and then did you work in development and social impact straight away? Was that your career?

SPEAKER_01 5:08

No, it wasn't. I've had three careers. My first career was actually in the early days of computing. I worked for a company that made electronic calculators when they were still the size of a large box. They actually were the company that developed the world's first house-help calculator, but didn't develop it because they didn't see a market for it, which was a bit, you know, not a sensible decision. But then I also worked on very early stage word processors, and I worked with the research and development team, so I was testing new products and that, and then when they were sold, I was installing them and training people in how to use them. So that was quite an interesting time. I realised that I, if I was gonna go on in a career in that sphere, I needed to do some training, and I wasn't enough interested in it to want to devote time to serious study. But for a long time I'd had at the back of my mind an interest in the probation service. So when I was in a position to think about doing something serious by way of study, I decided that I'd rather train to become a probation officer.

SPEAKER_03 6:14

What is what is probation service? What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 6:17

It was very different in the days when I went into it than it is now. But fundamentally then, it was the social work arm of the criminal justice system. We worked in the courts, we supervised offenders in the community, and we also worked in prisons and working on through and aftercare with people who committed crimes that resulted in custodial sentences and working with their families and so on as well.

SPEAKER_03 6:42

And what why did you want to do that?

SPEAKER_01 6:44

There was just something about it that had always interested me. I didn't want to be a lawyer, but I was interested in working in that system. And I had to train to be a social worker. Then becoming a probation officer, yeah, first had to be a social worker and then you did a probation option. So it was about really wanting to help people and get into a sphere of work that was something other than the commercial world, which I'd worked in but hadn't been particularly enjoyable or attractive.

SPEAKER_03 7:11

Yeah, yeah. So you worked in probation in the 80s, 80s and 90s? Yes. Yeah. Was that here in Brighton?

SPEAKER_01 7:18

No, then I was living in London and I worked in Surrey, inner London, and South West London, different services. Then it's all changed now. But I worked in a team attached to a local magistrate's court, which was the core means of operation of probation. Then I was also two years in a young offenders institution. I had two years in attached to inner London Crown Court. So I had a pretty wide and varied experience of working in different settings with different levels of responsibility and different focus of my work. Yeah. I had a management position at a time when the service was becoming increasingly bureaucratic. It was in the years of the Thatcher government when the pendulum was swinging to the right on many things, and we were being asked to change very significantly as a service. And I felt that my values and those of my political paymasters were sort of diverging quite radically. So I decided I needed some time out. I'd had a difficult time personally with the last years of my mother's life and decided to take some time out.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

So we're going to retalk.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

We're talking 19. I left the probation service at the end of 1994 and went to Cambodia as a VSO volunteer in January 1995.

SPEAKER_03 8:33

Okay, so you left the probation service. Were you sure that you were definitely going to leave for good or you were just taking some time out at that point?

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Lots of people advised me to take leave of absence, but something just told me to make a break. And I didn't know. There was an expectation that I would go back. I knew very quickly once I was in Cambodia and away from the probation service that I never ever wanted to go back to it. I knew it had changed so much. It wasn't the job that I went that I started doing, and I didn't want to do the job that it was then.

SPEAKER_03 9:07

So you didn't take a break from the probation service, you actually decided to make a team break and you left and you were thinking what next. And you found yourself in Cambodia. So how did that happen?

SPEAKER_01 9:20

After my mum died, I went to visit my cousin who was living in China, living and working in China, and I had a really interesting toiling with him. And because I was feeling quite unsettled by life generally and not very happy with my professional life, I thought I'd look into options for going to work abroad. And I looked, took some time, and I looked at a lot of things.

SPEAKER_04 9:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

And in the end decided on VSR because it it was at that point in time, it was a two-year commitment.

SPEAKER_03 9:48

That's voluntary service overseas.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

What's that? That's a UK organisation, which is the primary volunteer sending organisation. At that point, it had quite substantial government funding because it was linked to the government's development programme through funding. But it was an independent charity. And the way they operated was you go through a process to see whether or not you were suitable to be a volunteer. And if you parcel the various tests and assessments, they then talk to you about options that they've got available that they think might suit you. So I sat down with a placement officer who offered me five different things. And the one in Cambodia seemed to be the best fit in terms of my skill set and what was needed.

SPEAKER_03 10:38

Where else was offered you?

SPEAKER_01 10:40

One was Mozambique, which was doing social work with the elderly. There was one in Satnusia, which everybody thought I was completely mad to have turned down.

SPEAKER_03 10:50

The Caribbean.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yes. But in the end, I heard from the person who went there it was an absolute nightmare, so I made a good decision not to go. But the best fit seemed to be Cambodia because it was to do management training in the not-for-profit sector. And I'd recently done a master's in public sector management. And although I wasn't a trainer, I was one of the managers that, whenever there was new legislation or new systems to roll out, the training department used to pull me in as one of the team that put together rolled up training programs. So I had some experience. And so it just seemed to be the best fit for me. And the project was to run a management training program for a group of seven international NGOs who were working in Cambodia in the mid-90s.

SPEAKER_03 11:39

So you turned up, landed in Cambodia 1995? January 95. January 95. Your first time there. So what were your kind of first impressions when you landed when you arrived?

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Oh gosh. First impressions. It was very undeveloped then. My first impression actually getting off the plane was, well, I thought the Americans had gone, but but there was a stonking great American Air Force cargo plane parked on the on the side of the runway. And the airport was effectively large wooden hut. So it was pretty basic, walked across the tarmac.

SPEAKER_03 12:16

And when you said that you thought the Americans had gone, what you're referring to there then is the fact that Cambodia was still being affected by conflict then, but it was coming out of 30 years really of civil war and conflict. Um and of course there'd been American involvement.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

The civil war was still ranging. I went in January 95, and the civil war didn't end until 98. So there were parts of the country that you couldn't go to. And I can remember every year, those first early years, you would through the city centre, you would see the army rolling out what to go north for what they called the dry season offensive against the Khmer Rouge, who were still holding several provinces in the north of the country, and also to the south to go down to the beach. You could only go if you were in a convoy with satellite communications and so on. So there were lots of parts of the country that were still pretty risky, and there were in a very weird state of having two just that seagull was trying to get it on.

SPEAKER_03 13:21

Okay, let's keep going. So what was Cambodia like in 1995?

SPEAKER_01 13:30

I can't say a great deal as to how Cambodia was because we didn't get out of the city very often.

SPEAKER_03 13:36

Pen Pen on Pen.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Yes, part mostly because of security reasons. There were some places we went to not so far away, but the city itself was very different than it is now. There was only one set of traffic lights in town and they didn't work all the time. In the centre of the city, there were still many beautiful old wooden houses. It was not unusual to turn a corner and see a pig or some sort of sort of livestock roaming around on city centre street. There were only one or two supermarkets, and the what you could get in terms of western goods was very limited. So life was quite simple. There weren't any fancy cars at all on bicycles and motorcycles.

SPEAKER_03 14:17

And the broader the sort of background then is in 1995. So there'd been the United Nations transitional authority in Cambodia in the early 90s. There'd been an election. And by 1995, in an effort to maintain peace, even though there was still some fighting with remnants of there'd actually been this arrangement where you had two there were two prime ministers, yes, two of everything. Yes. We had the we had sort of two parties sharing power at that time, and Camp Cambodia was in the process of rebuilding after decades of conflict, even though some of that was still going on.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

But security was a major issue. So actually every street corner in town, there were soldiers of different parties with their AK-47s. Very often they'd be drunk. Most people were in with their doors, external doors, gates locked by seven o'clock at night. I lived in an apartment above a family, and if I went out at night, they would be very anxious until I was home. Because there was a lot of lawlessness. I got robbed at gunpoint. Somebody just pointed a gun at my stomach and took away. I had a little moto for the project and that was taken away from me at gunpoint. And that happened at half past two in the afternoon in the middle of one of the city streets. So you really had to watch yourself. You had to be careful. And I certainly couldn't tell anyone back home here about the sort of things that were going on because they would have, I think they were completely freaked out. We got good support from BSO and from the embassy and good guidance about how to stay safe. And just so we managed, and then gradually things did get better.

SPEAKER_03 16:03

And through your work training managers with not-for-profit organisations who were working in Cambodia at the time, what did you learn about Cambodia? What was the situation? Majority of people.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

There was poverty, the like of which I'd never seen before. I never could have heard the phrase food insecurity. I didn't really know what it meant until I went to Cambodia. There was also a massive issue for many people in rural areas about landmines and the rate of injury and death from landmines. I think Cambodia was top of the global scale at that point in time. And there were very, very big demining efforts going on, but they're still going on now, 30 years later, which is an indication of how serious the problem was. So there were lots and lots of issues that the country was confronting that I'd never ever experienced before. So it really was quite an IO, you know.

SPEAKER_03 16:57

Yeah. And you see you were meant to be there for two years. That was the commitment to the S in your life where you were ready to change. Yes. So being there for two years, you stayed. So what happened?

SPEAKER_01 17:09

My project was set up. There were no training facilities whatsoever in Cambodia, and there were no trainers for the sort of things that the NGOs needed. The situation there was because of all that had happened with the education system being wiped out and anyone with it believed to have had an education, either fleeing or being executed by the Khmer Rouge, there were qualified people available to run organisations. So every last international NGO there was operating in a way that they said was very contrary to their normal way of operating in developing countries, in that they had expatriates doing everything. They didn't just have an expatriate country director representing the organization. They had to have expatriates for finance, for admin to run every project. Because the Cambodians just had no experience of anything and they weren't in a position where they could take on project management or other functions.

SPEAKER_03 18:08

Why were all of these international NGOs?

SPEAKER_01 18:10

They were all there doing all sorts of things: health, education, community development, agriculture, you name it, there were international NGOs there helping with the rebuilding effort. And there was still an awful lot to do in terms of refugees, working with refugees, internally displaced people. That everywhere you turned, there was need of some sort, and the international NGOs were there working with it.

SPEAKER_03 18:32

Because under the Khmer Rouge, as you were saying, everything had been wiped out the education system, the healthcare system, culture, yes, uh think of the arts, yes, the economy just destroyed, yeah, and there were thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals who had fled in the 80s and then in the 90s, some of whom were coming back.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Yes, yeah. There were a lot of people coming back. It was very interesting when I started really getting to know Cambodian staff in organisations and in my own organization. There was at that time there was a real schism because there were a lot of people who had stayed in country, and through the years of the Vietnamese occupation in the 80s and the communist government, they had been given opportunities to go and study in communist countries like Russia. And some of them were quite well qualified. But then there were the other people who had gone over the border into the camps, and they had got some education in the refugee camps, or they then maybe some of them had gone abroad and they were coming back. But there was a real schism between those who'd stayed and those who'd who had fled, and it wasn't always comfortable in look in terms of how those groups worked alongside each other. There were real issues there.

SPEAKER_03 19:55

So in training managers at the international organizations that were based on Cambodia to support building. And you'd been there for two years and you stayed.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

So what happened was that we what the way the project was set up, my job was to find trainers around the region and bring people in to do the training. And there were multiple subjects we needed. We needed your resource management, we needed finance management, we needed project management. We needed multiple people with expertise in multiple subjects, and it proved very difficult to find people to cover every subject. So I ended up doing some of the training myself. I did find some good trainers. One Thai woman did a lot of work with us and she was excellent. But we realised that just really wasn't viable in the long term. And what we should be doing, instead of bringing in expats to do the training, what we should be doing was be developing a Cambodian training facility. And so it was decided after about a year that we would start working towards transferring my project when it came to an end into the start of a local organisation, local NGO, that would then offer the training. But we would be doing the training of trainers. So my BSO project finished on the end of March 1997, and on the 1st of April 1997, we officially founded VBNK. And the board of it were the people who were in the NGOs that I'd been working with, the group of international GOs that I've been working with. So we did it really as a team, a joint effort to take this project forward and develop it into something else.

SPEAKER_03 21:40

So that's the origin story of VBNK. Yes. For those listening who don't know the Cambodian context, I'd always heard about Jenny Pearson, the work that Jenny Pearson had done in terms of capacity development, strategy, organizational development across civil society. But with a focus on the development sector and had always been told you must meet Jenny Pearson once we've been at a party. I'm so pleased to meet you. And that was the sort of start really of our kind of friendship. But Jenny Pearson is so well known, you're so well known for your work supporting the development of civil society in Cambodia. So that was the start of VBNK. So what what does VBNK stand for? Why is it called VBNK?

SPEAKER_01 22:26

The Khmer is the cheers down, but up and down Kanye Akpiwa, which is an institute to train facilitators of development. That's the best translation I can give you of it. We started thinking we're just going to be a train little training project, really. We had a three-year funding commitment from two excellent donors, Dutch and German donors. And I thought that was what I was going to do. I would set that up, run it for three years, and then I would leave. But the minute we opened the doors, we were offering the same training that we've been offering in the VNSO project, but we started then immediately getting requests to help with other things. Can you help us develop this strategy? We are really struggling with our organizational culture. We can't work out what our values are. We've got this mishmash of ex-patriots from different countries and Cambodians, and we've all got different ideas. Can you help us with this? Can you help us with that? So very quickly, we started doing other things that needed obviously to bring in other expats as well as myself to work with the Cambodians to sort of train the Cambodians up about how to do these different types of work and then to work alongside them, build building their skills.

SPEAKER_03 23:44

So before we talk about BBNK and the really important work you did over the decades as it turned out, why did you, Jenny Pearson, decide you wanted to stay in Cambodia, do this work?

SPEAKER_01 23:56

The simple fact was I felt I could do some good. I felt there was a big need and it needed all sorts of input and support and help from all sorts of people with different skill sets to help try to rebuild the country in multiple ways. But the work I'd been doing in probation, I'd long since lost any sense of connection to being able to affect positive change. I just felt I got buried in bureaucracy and so on. Whereas in Cambodia, you could see, oh, there's this issue, this problem. Okay, if I'll give this a try and see if it works. And things did work, and you could you could see that what you're doing was actually helping. And that is very rewarding, and obviously it was although the the things were still difficult in terms of security and so on, it was a good place to live. I had a very a lovely group of friends with other BSO volunteers and so on. I'd got close to a Cambodian family. So there were many positives about the life.

SPEAKER_03 25:07

And I know you were very much involved in the arts scene that was just starting to take off again.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

That sort of came late, that came later. That really wasn't very evident at that stage in the 90s. I'd say that came more in the 2000s. Yeah. But yes, it was that was also something very enjoyable when it did start to emerge.

SPEAKER_03 25:26

Because you were actually, we're gonna talk about BBNK more now, but you're actually, as it turned out, you were in Cambodia almost 30 years?

SPEAKER_01 25:37

In the end, 27 years.

SPEAKER_03 25:38

27 years, and of course you still go back every year.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

Yes, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:42

So back to BBNK then, back to this organization you founded out of this BSO project that you'd led. What was the problem? What were you actually trying to do? What was the issue you were trying to address?

SPEAKER_01 25:56

What we were trying to address was the lack of management knowledge and expertise in Cambodian, the Cambodian population, the staff of the NGOs, leadership issues for the Cambodian NGOs, and the internationals wanted to get their expats out, and they wanted to localize, gradually work up the organization, start by localizing at project level and then at senior management level, and then some of them actually wanted to completely localize the whole organisation.

SPEAKER_03 26:26

And look these NGOs, when we talk about the non-governmental organizations alongside the government, and of course, of course, at times there was some tension with very significant in-sexual development funding at the time, they were playing a vital role in supporting the development and rebuilding of Catholic.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Absolutely huge. Yeah, alongside the UN agencies. Yeah. But the government were quite suspicious of some of them. I think because there was obviously the mega human rights issues, which you will know a lot more about than I do. But because some of the human rights organisations were very active and very vocal, it made the government very suspicious of all NGOs. So sometimes there were some some difficulties and tensions there about getting traction.

SPEAKER_03 27:12

And the issue and the and the context and the background was decades of war. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

Yeah, absolutely. And all the legacy that that that leaves a population, which I believe is still there in a significant way, although it's all got glossed over down the years. But you just cannot, you can't underestimate how severely what had happened to people in the Khmer Rouge years and then the subsequent years of Vietnamese occupation, the impact that had on individuals, on families, on communities, and what it destroyed in Cambodian society. The primary characteristic of society that got destroyed was trust. And I think it's still never been properly rebuilt for all sorts of reasons, largely to do with political issues. And I don't think the loss has ever been really addressed. There isn't a family in Cambodia that doesn't still have a gaping great hole of loss as a result of the Khmer Rouge use. So those things really have a very profound effect on how people function. Because I was trained as a social worker, I think I looked at things a lot differently than some of the other people who were working there. I can remember having a conversation with an ex-pat who was managing a community development project and his background was agriculture. And he was absolutely dumbfounded. He just could not get to grips with the fact that there were really major problems in how people communicated with each other. And he couldn't, he just couldn't understand that that would be a legacy of what had happened to people in their not too distant past in their village. Some people had been Khmer Rouge who had been responsible for atrocities committed against other people in that same village, and they were all still living there together in the same village. It's bound to have an impact. It's bound to be problematic in terms of things like trying to develop community. There was a big push for community development approaches. And I just felt they were always so flawed because they were really looking at what was going on with individuals, what was really happening in communities in terms of how they were dealing with the legacy of the past.

SPEAKER_03 29:26

Bringing it back to your work then, obviously, you were supporting working with NGOs, involved in these community development work.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

How was that across that legacy? How did that affect the running, the development, the management of NGOs? Is there a connection?

SPEAKER_01 29:42

Yeah, there's a number of things. One of the things that I came to realise after several years was that we were doing all the right what I thought was all the right things. People were getting training, we were doing different processes with organizations to help them develop and strengthen systems development, strategic strategy development, values clarification, and things weren't changing. And I came to realise when I started looking into it deeply from a psychosocial perspective that it wasn't changing because people were still people who've experienced extreme trauma can get stuck in survivor behaviours. And survivor behaviours are very risk and change averse. If you combine that experience with a culture that is very heavily embedded in Confucian principles of respect for your elders, not questioning your elders and betters, not doing anything that involves change loss of face, it really presents a very set of strong barriers to change, people changing their behaviours. It took me a long time to understand that. I came to realise it was a big issue. So we had to start looking at ways to help people let go of their fears and be willing to take the risk of doing something differently as they learn about a new approach, a new technique in training and so on.

SPEAKER_03 31:08

I want to try and kind of summarise where at in a way. So you started DBNK in order to address the lack of capacity among NGOs in Cambodia, and the lack of capacity came from the terrible history of the last you know 30 years. And originally you went about that doing doing what you knew work from your past experience in terms of how you can train managers, develop strategies, look at values in order to build up these NGOs so they could work with the government to rebuild Cambodia out of Cambodia, but something wasn't worth it. You realised the reasons some of those approaches that had worked in other contexts weren't worth it in Cambodia was because the the trauma, the lack of trust, the impact on society, war, and history had brought about.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:04

So in that context, how did you adapt the approaches, the tools the V BMK were using?

SPEAKER_01 32:10

Well, I started doing was exploring some stuff that was really considered quite radical, in that I started working with creativity in things like using art, theatre. I started working with a theatre practitioner called David Glass, who did a lot of work with us. And it was all about giving people a means of expression and different ways to communicate with each other and to help them build confidence in risk taking and doing things differently. So some of those approaches worked, but from that we also then really developed our methodology. Quite early on, we stopped doing any training that was simply standalone training. We, for example, we put together a six-week module, modular program for NGO managers, but we would only accept people on that course who had an appointed mentor in the senior management of the organization who would work with them, and then they would have assignments to put into practice what they'd learnt on a module in between, and then they'd come back and present about how they'd got on. So we started to make it much more of an interactive process, engaging with the organizations that were sending staff to us for training, instead of letting them send somebody to us for a week, and it's them assuming that when they gotten back a week later, they were done and somehow um they could just get on and do things differently.

SPEAKER_03 33:48

And these were organizations from the health sector, the education sector, agriculture, community development, you name it, they all came to us.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

They all came to us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:59

You said to me before, if I've ever used the term capacity building, you said that prefer the term capacity development or capacity strength. I mean, what why is that?

SPEAKER_01 34:08

What's it's my the work I've done on capacity over the years, I've come to realise that one of the really fundamental flaws about what happened for decades was that international experts went in with an assumption that they were working on a blank page, that there wasn't any capacity there already. One of the principles of good practice that is now accepted is that you have to start by assessing what capacity is already in place. And so you aren't building from scratch, you are helping to develop and strengthen what's already there. And I know lots of people have still got strong arguments for saying capacity building is a valid phrase, and it's still very commonly in use. Personally, I prefer the value base of what goes with talking about capacity developing, capacity strengthening rather than incapacity building.

SPEAKER_03 35:03

Yeah, building suggests or building something from scratch.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:07

Development or strengthening suggests you're working with the capacity that's there and helping to bring it out.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:14

So looking back on Jenny, are there any standout moments or achievements that you're most proud of today?

SPEAKER_01 35:22

I think there's no particular moments. I suppose I could probably dig into my memory and pull out a few. I think what I'm proud of is the fact that we help bring about some shifts in the approach and the general paradigm and thinking about what's the best way to go about this, what is the best way to go about making this shift from international driven, international, implemented to nationally owned, implemented, and led. There's a lot of people now who came through VBNK as staff, and sometimes we had one person in particular I had some monumental battles with because it took him a long time to understand what we were trying to say, and then one day he just said to me, I've just got it. I've just got it. You're trying to help us do things better, aren't you? Yes. He's gone on to do all sorts of interesting things, and some of our uh alumni have really been very significant figures now in the Cambodian development community, either working individually, some have gone into government positions. One of them has started an astonishingly successful fintech company and has been picking up rewards globally. But he's told me he said I he credits a lot of his success to what he learned at VPNK.

SPEAKER_03 36:47

Wow. You left VPNK and VPNK, there was obviously it was a long process, but it was localized.

SPEAKER_01 36:55

Yeah. I left after 11 years, I just felt after about nine or ten years, I just felt I was running out of fresh ideas and that it would be good for the organization for somebody new to come in with fresh, fresh energy and a fresh vision. And I was replaced by another expatriate who was very good and we got on very well. And I we had a really good transition. I did a couple of pieces of work for him when he asked me to. For example, I'd been running a women's empowerment process for the Cambodian female staff of VBNK, and he said, of course, it made sense for me to continue doing that process.

SPEAKER_03 37:36

Yeah, that transition is so important. I left my role as CEO of give out, and we really made sure that we worked hard on planning that transition, and I was there to support my successes. Yeah, it's crucial because when it's not done well, yeah, can be the end of an organization.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

Yeah. It then localized during his tenure. They hit a big problem about registration, and the government was suddenly getting a lot tighter about who was able to be named as director of a Cambodian NGO. So the director's position was localised, and somebody who'd been a staff member, senior staff member in my time, he became the director. And he was director for five years. Towards the end of that five years, he approached me and asked me if I would go on the board. He said, Is it long enough? Have you been away long enough? Would you be willing to come back on and on the board? And there were problems about his leadership. And so I came on the board at the time when the board was struggling with a number of issues, and they had been trying to recruit because he they'd agreed he was going to stand down at the end of his contract, and they had not been able to find anybody suitable to take over. So I said I would stand down from the board and I would go back into the director's position on a part-time basis for six months to give the board more time to recruit. Unfortunately, that ended up being six years.

SPEAKER_03 39:05

And so you had a second stint basically. I had a second stint.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Yeah. So I was always part-time. Second, second time I was only ever part-time.

SPEAKER_03 39:12

Did you feel that obviously hadn't been the plan? Did you feel somehow that affected what DBNK had not quite developed in the way that I hoped it's going to develop after you left?

SPEAKER_01 39:22

Yes, very much. It was I was hugely disappointed at what had happened because I knew that only had left an organization that had got very strong systems and policies, particularly around things like equal pay treatment of men and women, and that had very much gone down the tubes. The female staff, you know, we always with one voice said, You've got no idea how glad we are, you're back. We can actually be heard again. And it turned out that the men had all been given pay rises and the women hadn't, and there'd been a bunch of issues that really brought the organisation into quite a difficult position. And they had just won a large contract with a big international, one of the big bilateral donors, and they were just in no way ready to do the work that was going to be expected of them. So I really, having said I would just go in and do a very light strategic hold, I ended up having for the best part of a year to having to be very operational to get everything back on track. Did that until went back in 2016 and I finally left again in 22 and handed over to a Cambodian who is still running it now.

SPEAKER_03 40:36

So it was then after your second stip, then actually that aim to fully localize was achieved.

SPEAKER_01 40:43

But it was in a very significantly changed environment because when I'd started, we had these really supportive funders who had given us core funding and they given me real freedom to do whatever I thought was right. They trusted what I was doing and what we were doing as an organization. So all the stuff I did on creativity, they were really interested in and supported, didn't query the budgets being spent on things like that. By the time I went back, obviously those donors had phased, started to, you know, one of them had phased out completely, the other one was phasing out their course support. So it was very much a question of looking for business, always looking for the contracts to support the organization, and very little spare in the budget then to do anything that was experimental or innovative or creative just for the pure benefits of that. It was always you've got to deliver on this contract. So it was it turned into a very different world.

SPEAKER_03 41:43

Do you think in some way, though, that changed funding concept partly reflected the fact that actually um a lot of progress had been made over the preceding two decades?

SPEAKER_01 41:56

Yes, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And in many ways it it was a good thing. And I can remember even when I first started having conversations where I say what this country needs a lot more than all these NGOs is it needs a lot of good businesses providing decent employment so people can feed their families. People would be horrified when I was talking about business development in the commercial world. But of course, any country needs that more than it needs to be dependent on charities supporting it or international donors supporting it.

SPEAKER_03 42:30

And there are certainly still many issues, many challenges, but certainly the role of business, the tremendous economic programs, I think that has to be put down as uh as a success.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

Yes, yeah. And things like the garment factories, we did some work in the early days, we did some work with ILO on on their Better Work initiative, which is now they start in Cambodia and it's now rolled out globally. It was very interesting. And one of the fascinating things that was happening was what those factories initially were all in Phnom Penh, and they were full of young women who'd come in from the provinces, and it was changing the dynamics in families and between the gender dynamics of the country were changing enormously because suddenly the young unmarried daughter who'd been considered at the bottom of the family pecking order, suddenly she was the breadwinner who was in Phnom Penh and sending home. Maybe it was only $20 a month she was sending home to her family, but that $20 a month was really significant in a family's income and it changed her status in the family enormously. So there was a huge amount going on in terms of the social dynamics as those business developments, commercial developments started to really show up.

SPEAKER_03 43:50

Yeah. So just to finish for now on BBMK. So are you happy with where BBMK is today then?

SPEAKER_01 43:57

I think there is always a case for. Or really looking at have an organization served its purpose in the moments it was needed, the days, the times it was needed, and has it possibly outlived its usefulness? Vivian K now is very different to the organization I left. It's a handful of staff, several of them are in the old part-time contracts. They are chasing for contracts, they are doing work that doesn't necessarily fit with our organizational ethos that we were so proud of. Personally, I would rather have seen and say, you know what, we did a really good job at the time when we were needed, and we aren't needed now, and people don't want to hear that message anymore because things have moved on and things are different now. So maybe we should just stop.

SPEAKER_03 44:48

Yeah, yeah. Now, before we finish, I want to get your advice for other founders. But I'm, as you haven't, I'm just going to plug your book because you wrote a book, Creative Capacity Development, which basically in detail tells that story that we were sharing earlier about the innovation, some of the risks you took, some of the new approaches to development in terms of thinking thinking about it very differently in terms of the creative world and sector, and the fact that when we're talking about capacity development, it's a one-off thing, it's about continuous learning. Is that a fair summary of that book?

SPEAKER_01 45:29

Yes, I think yes. So sorry, yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:31

Creative capacity development by Jenny Pearson. Available at all good booksellers.

SPEAKER_01 45:36

I don't think so, sadly. No, no, get in touch if you want one. I'm gonna box with them in the flat.

SPEAKER_03 45:41

So, Jenny, what we like to do on this podcast is we like to ask the founders we're speaking with if they've got advice for other founders, including those who perhaps might not have yet started an initiative or an organization but are thinking of doing so. I want to ask you a few questions and really lean on your wisdom and experience. So let me ask, what's one thing you think people might underestimate about starting an initiative or an organization?

SPEAKER_01 46:09

I think my main area of learning was related to the organization growing and getting more and more staff who you then organise into teams, of course, to do different things. And the need to keep paying attention to communication. It's very easy to assume that you are taking everyone with you when in fact very often you're not, because you haven't given enough time and attention to making sure everyone understands what you're trying to achieve as an organization or what any particular initiative is meant to achieve, and getting everybody on board with you. So that I think was a really significant area of challenge that I had to learn ways to overcome, and ultimately it really just depends on making sure you give enough time for good communication.

SPEAKER_03 47:08

Yeah, yeah. And I guess what's the one lesson then you take from that that you wish you had known when you started?

SPEAKER_01 47:15

It's that that really is yes, take the time, make the time to do to do what's really needed. Don't keep rushing ahead, don't be driven all the time by your deadlines. Just say we've got to make some space to have this conversation. Linked to that is another issue that I was a bit slightly painful learning for me, but this I think can apply anywhere. I think it applies particularly in the development context, and that is you bring in expatriates who you recruit because they have a certain area of expertise, and you want them to contribute to the organisation's mission and the organisation's own development. And for us, that was we were developing our own capacity to develop the capacity of others. And I think it's very easy to assume that expatriates have the skills needed to do that, and they also have the right values and motivation to do that, and that can be a very bad mistake. I can say without any hesitation at all that the worst problem I had in the organisation ever was created by an expatriate. And I can also say that I was let down on a number of occasions by expatriates who may have been very skillful in their own sphere of expertise, but they did not have what it took to work with Cambodians and help Cambodians then learn and develop those same areas of expertise, and that was very problematic and caused a number of issues at different times in the organisation's life.

SPEAKER_03 48:50

And what support, or did you have support as a founder? What was the support that was most valuable for you?

SPEAKER_01 48:57

In the early days, it was the board because it was the same group that I'd worked with on the VSO project, and the chair of the board for the first three years was absolutely super, and I was so sad because the family decided to go back to America, and that was a great shame when we lost him as our chair because he'd been absolutely terrific, and he'd been in Cambodia a long time and he really knew and understood the issues. He got it, he got it, he absolutely got it. So, yes, the board was supportive, and that was important, and then you you you find your network of peers who are like-minded people who've got the same values and are striving for the same things, and that's really important as well.

SPEAKER_03 49:40

Last couple of questions, I think. What advice would you give someone who's thinking about starting a new development or social impact initiative today? That noise in the background is a seagull. Oh really, leftovers from someone's breakfast. That's the crashing we can hear.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 50:04

But back to the problem.

SPEAKER_01 50:06

Sorry, what was the question again?

SPEAKER_03 50:07

So, what advice would you give to someone about starting a new development or social impact initiative?

SPEAKER_01 50:14

I'd say go for it. If you see the need and you think you can help, go for it. Be aware it's gonna take an awful lot of time, an awful lot of energy. There will be really bad days that you get very frustrated and wonder why on earth you're doing it. But if you've really got a clear vision of what you're trying to achieve, then it's worth it and it definitely go for it. And be open to learning on the road. You that's the really important thing. You've got to be open to learning yourself and admitting when you've got things wrong.

SPEAKER_03 50:47

Jenny Pearson, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for sharing your story, your journey, and and lots of what you've shared are lessons in learning that that are that I think are transferable and really valuable for anyone who's thinking about founding an organisation. But also, I think the point you've made is that context really matters, it's not one size fits all. And Cambodia today, but in the 90s, was a very specific context. Jenny, it's been such a pleasure to talk today. I've enjoyed the interruptions by the seagull for key twisting us. That's the brightness probably. Exactly. Look forward to catching up again soon. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01 51:30

Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_03 51:57

Thanks so much, and see you next time.