Last summer, a small crew from our Shelter production team filmed in Haiti. We had just a few days to cover the vital work of Architecture for Humanity, Yves Francois, and several students with the University of Minnesota College of design who were working on infrastructure and community development projects. The short film we made has been shown at screenings in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, and of course, has been viewed a lot on Vimeo. We started up our educational outreach program, called Shelter: connect, running workshops and connecting with students worldwide.
Now it’s time to go to the next step. We recently did a follow up interview in San Francisco with Eric Cesal, who heads up Architecture for Humanity’s Haiti office. We’re prepping to return to Haiti to complete the stories we started tracking there.
The campaign is live on Kickstarter. Have a look and find out what we’re planning to film during our return to Haiti. We’re offering some great rewards for your support.
I was speaking on the phone this afternoon with my friend Jeff Pflueger, photographer, web designer and data visualization guru. He asked me how I fit in all the things I do. I gave him my usual reply. “I work on my consulting business three days a week, and my film Shelter the other eight days of the week.” We both laughed. In fact, I work on consulting six days a week and Shelter the other 14 days of the week. I don’t get much sleep.
Sleep Deprivation as a Way of Life
Most people are functioning in a world of sleep deprivation. That loss of sleep is cumulative. You need to catch up somehow. Sleeping late on the weekends won’t always do it. Most of us parents became sleep deprivation heroes in our early days, performing complex acts of diaper changing while cruising by on just a few hours. When I worked in the news business, we often pulled all-nighters. If the story was any good, they asked me to recut it for the nightly news just as I was closing my briefcase and thinking about seeing my family again. Chronic lack of sleep has been linked to various ills, like heart disease, bellicose behavior around the police officer giving you a parking ticket, and terminal crankiness. To say nothing of the most serious problem, falling asleep while driving.
Sleep Efficiency
It takes me a while to get going in the morning and I like to work late. I like coffee. Sometimes my wife will give me a cup of coffee and just siphon off the ideas that come out of my mind as though carried by a flowing river. I like the feeling. But then, hours later, when she goes off to bed and falls asleep in two minutes like an angel, my mind is still humming, visualizing business intelligence data like Jeff and I were discussing, testing a new internet phone system that can recognize who’s calling, or laughing at some foolishness on Twitter. The ability to fall asleep fast and stay asleep is called sleep efficiency. I don’t have any of that. But I can see really well in the dark. This is useful when getting up in the middle of the night to check the doors, see if it’s raining, pick up a book, read two paragraphs, and try to get back into bed silently so as not to awaken the slumbering angel.
Persian New Year’s Resolution
It’s a little late for New Year’s, so I’ll have to make this a Persian New Year’s resolution. I’m going to start getting more sleep. Sleep is useful, as you might imagine, but scientists still can’t figure out why we need so much of it. Some believe that sleep is used to consolidate memories, filing things away and codifying them in powerful images of dreams. Others believe that our dreams are actually what we use to prune synapses, getting rid of unneeded memories by dreaming them away. Anyway, sleep deprivation research has shown that when people aren’t allowed to dream, they go nuts.
Of course, I’ll start on my resolution tomorrow. I’m writing this late, and the angel who usually proofs my 500 words is already asleep. Sorry for any typos.
Back from an action-packed two days of production in San Francisco on SHELTER. While the mind is willing at this hour, the typing fingers are weak. I’m going to give it a shot anyway, because I get to talk to a lot of visionaries while working on SHELTER. It’s always good to write about that. Seth Wachtel just returned from Haiti with stories to tell about tent cities that reached all the way to the airport.
He saw mothers praying over scraps of fabric that once clothed their children. The children are gone; the scraps were all they had.
Seth, the Director of the Architecture and Community Design Program at University of San Francisco, is working on building a medical center and other projects, and he saw signs of tremendous courage and optimism in Haiti.
After our interview with Seth, went to Kevin Rowell’s place. Kevin was living in Haiti for 11 months, since the earthquake, working with builders and community leaders to create sustainable shelter and building systems. Kevin works with Kleiwerks International and he told a moving story of Haitian community leaders who were puzzled (to put it politely) about why they received emergency relief housing that was made of metal — metal that gets hot enough in the Haitian climate to seem to cook the people inside. “I could build something better myself,” said one of the community leaders. Kevin has the great gift of listening to people, really hearing them, and then finding ways to create action from their feelings and ideas. Here’s a video from Kleiwerks that Kevin narrated.
First thing this morning we met architect, professor and author Eric Corey Freed. He’s a funny guy, with a snappy wit and sharp intellect, and therefore it’s no mystery why he’s sought after by corporations and others as a keynote speaker.
We had to look for a good filming location, moving the crew to avoid thumping air compressors, crying babies and distant train whistles, all the things show up as soon as we start the camera.
Eric told me stories about how he tours cities with local leaders who want to know why nobody comes to their downtown. The answer is simple: Those cities, and so many others, have done lots of things to take people away from the city: they’ve built freeways out of town and big box stores and neglected the human scale that breathes life into design. Good design changes everything. Eric made the connection between the foundational work being done in Haiti right now and how it will benefit our own cities. He brought into focus why the design-for-good movement is gaining power.
We wrapped out the day with informative interviews at Architecture for Humanity. Gretchen Mokry, a program manager there, got her arms around the array of projects that AfH has going all over the world, and Sandhya Naidu Janardhan, a program coordinator, gave us specifics about construction training and managerial programs AfH is pursuing in Haiti. AfH has been a good friend to us as we put SHELTER together. Another great friend to SHELTER is John Peterson of Public Architecture. He did an interview for us earlier this week, conducted by my colleague Richard Neill, and he was one of the guiding forces behind Public Architecture’s new book about the power of pro bono work.
Next? Putting this all together for our Sundance Institute application. We’re cutting the trailer next week. A big thank you to Joel Goodman, who will be providing music.
It’s that time of year. You’re sending cards, shopping for gifts, holiday music ringing in your ear, along with compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue is what happens when there are so many people hitting you up for something. The emails come fast and furious about tax-deductions you can get, and everyone wants you to “open your heart and open your checkbook.”
Look, I have had a little too much coffee in the past few days, and caffeine can lead to cynicism, so let me rephrase. For one thing, I am one of those people asking you for something. I want you to have a look at my IndieGoGo page for the Shelter movie and consider making a tax-deductible donation to help make the film. But along with a few others, I’m trying to approach this whole charity thing differently. We’re not even thinking of it as charity.
Charity is Being Reframed as Involvement
Things wouldn’t run very well without charity. Governments don’t have the money or the courage to support all their subjects. Corporations can be sociopaths when it comes to serving their stockholders. So in many ways, it’s up to us, ordinary citizens, to turn the karmic wheel.
But this is not about crawling up to people with hat in hand. There’s a new kind of philanthropy that really has me excited – a participatory kind that involves action as well as giving. There’s a storyline to this, and it starts with the (RED) campaign. That campaign was criticized when it started in 2006 because it asked people to be activists by buying things. Was encouraging consumerism a good idea? Well, people were buying things anyway, and if they were motivated to buy Gap clothing or an Apple iPod to fund programs addressing HIV and AIDS, how would that be bad? When a Gap shopper buys a (RED) product, 50% of Gap’s profits go to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. Toms Shoes gives away a pair of shoes for every pair you buy. Charity: Water is bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations and a local business here in LA called Real Food Daily has teamed with Charity:Water to help. You buy a Real Food Daily holiday gift bag, and RFD will donate 100% of the profit to Charity:Water.
Patient Capital
Jacqueline Novogratz as founder of Acumen Fund, has pioneered a concept called patient capital. It means that when you invest a couple hundred thousand or even a couple million in a hospital in India or in technology for cleaner water in Africa, you might not get a monetary return on your investment – you might get a spiritual one. Though it might sound nuts to the bottom-line types, Novogratz has made it clear that there’s a different kind of bottom line to pay attention to – the kind that makes the world a better place.
Then along comes Jumo, the invention of one of the Facebook founders (not the guy in the movie). Jumo is going to help people social network around causes, using Facebook as a platform. Sure there have been some complaints about it because you have to get sucked into Facebook to use it, but the idea is of building social capital online is unbeatable, just like Habitat for Humanity’s idea of building social capital by having neighbors create a community and build their own homes.
A Sense of Collaboration
Money is always appreciated, but it’s good to know you can give more than money. You can participate in a movement. On IndieGoGo, I’m trying to find ways for you to participate in the making of Shelter. (No, you can’t hold the camera.) But you can influence the creative direction of the movie at screenings, serve on our advisory board, or you can even be in the film if you can think of something to say about shelter. (Can you?)
Getting less sleep lately, and it’s not a bad thing. Here’s why. Thanks to the folks at Zipcar, who picked up half the cost, I was able to drive out to meet architectural pioneer Michelle Kaufmann and interview her for an upcoming SHELTER blog. Michelle has not only explored new ways of creating sustainable housing, but she is also fixing our buildings so they aren’t killing us. (“Officer, I’d like you to arrest that building for murder.”) I also met Nipun Mehta of Charity Focus, KarmaTube, and Karma Kitchen — all projects that are world-changers. Nipun makes awesome chai without needing to measure any of his ingredients. He also knows how to make social change by measuring social capital. I’m up nightly thinking about how I might make films that way, using creative people paid in karma bucks. More on that soon – and more about KarmaTube coming soon as I discuss a project with Birju Pandya, one of the guys behind it.
For now, let’s look at this staying up at night business. Actually, it starts in the morning when I am busy walking into walls. By ten I am able to form sentences, at least in my head. By six in the evening I am fully on, and by midnight ready to create great meaning. One in the morning – pure genius. Surrendering to sleep seems like defeat.
As Lisa Russ Spaar wrote in the New York Times recently, “For the insomniac Vladimir Nabokov, I think that sleep, which he called ‘the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals,’ meant turning off, even for a few hours, his quicksilver, voracious consciousness.”
Um, I don’t know if I have a quicksilver consciousness, but voracious works for me, and once I start the big thinking machine it’s really hard to turn off. As a result, we’ve instituted a few rules. No computers after 10 pm. No media unless it’s Sesame Street or Shirley Temple films. My wife likes to welcome sleep by reading in bed. Not me, so I spend many minutes flossing to give her time to concentrate on a few pages. Then the sleep boat leaves the dock.
Well, nighttime isn’t what it used to be, anyway. Way back when, night was dead calm if you wanted it that way. No emails, no phones. Your timekeeper was the groan of a garbage truck signaling 5 am; time to hug your pillow for an hour or two before work. Now, always, there’s Somebody Out There. Somebody’s Twitter feed to check, or Facebook statuses to poke through like dirty laundry on a dorm room floor.
Staying up all night doesn’t guarantee solitude, but it’s worth it if you like to chase words across a screen or make a jumble of video clips sing their song. For that, I’ll skip a few Z’s.
Getting less sleep lately, and it’s not a bad thing. Here’s why. Thanks to the folks at 
