tion has become a model for participatory
development, lauded for finding and
engaging leaders who also happen to be
young residents of Kibera. CFK, which is
part of UNC’s Center for Global Initiatives, now boasts a sports program; a medical clinic; a reproductive health and
women’s rights center for adolescent girls;
a solid-waste management business for
youth; and a scholarship program that provides tuition, tutoring and mentoring.
Barcott, 31, is now the special adviser
to the chair and CEO of Duke Energy in
Charlotte, where he lives with his wife,
Tracy Dobbins Barcott ’00, and their
daughter. He earned master’s degrees from
the Harvard Business School and Kennedy
School of Government in 2009 after serving five years with the Marines in the
Horn of Africa, Bosnia and Iraq.
Following the release of his memoir,
It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine’s
Path to Peace, Barcott spent much of 2011
on college campuses, talking with students
about how they can make a difference. The
book came out in paperback in February.
He recently shared with the Review some
of the lessons he’s drawn from his decade
of experience with Carolina for Kibera. An
edited excerpt of that conversation follows.
You’ve said there’s a difference
between saving the world and chang-
ing it. Describe the gulf that exists
between those two ideas.
I was really frustrated during those initial weeks in Kibera by how a lot of large
NGOs had lost their way; they weren’t
serving the needs of the communities that
they intended to serve. Instead, they had
gotten diverted, and they were spending
resources ineffectively … as opposed to
actually investing in human talent and
capacity. The save-the-world mentality
embodies a lot of the failures of well-meaning individuals from more affluent
places like, name-your-town in the
United States, who assume that, because
they are American and born into this particular culture and set world, that they
can show up and just start solving problems for people in very different contexts,
who live on a lot less than they do, and
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