Middle Ground without Compromise
The middle ground today is hard to find. The middle ground sounds like a place you can only get to by making compromises. And compromise is out of fashion. Increasingly we live in a binary world or either-or.
This binary is false, unnecessary, and damaging. It’s what happens when we think about objectives being mutually exclusive. Rather than an either/or binary, I would suggest that we consider a cooperative approach to viewing social change on a spectrum. When we take a spectrum approach, what we find in the middle may be a balancing of some of the either/or ideas, but it is also likely to produce creative new ideas.
Like many other aspects of discourse, there is a great tension in the strategies for developing economies. The question is always how much relief is provided compared to the amount of development that is done. The is a presumption that communities in crisis need reliefs, they need handouts of life saving and life sustaining materiel and that in order to provide development assistance, that relief must be sacrificed. As a result, too many organizations and projects both in the United States and around the world are organized on either side of this binary; either working on long term “systemic” change or on immediate relief services. Levo rejects this mutually exclusive objective setting and asks how do we accomplish both?
Focused on food security, Levo uses an approach that intentionally leverages middle ground technology to enable both short-term and long-term support for at risk populations. The idea of either help people now or build something for the future is not acceptable. People need help now AND we need to build a resilient world for the long term. Hydroponics is more efficient and effective at growing vegetables than traditional agriculture, but typically it requires sophisticated technology, substantial capital investment, and commercial scale operations. As our objectives are both short-term food security and long-term stability, we look for solutions in the middle ground.
About six weeks ago an orphanage in Pignon, Haiti supporting 10 children planted a couple Levo growing systems. They will be shortly begin harvesting. Less than two months to food stability for a few hundred dollar investment! And that’s not all, when the systems are fully harvested, they can be replanted again and again. So, for a few hundred dollars, we get short-term relief AND long-term leverage food security and economic development.
How are you finding middle ground for uncompromising value?