Ever since the news about the intention of the Attorney General’s office in the state of California to rebuke the registration of OneVillage Foundation (OVF) to operate as a charitable trust, the key OVF people in Taiwan, Ghana and the U.S. have been keeping a very low profile, as if they are hoping to discourage any accusations of fraud by their mere silence. Or as if they are demonstrating yet again their remarkable resilience by preparing to shed the OVF skin in order to resurface under a new label – as they did before with the Aids Relief Foundation. Though this time, the OVF people are making it quite clear that they have nothing to spare for charity, preferring henceforth to refer to their work as a “social enterprise” or a “private initiative”. However, no matter how many layers of skin are shed, no amount of creative labeling will change the true nature of the core. The key question for OVF and its people still remains; what about the giving? You have been taking money under the pretext of making lives better – lives of people in Africa, lives of the most destitute like the orphans and the AIDS afflicted – but what have you been giving?
Storytelling, OVF's core capability
Like so many others, we – the editors of this site – have been struggling to make sense of what it is that OVF actually brings to the table. We see promises and expectations that are not fulfilled. We see the way they use “charity” in order to promote their own networking interests. But what is in fact their core capability? Recently, it was brought to our attention by one of our readers that the OneVillage Initiative is mentioned in the book “Wake me up when the data is over” edited by Lori Silverman, where contributor Michael J. Margulis, a professional in the field of brand storytelling, promotes OVF and Joy Tang’s story as an example of an organization that uses storytelling as a key strategic instrument for its operations. (It is reasonable to assume this example would not have been included in the book had the editor been aware of the strong concerns regarding OVF beforehand.)
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| OVF's founder Joy Tang at TED x Youth Day in Taipei in 2010 |
Indeed, as OVF founder Joy Tang herself writes in a proposal to the Dharma Drum University in Taipei, storytelling is a key activity for OVF in order to implement "Community Development & Organizational Change". What this means in practice is that storytelling is used aggressively as a tool to diffuse the image of OVF as dedicated to a greater cause of the common good. This image contrasts sharply with examples published here showing work that is dubious in nature (see the orphanage case), not about any greater cause at all than creating profitable business opportunities for the OVF people themselves (see the Jukwa farm case), or in fact mere fiction. Besides actively networking and holding workshops and seminars to promote the image of OVF, the OVF people have literally spammed the Internet with their own wikis and a massive amount of blogs in order to create and maintain the illusion that they are a social movement dedicated to real-life betterment, when indeed they can at best be called a network of people looking to promote themselves as social agents for change and sharing some common interests, notably in drumming and in the belief in the power of Internet communication. Most of the wikis, as well as video presentations published on the internet, have been created by student volunteers from the National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Hsinchu, Taiwan upon the request of OVF's founder as part of their voluntary service assignment. The students themselves seem unaware of the true nature of what they are writing about, dazzled by the opportunity of an international experience in a country that is to them exotic.
Storytelling as a powerful tool
Storytelling can be a beautiful thing, and is a part of most cultural traditions. Stories are powerful tools that add color and texture to our lives and in many parts of the world, the ability to tell a good story - especially orally – is highly valued by most communities. By activating our imagination, stories make history come alive, serve as instruments for socializing people into what is politically correct and socially acceptable, and promote local values and traditions amidst a world of mass culture. Children in particular are very open and thus it is a tool that is being increasingly used as a way of educating the youngest in our society. By targeting the intuitive rather than the logical part of the brain, storytelling is a way of communication that does not activate people’s evaluative capacity but seeks to interact with an “open state of mind”, i.e. to encourage receptiveness rather than critical thinking. The intentions of the storytellers with what is being communicated are thus of utmost importance, in order to ensure that the quality of what is communicated in terms of ethics and trustworthiness is maintained – especially when the stories are directed toward those groups in the global community who are particularly receptive to what is communicated by a storytelling authority simply because they lack their own frames of reference that will allow them to assess and evaluate what is told.
The obvious appeals of stories should not allow us to forget, however, that they have been used effectively throughout history for instigating racism between different ethnic groups or religions, by transmitting prejudices and myths based on the fears or aversions of one particular ethnic group toward another. Storytelling can have an impact far beyond our imagination. The Nazi regime in Germany encouraged the propagation of stories that defined Jews as vermin rather than human beings, and it is no secret that the bloody conflicts between the Hutu and the Tutsi people in Rwanda were fueled by radio stories aimed at making people believe that they had to be the first to slaughter lest they be slaughtered themselves. What is supposed to contain stories within the realm of what we deem to be civilized are hence the moral and ethical codes and values that we adhere to.
When story-telling masks the truth
In 2007-2008, as the country of Kenya was undergoing a difficult crisis, many organizations initiated various efforts to help the Kenyan people. The OVF joined an effort for peace called the "Pyramid of Peace" through Joy Tang, who quickly became an active promoter. Her roll call was "Please join us in any way you can. We need the stories to be told and people connected.""
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| Joy Tang promoting the Pyramid of Peace on the Global Voices Online website |
Though this initiative remained very visible at the time, little has been said of it since, and with cause. Despite fund-raising efforts, it never actually did contribute to peace in Kenya in any way on the ground and in many instances, it brought out the worst in people who saw a quick opportunity to gain support for their own interests. So much for the value of story-telling, once the hype was gone. However, a self-critical assessment of this story-telling effort has yet to be found.
It is interesting to see the amount of effort that is being put into writing history by the OVF people. One notable example is the Doug Bontempy story called "Doug Bontempi's life on earth", with its own dedicated Flickr album on the internet.
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| Doug Bontempi in the home of OVF's founder Joy Tang, a framed picture of the two of them in the background |
Doug Bontempi was Joy Tang’s cohabitant whom she claimed after his death was not her lover but her best friend. Interestingly, as his "best friend" she inherited quite a bit of his money after his death although he himself was still married to another woman at the time. For some reason, accounts of how OVF’s founder transformed this out-of-prison, former head of the local Hells Angels chapter in California into an African drum lover found their way onto the Internet after he passed away in the summer of 2009. The accounts were written by Joy Tang herself with help of her good friend and the brother of Doug Bontempi, Art Goodtimes, and make no mention of the money. Was such post mortem storytelling indeed a tribute or a necessity, i.e. a proactive attempt to direct people's attention towards that part of the story that might be to one's favor, as a way of getting around and making people forget a truth that was far from glorious?
Thanks to the early sensibility of the OVF network in the U.S. to the potential of Internet as a marketing tool, the OVF people have long enjoyed a privileged position on the Internet where the number of promotional stories diffused through various blogs and wikis as well as other web sites is huge. The voices of those for whom OVF collaboration has left a bitter aftertaste remain mostly silent, but for a few exceptions. For the most part, the victims of OVF and its founder Joy Tang have been most reluctant to express their concerns and tell their stories for fear that their names would be smeared in the networks where they wish to remain active. And sadly where former collaborators have voiced concerns, retaliation has indeed occurred more than once. Hence the need for an arena for discussion that would stand on its own, welcoming any response by the OVF people regarding the disclosed information, while showing those who have been used and exploited by OVF that they are not alone.
Joy Tang of OVF promoted as a storytelling authority
On May 27th-29th 2011, Joy Tang will be the moderator for the annual storytellers' meeting organized by the center for storytelling in Yunlin, Taiwan (run by her friend and collaborator LiFang Tang), with the OVF experience being part of the program.
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| OVF Founder Joy Tang and fellow storyteller LinFang Tang |
It is most telling that the OVF key people - including Joy Tang, Mark Roest and the latest addition Emmanuel Richardson - all refer to themselves as "storytellers". But however powerful a tool stories may be for diffusing an image of what one does not want people to see, an illusion can only be maintained as long as people actually believe in it. As one famous story goes, it only took the words of a small boy to break the charms as the people awoke to find that their emperor was, in fact, stark naked! Sooner or later, people do break free of the illusion, and when that happens, no story in the world can shield an ugly reality from the truth.
