Senior Project Blog Post 3

This week in "Switch" I read about finding bright spots.  Heath uses the work of Jerry Sternin, an employee of Save the Children, an organization working to help children in need.  His job was to create a new office in Vietnam to fight malnutrition, but when he arrived he was told he only had 6 months to make a difference, as the foreign minister told him his presence was not appreciated by everyone in the government.  He knew about the issues that caused the rampant malnutrition: Poor sanitation, not enough clean water, and little education about proper nutrition, but all of that was "TBU" (true but useless).  With a short time span and a minuscule budget there was no way he could address these issues effectively, so he decided to take a different approach.  He went to rural villages and met with groups of mothers who would measure and weigh each child in the village and analyze the results.  They were looking for examples of kids from poor families who were well nourished.  If some kids could remain healthy despite immense poverty, then their success could be replicated and create a practical (but short term) solution.  The mothers needed direction, not motivation because all of them wanted to make their children healthier, the question was how.  This is similar to the goals of my own project.  All coaches want to make their teams and players better, but they do not know how. I want my skill development chart and data to be the "direction" these coaches are looking for even if they don't know it yet.  The solution Sternin found was that the mothers of the healthy children were feeding their kids 4 smaller meal a day (rather than 2 with the same amount of food), as their stomachs could not handle such large amounts at a time.  They also were including improvisations in the meals such as crabs and sweet-potato greens which were often seen as lower-class or improper.  These few bright spots led to a 65% decrease in malnourishment in the 6 months while Sternin was there.  I hope my tool, most likely over the course of 3 or 4 years, will help coaches develop more personalized approaches to their kids on a short term scale, while also helping the organization develop long term solutions to problems the tool will make clear.