We were fortunate enough to host Dr. Badiul Majumdar and his wife, Tazima, this month, at a series of speaking events around Australia. You may have attended one of his talks about pioneering change and becoming a resilient leader.
If there is anyone to talk about resilience and leadership, it’s Dr. Majumdar. He has been leading the team at The Hunger Project Bangladesh for close to three decades, catalysing grassroots change and reaching 5 million people living in hunger and poverty.
His talk was incredibly moving as he discussed the lives he’s impacted, community-led development in Bangladesh and how to pioneer change through leading by example.
Here were some of our key takeaways from the events:
- It’s not that we are all born equal, but that we are born for self-sufficiency. It is an essential part of being human.
- Our work in Bangladesh on mass-mobilisation has always been an enormous experiment. Our strategies are community-powered, led by an incredible network of Animators (local volunteer leaders) in the villages.
- The dependency mindset cages people everywhere — many in comfort, many in poverty. In whichever way we encounter dependency mindset, it robs us of our basic human capability of self-reliance.
Dr. Majumdar discussed the unique approach of The Hunger Project to shift the mindsets of people living in hunger to empower them to transform their situation. The mindset shift is taught through Bangladesh’s unique Vision, Commitment, Action workshops, created by Dr. Majumdar himself.
“No one can make a flower bud bloom. You cannot prise it open or unfurl it manually. It will destroy it. You can only assist a bud to bloom by ensuring the environment is good — watered and fertile. We, our partners and Animators are aiming to be good gardeners so that individual buds can bloom.” — Dr. Majumdar.
As the powerful storyteller he is, Dr. Badiul has shared a story with us below about how a young woman from Bangladesh named Hosniara transformed her situation. This is just one example of the progress made possible with your investment and partnership.