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Kjerstin Erickson is one of those "shiny" people who lights up a room. After meeting her at the Global Engagement Summer last spring, I knew I wanted to grab her for an interview before she became too famous.
Erickson founded FORGE (Facilitating Opportunities for Refugee Growth and Empowerment) in 2003 when she was a 20 year-old junior studying public policy at Stanford University.
FORGE serves 60,000 refugees in three different refugee camps in Southern Africa, and is an official operating partner of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). 
Now 26, Erickson is still FORGE's Executive Director. She has been named a Haas Public Service Fellow at Stanford, a Top 10 College Woman by Glamour Magazine, and a Person You Should Know by CNN.
FORGE uses a collaborative, rather than top-down model, to serve refugees' needs, and much has been written in the blogosphere and media about Erickson's "radical transparency" around the organization's financial challenges.
Saturday, June 20th is World Refugee Day, and this year's theme is "Real People, Real Needs." If you're inspired after listening to the interview on the Big Vision Podcast, or reading the edited transcript below, take a browse through FORGE's gallery of projects created by refugee social entrepreneurs.
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Kjerstin Erickson: FORGE is an international nonprofit organization that works with refugee communities in Africa. What we do is essentially support social entrepreneurship within refugee communities. We work with about 60,000 refugees from across the continent. We bring communities together to identify their top problems, needs, and priorities, and solve them internally.
The projects can range from preschools, to libraries and computer training centers, to women empowerment programs. It runs the gamut based on what the needs of the community are, and what they're most passionate about solving at that time.
You use a process that on your website was described as the, "collaborative project planning process."
Yes.
Can you talk about how that works, and what the pros and cons of that process are?
The "collaborative project planning process" is a mouthful. We like to refer to it as a "people-powered" development process. It's really designed to make sure that all solutions are both emerging from the local community and tailored to the community's needs, and are developing the leadership skills of the most promising and emerging leaders at the same time. This process emerged based on working for four years in a more traditional development organization sense, in which we were bringing in international volunteers. We would look at a community and say, "This community needs a library, " or "You don't have enough kids in preschool." Then we would design the projects and implement them top down.
We had a lot of great results there, but we realized that something was missing and that the individuals that were involved on our side were getting so much learning experience and leadership experience by creating these projects, but we weren't designed to create those learning experiences from Americans. We wanted to ultimately empower the refugees as much as we could. We radically transformed the way that we did our business, and designed a process through which the refugees themselves would get all of that experience.
At the same time, we would be creating projects that were more locally tailored and more specific and impactful, and allowed a community and a set of individuals to be able to repeat that process, and learn all of the important skills of how to create community change.
What have been the challenges of using that process? I mean, obviously people haven't been using that other process for so long if it is completely ineffectual.
Right.
Obviously, what's good about it is that you're empowering people. You're hopefully meeting the needs that they have determined. They're walking away with skills. Hopefully the project continues. What's the dark side? What's the challenge of using that process?
Well, it's scary because you have no control. You walk into a community, and you have no idea what they're going to say, and what they're going to need. Sometimes from our perspective we might think, "That's not what you need," or "That's not a good idea," or "That's never going to work," or the community might elect some leaders that we don't think are the best leaders.
You really have to trust the process and go with it, and that takes a lot
