By Lynn Baskfield
I am part of a Positive Intelligence Coaches Pod that has been together for about two years now. We have named ourselves Good Trouble. We are six professional life and business coaches who have taken on a project that began with a friendship between me, and a young single mom I met in 2018 in Belize when I was travelling there.
As the friendship continued after my return to the states, I became more and more impressed with the courage and commitment of my friend to getting her three children educated in a country that has low graduation rates and high poverty. I started out contributing a few dollars a month to help with school expenses. When Covid hit, my friend, who worked in the tourist industry, was laid off and has had no income since. My contributions grew. As it was a lot for me to take on myself, I developed The Pay It Forward Project, Women Helping Women, to draw in more of my community to help this little family. Here is my web page with more information: Pay it Forward Project (equinecoaching.com). Basically, it’s a call to women (and men) who at one time were in need, got on their feet with the help of someone who had resources to help, and are now thriving and able to pay it forward.
The woman who is our beneficiary lives in poor section of a high crime area outside of Belmopan, Belize. We have looked with her at how to make this project more widespread without compromising her safety, so we are calling her Mara.
I was diagnosed with cancer recently. One of my biggest worries was not abandoning my “adopted” family while undergoing chemo and radiation this summer and not being able to coach. Good Trouble stepped in to help. They “adopted” Mara and her kids too, a boy who is 15, and two girls, 13 and 11. As a group, my Good Trouble pod not only supported me in my commitment to this family in ways I had never dreamed (giving me the gift of facing my saboteurs square in the eye.) And they began to formulate a bigger vision, taking on this project as a pod.
The bigger vision we have stepped into as a pod starts with Mara’s family, then expands to the broader community. It has three parts:
- Stabilize: safe housing, money for school and daily living, literacy training, learning a trade for Mara, business coaching
- Sustain: plying that trade to bring in a sustainable income to support the family
- Pay it forward: Mara helps another single mom get on her feet. And it grows over time from there.
Once Mara and her family are stabilized*, she learns to read and write more fluently and learns a trade (she’s leaning toward sewing) so that she can sustain herself and her family, she will help us identify another family in a similar situation and so on.
*(Two examples of how we are helping with stabilization: Mara’s house sits on stilts so that torrential rains in her area don’t flood the building. The wooden stilts were rotting, making the whole house unstable. Hurricane season is from June-November. We have recently contributed and collected enough money to put in new cement supports to weather heavy rain and high winds. Also, last September, Lynn’s Pay it Forward community helped build an “indoor bathroom” a tiny cement block structure in the yard with a toilet and shower. After another fundraising effort, it now has a door and a window for privacy from the street.)
I am blown away by the heart, commitment and expertise of each person in the pod. I wondered how I would sustain doing much of the financial contribution, fundraising and support coaching myself. Now there is the power of six. Plus the power of others of the small but growing Pay it Forward community who send $10 - $25/month, or sometimes a larger, one-time donation.
We are all learning about systemic poverty, inequality of education, and the power of the the human spirit embodied in the fierce mama named Mara. We are learning.
