Omar Samra, owner of the company that managed the "Right To Climb" expedition to Kilimanjaro which I criticised here, left the following comment. Due to blogspot's infuriating comment system, his message came out truncated and its paragraphs a little garbled, sections of his response came to me but weren't published somehow, etc. (knowing that I do not moderate comments).
For this, and as I had promised, I'm re-posting it here as a standalone post - and I thank him for taking the time to respond. Out of respect and as this is not, after all, an inimical conversation - I harbour no ill-will to Mr. Samra whom I don't personally know - I tried to keep my comments to a bare minimum (nearly succeeded, too!) to correct or clarify facts, not going into a perspectives shouting match, tempted as I was to argue on many occasions. But my perspective was already made clear in the previous post so no point in repeating it. While many of Mr. Samra's comments are indeed clarifying, most of my criticism remains, I believe, appropriate. But that's up to you to judge.
I also have no intention to post a further response to this letter, but will respond to potential reader comments if any.
Thanks.
mt
-------- Mr. Samra's message --------------------------
Hello Mohamed,
My name is Omar Samra, the person I believe whose integrity is in question here . I tried to get your number off a common friend to explain the facts given that you are willing to be proven wrong. You were not willing to speak to me.
Indeed - a written debate needs not be made into a voice one. But I did promise said common friend that should you wish to respond by email I'd publish your message in its entirety, as I am doing here.
And so am reverting to this blog comment to clarify a few points. I hope everyone who read the first blog post reads it. Anyway, here goes:
First of all I write this response under the assumption that Mr. Mohamed (blog author) wrote this not in malice but because he cares about the cause of special needs in Egypt and felt bad that some wrongdoing was being made. Otherwise there would be no point in going on.
Yep.
I maintain that The Right To Climb (RTC) initiative was done first and foremost to raise funds and awareness for the charity. As a company we run regular trips to Kilimanjaro and it is infinitely easier to organize those than an entire charity campaign as well alongside. It is true that the RTC did receive a lot of PR as intended and this is as it should be because it is a novel approach to charity and a success on all counts. Let me explain all addressed points as much as I can. Please ask questions if you feel I have missed anything
My motivations are clear and have always been transparent:
1) Both my sisters are mentally challenged and securing funds for the organization indirectly secures their future
2) I care deeply about the cause and have regularly volunteered in the field since 1988
3) I sit on the board of the NGO (public info on the RTLA's website) since this year and the RTC is a way of contributing positively through my work (Wild Guanabana). Namely raising funds and awareness for the great work that is being done by the RTLA.
The climb costs $2650 not $5000 as mentioned in the blog.
Short of seeing the invoices, I obviously have no tangible way of proving otherwise. This said, the rough figure of $5000 was obtained by asking the friends/families of not one but two of the climbers on your trip, as well as a third party who's a seasoned climber. Therefore I fully stand by my figures.
The assumption that the RTLA would have been better off without the climb is flawed to the core. If we had reached out to those same people to donate $3600 each they would not have just handed over the cash. Most probably they have other ideas of how they want to use their money or other charities to give to. After all, philanthropy is a competitive field. What we did is give them the opportunity to embark on a unique journey they have always wanted to do, climbing Kilimanjaro, and use this as a vehicle to raise money and awareness for the cause, which they did successfully. With the idea presented in this way many were willing to do both things together. Also, this approach in terms of awareness is much more powerful than if they had simply donated money (assuming this was even possible in this magnitude) because then only those people would know about the RTLA and the great work they are doing as well as the cause itself. By getting over 20 people to prepare for one of the biggest challenges of their lives for 3 months they inevitably get to speak to tens if not hundreds of people and they spread the word this way. For them to raise money they need to be armed with answers about the cause and RTLA (most people don’t just hand over donations lightly) which means they do not become only donors but hopefully ambassadors which I am sure most will agree is infinitely more powerful especially in the medium and long term.
The figure of $51,990 you mentioned was not an up-to-date figure and it is wrong to measure the success of the initiative based on results that are not final.
That was the figure on your website the final day of your Kilimanjaro expedition - and the day of publication of the post.
Moreover, please bare in mind that there is no big corporation behind the RTC or Wild Guanabana for that matter. It is simply a handful of individuals including myself who were working round the clock those last 3 months to make this happen. So yes we did not update figures as efficiently as we wanted but we are working on this and everyone can rest assured that the full and accurate figures will be published at the end. We have updated the website recently and so far we have raised $121,000. We still hope there is more to come through. Whether the final figure lives up to Mohamed's expectations of success is a different story (in reference to the model UN pun) but we are trying our best and trust me these numbers are significant for the RTLA. Please bare in mind that LE20K is the cost of one kid there for one year so a rough calculation suggests we have funded the costs of 34 kids for a whole year, which is something. We hope to do more. You also make a remark that we could have done better. Assuming that you or someone else would have done a better job at this, is this really a case for such tone in your blog?
(Huh?)
Remember that big budgets and TV ad campaigns allow more mainstream charities to get the lion's share of funding from corporations and individuals so every person we convinced to donate something no matter how miniscule is a success. Sponsors that came on board to provide financial or in kind support were to a large extent driven by the originality of the initiative. Also consider that this is the first time we do this initiative, not everything we tried worked, we learn from our mistakes and will do better next time.
As you can see from the above, Omar Samra (me) is not the ONLY winner as you say. My company Wild Guanabana did gain exposure from this initiative but there is no shame in this and it would be hard to run and initiative like this and not gain exposure for the organizing company. The Right To Climb name was promoted aggressively because it is the charity initiative, so was the RTLA’s. The people at the RTLA themselves will tell you how much exposure this generated for them whether through phone enquiries, donations (some people after hearing about the RTC decided to donate to the NGO outside of our initiative and this we don’t count in our fundraising) and website hits. As a company we did get 26 out of 26 people to the top and this is a great achievement on a world scale. The expeditions unblemished success reflected positively on the whole charity initiative and allowed us to raise more awareness. An expedition where people get sick, hospitalized or a large percentage not make it to the summit fills people with less confidence about the entire endeavor. Moreover, as a company that is only over a year old we managed to create a successful CSR campaign that was wide reaching and helped the RTLA and shed light on a much neglected cause. How many young companies in Egypt do you see doing the same? You can also speak to the Special Olympics if you would like to assess the effectiveness of the campaign compared to other initiatives they see through their line of work. An awareness seminar we organized at Sawi Cultural Wheel alone attended by over 400 people made a big difference. In it we spoke about the cause, the issues faced and had one of the RTLA’s graduates talk about her success story with the organization.
When the idea of the RTC came about it was to take 1 down syndrome kid to the top with us to show their talents and prove that they are amazing individuals capable of so much more than most people think (hence the name The Right To Climb). As you can see on our website, the Special Olympics are our patrons and we went to them to pick the most appropriate special Olympian for this. After thorough consultation physicians advised us that this would be extremely dangerous because they typically have weak hearts (and at 5,500m your heart can beat at 120BPM at rest) and suffer from epilepsy, which might be aggravated by altitude. From here we decided that the risk is too high to do such a thing but we kept the name as it is symbolic
Your intentions I am in now way to guess. But I find keeping the name despite its actual irrelevance {as you explained yourself} is eyebrow-raising to say the least.
and still holds true that everyone does have a right to climb, climbing is also a metaphor for any challenging endeavor including some of the misunderstanding and stereotype these people have to go through throughout their lives. Having said this, if not for the remoteness of the location and ednon proximity to proper medical care and altitude hostility, I am sure that they would have made it despite its difficulty because most of these athletes are more fit than most of us even. So when we could not do this we organized a bowling evening where we all took the kids from the RTLA out so that everyone can meet them and for the climbers to know who are the people they are helping with this initiative. All the climbers now know many of the kids by name and have made lasting friendships.
We have plans to also go on a simple hike in wadi degla with the kids and hopefully maintain contact going forward.
Lovely sentiment. But whether the 'friendships' are 'lasting' or not, is complete speculation.
About creating awareness and using the right channels and saying that Nile FM doesn’t talk to the masses. As far as I know twitter does not reach the 80 million of Egypt Mohamed but you use it nonetheless. Does that make your message any less important? Or dishonest as you called ours?
I didn't call the message 'dishonest'. I called the claim that trekking in Tanzania will raise awareness about mental disabilities within the Egyptian society, dishonest.
And why I use Twitter is utterly irrelevant to this conversation, don't you think?
Sure there are more people out there but we do what we can and so should everyone. Going on TV, mass newspapers and reaching the 80m costs money we do not have so we start small and hope to get bigger one day. If every company in Egypt did their part in CSR no matter how small this would definitely be a step in the right direction.
It may be true that some of the people on the trip did not have a primary objective of charity on this trip, at least to begin with, but there is nothing wrong with that.
I actually found it laudable.
Did they not get off their sofas and raise money from friends and family? Did they not talk about what they are doing for weeks and months to everyone they came across? Surely you cannot discredit people’s efforts no matter how small they are. Moreover, if it started this way I can tell you confidently that after interacting with the kids at the RTLA and living this journey together for the last 3 months, every single one of the climbers are passionate about the cause, can talk intelligently about it and will forever be ambassadors for it. In their lifetime they will hopefully inspire many other people to do good in any way they can.
Your 2.4:1 point is completely wrong. The trip costs much less and raised much more than you said (figures above). This again is an irrelevant calculation because once again you cannot count money people are willing to pay for a trip as money that could have gone to the charity. What we’ve done is effectively include people into this effort that would have otherwise not participated. I am sorry if you are only familiar with marathons as challenges to raise money for charity.
That was merely the example I used.
You might want to search Kilimanjaro and charity and see how many times this model been used to great success around the world and yes these trips cost money. I can also site many other successful initiatives to raise charity money that are way more costly than a climb to Kilimanjaro. There are many highly respected for profit companies out there who do charity challenges as their core business. They make money off organizing the events but through the work they do raise thousands of dollars for good causes.
If good intentions are only useful as long as they translate into something tangible (according to you) then we have definitely achieved something we can all be proud of. We are in the process of gathering the last pieces of donations and will announce our results shortly. However, for the benefit of everyone out there in the world who tries to do good but is not successful, please keep trying and not let anyone put you down.
Thank you for your attention.
Omar
For this, and as I had promised, I'm re-posting it here as a standalone post - and I thank him for taking the time to respond. Out of respect and as this is not, after all, an inimical conversation - I harbour no ill-will to Mr. Samra whom I don't personally know - I tried to keep my comments to a bare minimum (nearly succeeded, too!) to correct or clarify facts, not going into a perspectives shouting match, tempted as I was to argue on many occasions. But my perspective was already made clear in the previous post so no point in repeating it. While many of Mr. Samra's comments are indeed clarifying, most of my criticism remains, I believe, appropriate. But that's up to you to judge.
I also have no intention to post a further response to this letter, but will respond to potential reader comments if any.
Thanks.
mt
-------- Mr. Samra's message --------------------------
Hello Mohamed,
My name is Omar Samra, the person I believe whose integrity is in question here . I tried to get your number off a common friend to explain the facts given that you are willing to be proven wrong. You were not willing to speak to me.
Indeed - a written debate needs not be made into a voice one. But I did promise said common friend that should you wish to respond by email I'd publish your message in its entirety, as I am doing here.
And so am reverting to this blog comment to clarify a few points. I hope everyone who read the first blog post reads it. Anyway, here goes:
First of all I write this response under the assumption that Mr. Mohamed (blog author) wrote this not in malice but because he cares about the cause of special needs in Egypt and felt bad that some wrongdoing was being made. Otherwise there would be no point in going on.
Yep.
I maintain that The Right To Climb (RTC) initiative was done first and foremost to raise funds and awareness for the charity. As a company we run regular trips to Kilimanjaro and it is infinitely easier to organize those than an entire charity campaign as well alongside. It is true that the RTC did receive a lot of PR as intended and this is as it should be because it is a novel approach to charity and a success on all counts. Let me explain all addressed points as much as I can. Please ask questions if you feel I have missed anything
My motivations are clear and have always been transparent:
1) Both my sisters are mentally challenged and securing funds for the organization indirectly secures their future
2) I care deeply about the cause and have regularly volunteered in the field since 1988
3) I sit on the board of the NGO (public info on the RTLA's website) since this year and the RTC is a way of contributing positively through my work (Wild Guanabana). Namely raising funds and awareness for the great work that is being done by the RTLA.
The climb costs $2650 not $5000 as mentioned in the blog.
Short of seeing the invoices, I obviously have no tangible way of proving otherwise. This said, the rough figure of $5000 was obtained by asking the friends/families of not one but two of the climbers on your trip, as well as a third party who's a seasoned climber. Therefore I fully stand by my figures.
The assumption that the RTLA would have been better off without the climb is flawed to the core. If we had reached out to those same people to donate $3600 each they would not have just handed over the cash. Most probably they have other ideas of how they want to use their money or other charities to give to. After all, philanthropy is a competitive field. What we did is give them the opportunity to embark on a unique journey they have always wanted to do, climbing Kilimanjaro, and use this as a vehicle to raise money and awareness for the cause, which they did successfully. With the idea presented in this way many were willing to do both things together. Also, this approach in terms of awareness is much more powerful than if they had simply donated money (assuming this was even possible in this magnitude) because then only those people would know about the RTLA and the great work they are doing as well as the cause itself. By getting over 20 people to prepare for one of the biggest challenges of their lives for 3 months they inevitably get to speak to tens if not hundreds of people and they spread the word this way. For them to raise money they need to be armed with answers about the cause and RTLA (most people don’t just hand over donations lightly) which means they do not become only donors but hopefully ambassadors which I am sure most will agree is infinitely more powerful especially in the medium and long term.
The figure of $51,990 you mentioned was not an up-to-date figure and it is wrong to measure the success of the initiative based on results that are not final.
That was the figure on your website the final day of your Kilimanjaro expedition - and the day of publication of the post.
Moreover, please bare in mind that there is no big corporation behind the RTC or Wild Guanabana for that matter. It is simply a handful of individuals including myself who were working round the clock those last 3 months to make this happen. So yes we did not update figures as efficiently as we wanted but we are working on this and everyone can rest assured that the full and accurate figures will be published at the end. We have updated the website recently and so far we have raised $121,000. We still hope there is more to come through. Whether the final figure lives up to Mohamed's expectations of success is a different story (in reference to the model UN pun) but we are trying our best and trust me these numbers are significant for the RTLA. Please bare in mind that LE20K is the cost of one kid there for one year so a rough calculation suggests we have funded the costs of 34 kids for a whole year, which is something. We hope to do more. You also make a remark that we could have done better. Assuming that you or someone else would have done a better job at this, is this really a case for such tone in your blog?
(Huh?)
Remember that big budgets and TV ad campaigns allow more mainstream charities to get the lion's share of funding from corporations and individuals so every person we convinced to donate something no matter how miniscule is a success. Sponsors that came on board to provide financial or in kind support were to a large extent driven by the originality of the initiative. Also consider that this is the first time we do this initiative, not everything we tried worked, we learn from our mistakes and will do better next time.
As you can see from the above, Omar Samra (me) is not the ONLY winner as you say. My company Wild Guanabana did gain exposure from this initiative but there is no shame in this and it would be hard to run and initiative like this and not gain exposure for the organizing company. The Right To Climb name was promoted aggressively because it is the charity initiative, so was the RTLA’s. The people at the RTLA themselves will tell you how much exposure this generated for them whether through phone enquiries, donations (some people after hearing about the RTC decided to donate to the NGO outside of our initiative and this we don’t count in our fundraising) and website hits. As a company we did get 26 out of 26 people to the top and this is a great achievement on a world scale. The expeditions unblemished success reflected positively on the whole charity initiative and allowed us to raise more awareness. An expedition where people get sick, hospitalized or a large percentage not make it to the summit fills people with less confidence about the entire endeavor. Moreover, as a company that is only over a year old we managed to create a successful CSR campaign that was wide reaching and helped the RTLA and shed light on a much neglected cause. How many young companies in Egypt do you see doing the same? You can also speak to the Special Olympics if you would like to assess the effectiveness of the campaign compared to other initiatives they see through their line of work. An awareness seminar we organized at Sawi Cultural Wheel alone attended by over 400 people made a big difference. In it we spoke about the cause, the issues faced and had one of the RTLA’s graduates talk about her success story with the organization.
When the idea of the RTC came about it was to take 1 down syndrome kid to the top with us to show their talents and prove that they are amazing individuals capable of so much more than most people think (hence the name The Right To Climb). As you can see on our website, the Special Olympics are our patrons and we went to them to pick the most appropriate special Olympian for this. After thorough consultation physicians advised us that this would be extremely dangerous because they typically have weak hearts (and at 5,500m your heart can beat at 120BPM at rest) and suffer from epilepsy, which might be aggravated by altitude. From here we decided that the risk is too high to do such a thing but we kept the name as it is symbolic
Your intentions I am in now way to guess. But I find keeping the name despite its actual irrelevance {as you explained yourself} is eyebrow-raising to say the least.
and still holds true that everyone does have a right to climb, climbing is also a metaphor for any challenging endeavor including some of the misunderstanding and stereotype these people have to go through throughout their lives. Having said this, if not for the remoteness of the location and ednon proximity to proper medical care and altitude hostility, I am sure that they would have made it despite its difficulty because most of these athletes are more fit than most of us even. So when we could not do this we organized a bowling evening where we all took the kids from the RTLA out so that everyone can meet them and for the climbers to know who are the people they are helping with this initiative. All the climbers now know many of the kids by name and have made lasting friendships.
We have plans to also go on a simple hike in wadi degla with the kids and hopefully maintain contact going forward.
Lovely sentiment. But whether the 'friendships' are 'lasting' or not, is complete speculation.
About creating awareness and using the right channels and saying that Nile FM doesn’t talk to the masses. As far as I know twitter does not reach the 80 million of Egypt Mohamed but you use it nonetheless. Does that make your message any less important? Or dishonest as you called ours?
I didn't call the message 'dishonest'. I called the claim that trekking in Tanzania will raise awareness about mental disabilities within the Egyptian society, dishonest.
And why I use Twitter is utterly irrelevant to this conversation, don't you think?
Sure there are more people out there but we do what we can and so should everyone. Going on TV, mass newspapers and reaching the 80m costs money we do not have so we start small and hope to get bigger one day. If every company in Egypt did their part in CSR no matter how small this would definitely be a step in the right direction.
It may be true that some of the people on the trip did not have a primary objective of charity on this trip, at least to begin with, but there is nothing wrong with that.
I actually found it laudable.
Did they not get off their sofas and raise money from friends and family? Did they not talk about what they are doing for weeks and months to everyone they came across? Surely you cannot discredit people’s efforts no matter how small they are. Moreover, if it started this way I can tell you confidently that after interacting with the kids at the RTLA and living this journey together for the last 3 months, every single one of the climbers are passionate about the cause, can talk intelligently about it and will forever be ambassadors for it. In their lifetime they will hopefully inspire many other people to do good in any way they can.
Your 2.4:1 point is completely wrong. The trip costs much less and raised much more than you said (figures above). This again is an irrelevant calculation because once again you cannot count money people are willing to pay for a trip as money that could have gone to the charity. What we’ve done is effectively include people into this effort that would have otherwise not participated. I am sorry if you are only familiar with marathons as challenges to raise money for charity.
That was merely the example I used.
You might want to search Kilimanjaro and charity and see how many times this model been used to great success around the world and yes these trips cost money. I can also site many other successful initiatives to raise charity money that are way more costly than a climb to Kilimanjaro. There are many highly respected for profit companies out there who do charity challenges as their core business. They make money off organizing the events but through the work they do raise thousands of dollars for good causes.
If good intentions are only useful as long as they translate into something tangible (according to you) then we have definitely achieved something we can all be proud of. We are in the process of gathering the last pieces of donations and will announce our results shortly. However, for the benefit of everyone out there in the world who tries to do good but is not successful, please keep trying and not let anyone put you down.
Thank you for your attention.
Omar
2 comments:
Honestly Omar, before reading Mohamed's post about the "RightToClimb" I shared his same feelings. I felt you were using a cause to market the trip and not marketing a trip to benefit a cause.
I was looking forward to your response to Mohamed's post, but unfortunately I still feel the same.
I admit I'm no expert on CSR, but since blogs now provide a channel for anyone to voice their opinions, I am merely sharing my take on the issue and the message I got from the media.
Note: I am not providing any facts or anything, just my personal opinion.
I read this post and the one before it and I have to say that maybe the novelty of the idea is a bit confusing.
That being said, I think that Omar Samra is a respectable human being(What I know from public events, friends and I once emailed him)and I don't think he would be involved in a scam being it PR-related or financial, especially that he comes from a good family and he is affected by the situation himself. His company has been successful for a while even before the right to climb act, but as he explained, getting more marketing for your business is nothing shameful.
The idea is not a bad one, people who are willing to climb will pay a lot of money, so why not try and use them to get some more for charity? Ok, some how exploitative, but it's for the people who pay to decide.
Mesh 3arfa, honestly I thought you were a bit harsh.
Also, your annoyance with the whole situation and writing a blog post about it provided them with more PR :) just saying, after all there is no such thing as bad publicity.
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