#i wish all studios a very MEET UNION DEMANDS

[bepisdrink]

[holisticsoulhealer]

Be Gentle - A Spiritual Story

I wish to share a spiritual story that continues to gently touch my heart. I may have told this story before, only this time I wish to express it from a different angle. It’s especially poignant at this time, and I’ll explain why, toward the end of the story………………

Many years ago, I was working from a small studio in a beach city in Southern California. The owner of the beach house, let me sleep in and work from her sweet little studio, under the main house for a few years on and off. She would plan a very busy schedule, with family, friends and people she knew from the grief group she worked with. I had the great good fortune to meet one of her special peeps, who had recently lost her young 9 year old to leukemia.

I worked with her first and we were having such great, accurate success, bringing her into communication with that precious little girl. She then sent a very nervous, slightly skeptical husband and father to me. The moment he stepped into my space, he looked like he wanted to run a mile, in the opposite direction, from wherever I was. He wasn’t running from me, as it wasn’t personal, and instead he was running away from his own emotional responses. He had lost his sweet little girl.

I closed my eyes, and invited him to do the same. This inspired him to relax and I hoped it would also allow him to open his energy field, to experience some of whatever information was due to flow through me. I was in a car, singing “Hotel California” and other Eagles hit songs. Him and his daughter were riding together, singing out loud, smiling and laughing. In my vision they both knew all the words, and the feeling in the car was fun and quite adorable. In that car, in that moment, nobody was ill or dying. The atmosphere was pure fun.

I shared the clothes she was wearing, a favorite t-shirt and shorts, and the sense that they were off to enjoy a day out. When I opened my eyes and looked at him, he was sitting with a sweet smile, and tears pouring silently down his face.

I invited him to gently return from that vision, and stay open to sharing anything he needed to. He opened his eyes and I could feel his heart was busted wide open, as he nodded and agreed that the vision we had both just sat in, was a couple of sweet, short road trips he had enjoyed with her. He hadn’t really allowed himself to feel her loss too much, because he wanted to stay strong for the son they still had, and the demands of television camera work, was always pressing in on his time and emotions.

I let him know that what we had just shared as a personal and private experience between him, myself and the whole Universe, and of course his darling daughter, who was leading the way, in bringing him to her spiritually. He felt relieved, more faith filled and glad he’d not allowed the skeptical side of him to prevent him from experiencing the union he now felt with his little girl. It was a gentle reminder that we aren’t these bodies and we aren’t only human at all. I just heard that this daddy passed from this World this summer. I am sorry and yet gently excited that they are actually together again, probably singing at the top of their lungs to some of the classics.

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Love & Blessings,

Ruth

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[so-i-did-this-thing]

hi i just ran across your blog! im also an oboist, hoping to make it professionally one day. im in college right now, do you have any tips or like how did you become a professional oboist?

Hi there! I have been a freelancer all my career, so I don't play the oboe full time. This is actually incredibly common - lots of us supplement our income with teaching or a secondary career. Some people are able to make that career related to music, but tons of us are lawyers, sales clerks, pharmacists, etc. I myself was a designer, then a programmer, and now I work in government.

I have these tips for oboe performance majors:

1) Talk honestly with your career advisor. There are a limited number of orchestras in the world and spots open rarely, yet colleges churn out new performance majors yearly. Where does everyone go? See what you need to learn to be a viable teacher, recording and/or contract musician (lots of touring productions hire locally), etc.

2) Join the local music union. Most gigs will come from word-of-mouth, so start playing with and meeting people. The union is also your source for health insurance.

3) Gain a reputation for being easy to work with and punctual. Both of these traits are more valuable than sheer skill and will get you hired over better players who are arrogant or flighty. (Of course you need to be able to play the part in front of you, no excuses.)

Be a good sight-reader and know the standards. It was a culture shock learning how few rehearsals you do IRL for a concert vs college. Hell, I once toured for 2 weeks with an opera company, no one else spoke English, and we played a different opera every day. You gotta learn to roll with barely any rehearsals.

Be a good leader and if principle, an advocate for the woodwind section. Don't be afraid of conductors, they are just another sclhub in the pit/on stage with you, so learn how to talk to them.

Since oboes are usually first in, last out, be helpful during setup and breakdown. People notice if you are kind.

4) Diversify musically. Most musical theatre pits only want woodwind generalists, so learn the other instruments. They will take a generalist over a specialist any day, it doesn't matter if you are a better oboist.

Also learn interesting instruments that make you useful in recording - soundtracks need things like recorders, penny whistles, etc.

5) Diversify professionally. COVID has taught us how precarious a performance career really is. You need to know how to do other stuff or be good working in retail/food service.

6) Do not turn your nose down at pops, wedding, theme park or church gigs. These pay well. Churches have consistently been my most reliable source of income - I was a church musician for many years and that consistent $250 a weekend for 5 hrs of easy work kept me fed.

7) Be prepared to make tough decisions on what you are worth. I refuse to play for free; I will not give in to sob stories from community orchestras. I refuse to play for orchestras who take 6 months to pay people. "Exposure" is bullshit.

Alas, sometimes you have to coddle bad people in positions of power -- this is where having a backup job helps.

Refusing shitty gigs will get easier as you gain a rep among good people. And it's even easier if you have a backup job -- I have a reputation as That Guy who will corner the contractor (often the conductor) and demand the orchestra get paid on time, because I'm not worried financially about getting fired. I have threatened to sue orchestras to get my people paid. If you are union, stick with your union pals on overtime rules. No bullshit "sound checks" that turn into unpaid rehearsals.

8) It is possible to make it without owning an English Horn, but if you have the means, get one -- it really helps if you want to play more, but you may not necessarily earn more money because of the additional costs.

9) Make friends with the caterers at the gig. Get good at cramming Green Room / backstage food into your pockets or gig bag. Return to the catering table before they dump the food. This is how you will eat some nights.

10) Being a performing musician is... remarkably blue-collar in a way. Be prepared for that kind of lifestyle. You will be hustling your entire life, even if you land an orchestra appointment.

Honestly, though, out of the entire list, #1 is critical for you right here and now. The math just doesn't add up for all of us to be symphonic musicians, so you need to figure out what a performance career looks like to you. Maybe you work at Disney in the parks. Maybe you record video game music from your home studio. But the world has changed and music school (albeit like 25 years ago) did not prepare me for anything other than auditioning for orchestras and grad school. I'm still pissed about it.

That said, even though I don't play full time, I have played some very meaty repertoire. I've played principle with major orchestras (I'm a damned good sub), I've toured, and have done everything on my bucket list except for Tchaik 4 and the Bartok (I have played 2nd here, tho, so good enough).

Also, I don't regret music school - it made me a better, more confident person. I just wish I knew going in what the job market REALLY was like.

I wish you the best!

[art-arch-urb]

Refusal after Refusal

What if we acknowledged that we had fallen out of love with architecture and couldn’t remember why we loved it in the first place? That we had given up on building long ago because we had no interest in collaborating with developers, in designing money-laundering schemes or parking garages for foreign capital? And what if we told you that now we even found architectural discourse repulsive? That we had seen the logos for the oil companies emblazoned at the bottom of the biennial posters and couldn’t look away?That we had read the disinterest on the faces of the public and could relate? That we had watched academics lecture about labor practices while exploiting their assistants and overworking their students? That we had tried to warn each other about abusers and assaulters and were reprimanded for it by our heroes? What if we confessed that all this made us depressed, that we could barely summon the energy to get out of bed, let alone to work? What if we told you that we were beginning to think work itself was the problem?

2. The summer was hot. The hottest on record in Los Angeles and Montreal, Glasgow and Tbilisi, Qurayyat and Belfast—though records are easily broken these days. Everything appeared out of focus. The edges of our thoughts were blurred. According to studies, heat makes you lazy and unhappy. But sometimes your unhappiness supersedes your laziness, and sometimes your laziness indicates something about your unhappiness. We decided to try learning from our laziness.

3. It was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, the Franco-Cuban radical journalist and activist Paul Lafargue who first articulated a “right to be lazy.” He equated work, and its valorization, with “pain, misery and corruption.”He argued for its refusal. “A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway,” Lafargue writes. “This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.”

4. But, as Marcel Duchamp reminds us, “it really isn’t easy to be truly lazy and do nothing.”

5. “Sleep is a sin,” say the architects. Equipped with coffee or speed, they avoid it at all costs—sacrificing the body for the sake of the project, for the eternally recurrent deadline. When finally the suprachiasmatic nuclei demand submission to the ticking of the circadian clock, they curl up beneath their desks. They wear all black to minimize time spent worrying over clothes. They marry other architects for the sake of having a synchronized schedule. According to a recent study, archi­tecture students sleep less than any others, averaging 5.28 hours per night. More often than not, this is a performative demonstration of their dedication to their studies rather than a necessity, a time-honored ritual of masochistic devotion. In his 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary interrogates the neoliberal dictum that “sleeping is for losers.” Where time is money, sleeping is “one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.” Architects embody this attitude, imagining the stakes of the project—a luxury condominium, an arts center—as life or death. In fact, considering that sleep deprivation has been linked to premature death, it is their own lives that are put on the line.

6. Yesterday I woke up around 8:30 a.m. and took 450 milligrams of bupropion, 50 milligrams of Lamictal, 5 milligrams of aripiprazole, and 200 milligrams of modafinil, all swallowed in one gulp of coffee. (The modafinil—a medication used to treat shift work sleep disorder, among other things—is new, added by my psychiatrist last month when I complained I was having trouble working, or doing much of anything.) A few hours later, I took 20 milligrams of Adderall. Only then was I able to write this paragraph.

7. Beginning with their schooling, architects are routinely required to invest more money than they will ever receive in compensation and workplace protections. While the typical college student in the United States accrues an average of $29,420 in student debt, the architecture student is saddled with an average of $40,000.After graduation, the architectural employee can expect to work 70 hours a week for approximately $70,000 per year—or $15 an hour. And yet, as Bjarke Ingels has stated about the profession’s long working hours, “That’s the price you pay but the reward you get is that you do something incredibly meaningful if you actually love what you’re doing and you’re doing meaningful work."

8. In other words, architecture is a form of labor that masquerades as a labor of love. It contains within it the promise of fulfillment, of happiness. In her book The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed interrogates the normative function of happiness, how it serves as a means of orienting behavior and, in the process, is often deployed as a justification for oppression. That is, what it means to be happy is circumscribed culturally. “In wishing for happiness we wish to be associated with happiness, which means to be associated with its associations,” Ahmed writes. Work should make us happy and fulfilled—even more so when it’s “creative,” an assumption imbued with classist undertones. This draws young people toward architecture school; it makes the burden of debt, harsh working conditions, and low wages appear as an acceptable “price to pay.”

9. But, as the figure of the dissatisfied “CAD monkey” illustrates, the labor of architecture falls short of this promise. Conditioned to believe that fulfillment emerges from creative autonomy and expression, architects instead find themselves laboring over bathroom details or stair sections, and a sense of alienation emerges. It’s a feeling that parallels that of the industrial laborer described by Marx—more so than many architects would like to admit. In classic Marxist theory, workers are estranged from the fruits of their labor, which are taken away from them in the process of becoming rendered as commodities. Because it is understood as nonalienating work, to feel alienated in architecture becomes a sort of double-estrangement. Not only are you estranged from the labor, you are estranged from architecture itself.

10. While working as a studio manager at a New York architecture firm, my colleagues would often remark wistfully that they could rarely attend lectures or engage with discourse as I was able to do. Models, budgets, schematics, client meetings, site visits, overtime, and weekends at the studio had ravaged both their physical and spiritual capacities to participate in the field in a role beyond producing architecture with a capital A. Their passion had become their drudgery; their very own commitment to architectural work became the barrier between contributing to what they had imagined architecture could do and how it apparently must be.

11. I read somewhere that depression is the failure of your neurons to fire like they used to. There’s something ghostly to it: you have the memory of a feeling, of an association, but can’t conjure it anymore. Is there such a thing as a depression specific to architecture? How would it be characterized? I wrote a note on my phone: “The loss of belief in the possibility of designing a different world. Nostalgia for the future.”

12. To express dissatisfaction or alienation in architecture carries deep risks. For one, it could cost you your job. “If you aren’t happy, then leave. Others would kill to have your job.” It could also brand you as an outcast, as if marked by some internal failure or incapacity for feeling what everyone else does. And such a killjoy would ruin the mood of the office. That is, as Ahmed asserts, happiness is framed as a duty to others.18 Misery is contagious and therefore irresponsible. So, regardless of how overworked you are, how alienated you are from the products of your labor, how underpaid you are, how often the boss touches your ass, you must grin and bear it. There’s a reason why architects rarely organize to fight back against exploitative work conditions. Be happy, or else.13. According to Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, a mandate to appear happy, which they term the “performance/pleasure apparatus,” underwrites neoliberalism more broadly.19 Today, the individual must not only produce more but also enjoy more—and, pivotally, this surplus of pleasure must be performed. Pleasure serves as a signifier of the subject’s value within a socioeconomic system in which self-edification is substituted for the social and responsibility is privatized. The flip side of the burned-out professional is the determined young architect who spends their free time attending lectures or writing essays or designing their own projects. Such work is valorized as a signal of their commitment to the field and an indicator of their value as an intellectual practitioner. This fuels a culture in which the products of extra-professional labor are exhibited in journals or galleries, often without adequate compensation. We’re told we should feel honored to have such work recognized at all. In other words, today, nothing is work, and everything is work. Even our bodies and minds are objects of labor.14. I was working hard on an essay about work—about the disconnect between discourses on architectural labor and the broader economic context in which the discourses themselves are produced. I stumbled upon an interview with Antonio Negri in which he explains how, by 1965, the architecture school in Venice had become a center for political agitation and organizing. In early 1968, students from Venice and Padua joined forces with the workers at a nearby Porto Marghera factory, the largest petrochemical complex in Italy, where “two kilometers from the most beautiful city in the world hundreds of workers were dying of cancer, literally poisoned by their work.”20 Negri states that the union of students and workers “worked out quite smoothly because they had been in constant contact for a decade: the school of architecture was a gathering place for the working class.”2115. This struggle was a major event in the development of autonomia operaia, or autonomism, a political movement that defined postwar Italian politics and in which Negri played a central role. The solidarity between the academy and the factory was a significant aspect of autonomism, which reconceived of the position of the intellectual within leftist politics. Rather than develop theories upon which to base organizing, the intellectual should learn from work, from the workers and their lived experience. In this way, the autonomists transitioned from a demand for better working conditions to a critique of work itself, in which they understood labor as a totalizing process of subjectivization that sat­urated not only the factory but all of society. They thus displaced the centrality of the static figure of the worker and the working class with an understanding of social class as always in a state of becoming, transforming alongside conditions of work. Work itself—its valorization and the power this gave it over the experience of life—was the problem. “Refusal of work means quite simply: I don’t want to go to work because I prefer to sleep,” writes Franco “Bifo” Berardi. “But this laziness is the source of intelligence, of technology, of progress. Autonomy is the self-regulation of the social body in its independence and in its interaction with the disciplinary norm.”2216. But wait, haven’t we had this conversation before? Isn’t the struggle against work what we studied tirelessly to ace our papers? We worked our bodies and our minds through the night to prove we understood what the refusal of work was about, to prove our political awareness, to garner a critical edge, to be diligent students. But clearly this feverish ambition prevented us from recognizing ourselves as the products of its failure. Why regurgitate the past if not in order to understand how it landed us here, at 4:00 a.m., exhausted, verging on panic, and for what? 17. As Berardi elaborates, struggles for autonomy produced a new monster, laying the foundations for neoliberal economics and governance.23 When workers demanded freedom from regulation, capital did the same. The monotony, rigidity, and harsh conditions of the industrial factory gave way to flexible hours and jobs (in the Global North), but also deregulation, precarity, and the withdrawal of social protections. This shift was ideological and cultural, as well as economic.18. “Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation,” argues Kathi Weeks. “That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract.” Under the contemporary neoliberal regime, work has come to be regarded as “a basic obligation of citizenship.”24Within the realms of politics, the media, and even sociology, the persistent messaging of its importance has generated a singular world-building experience where working remains the only means of belonging. “These repeated references to diligent work,” as David Frayne remarks, “function to construct a rigid dichotomy in the public imagination.”25 Those who work acquire social citizenship, while those who do not are leeches. Within this dichotomy, work becomes a choice: there exist only those who choose to be productive and those who choose to do nothing. “Which are you? The sleeper or the employee, the shirker or the worker?”2619. What if we told you we don’t refuse much of anything? What if we told you that we ate up praise like a spoonful of honey? What if we said that the validation always evaporates too quickly? Like a sugar-addled rush, we work on the premise that the next project will leave us satiated. We make promises to stop, to slow down, to regroup, to prevent the inevitable burnout, which leaves us languid and shrouded in shame. We wonder what all the research amounts to, what the interviews and panels in galleries and lecture halls even do or mean. 20. If the autonomist refusal of work helped produce a society in which there is nothing but work, what strategies are left for us? What would it mean to refuse after refusal? To stake out a position of alterity to the contemporary work ethic in order to find the room to question where we’re going, what’s driving us, and to what end?21. To work is to be normal. To work is to be socially acceptable. In order to comprehend the commitment to the drudgery and exploitation of working life, Lauren Berlant argues that normativity must be understood as “aspirational and as an evolving and incoherent cluster of hegemonic promises about the present and future experience of social belonging.”27 To rally for any kind of alternative beyond the moral imperative to work would be to cast oneself almost entirely outside the realm of affiliation, and even personhood.22. Architecture, today at least, is like work, an end in itself. It is autotelic—or, more precisely, a constituent element within the autotelic metabolism of contemporary capitalism. The need for shelter is hardly the driving motivation behind the majority of new builds. Rather, demolition and construction serve as the two poles of a coiling system of endless production for the sake of production. Financial speculation, warfare, and environmental desecration belong to its arsenal. All together, this system constitutes a global force responsible for the lion’s share of global carbon emissions. It results in the mass displacement of the poor and marginalized. In short, shelter is not the ends of architecture—it is its collateral damage. It is a question not of architecture or revolution but, rather, of architecture or survival.23. “If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design,” said Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio. “[I]f architecture is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities—until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then design must disappear. We can live without architecture.”2824. Let’s back up a bit. What produces this all-consuming, obsessive indifference to architecture? On the one hand, the profession and the academy are sites of violence, ridden with sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, ableism. But, perhaps even more than that, we have yet to find a work of architecture that is capable of changing the status quo. On the other hand, we’re obsessed with the belief that it could, since, at the end of the day, all architecture changes the status quo—converting land into capital, emitting carbon dioxide, displacing people. In other words, we acknowledge architecture as immensely powerful but find ourselves—and all architects or architectural thinkers—powerless. Architecture, it seems, has been swallowed up by external forces and put in the service of the smooth functioning of the city and of flows of capital. We can’t imagine an architecture capable of disrupting this. Formalism is a dead end—novel forms are just a means to produce new terrains for the expenditure of surplus capital. We have little control over program since we’re beholden to patronage. Meanwhile, criticism has no bite; speculation, no value; theorization, no impact. Academia and institutions defang all thought. 25. We believe that the problem of work is at the center of all this. The need to work—a shared condition for all but the very wealthy—means we can’t really turn down a client or an opportunity to exhibit or an adjunct teaching position. Refusal, done alone, is a privilege few can afford. But, alongside that, the culture of work has seeped into our souls. Affirmation produces dopamine. Success signals security (even if, in actuality, it doesn’t offer it). Everything we do is for the sake of capital, whether social or material. We look for opportunities to tear each other down so that we can rise up an imaginary rung on an imaginary ladder instead. We are cowards, unwilling to bite the hand that feeds us strychnine-laced food. We can’t pause to think. We’ve lost all hope in the future.26. When commissioned to write this essay, we were asked to provide “concrete alternatives” to the present—but how could we? All we can speculate on is having the time to do so. All we can imagine is a horizon, hazy and distant, in which we discover, or remember, how to refuse—together.

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/46/refusal-after-refusal?fbclid=IwAR3OA3zuZGwx0-VuEEM2QWZlP44uF2N6MFKoD8M2fUudNZnkNjnj4brp2nk

[abujaihs-blog]

Cooperatives Still the Sure Way for Kenyans to Own Homes

COOPERATIVE MODEL AFFORDED US A HOME In 2012, after working for some time in Mombasa, when Grace Wairimu and her husband were about to move out to Nairobi, like most people, their biggest worry was where they would settle down. “We wanted a place where we would not be paying rent every month, a place that was adequate for both of,” she says, adding that by a stroke of luck when poring through the pages of the Daily Nation, she came across a project that she felt was within their means. “When I read about the project in the newspaper I instantly fell in love with it. So we decided to research more about it,” she says. “The project was studio apartments by Urithi Housing Cooperative Society dubbed ‘Own A Room’.”

After lengthy deliberations, the couple was convinced they could afford a unit. So the following morning they set out for Nairobi, ready to pay the Sh550,000 asking price for a unit of the studio apartment block. “Unfortunately for us, when we got to Nairobi, we were told that all the units had been sold out off-plan. It took a lot of efforts to find someone willing to dispose of their house and when we got one, we paid in cash,” says Ms Wairimu. The 26-year-old business management diploma graduate, who is married to a businessman, says that they moved into the house in 2016, happy to say goodbye to landlords and their pesky agents. Fast-forward to 2019, and despite the studio apartment having served the couple well, Ms Wairimu says that with the addition of an extra member into the family two years ago, they have outgrown the space and are shopping for a bigger house. “Our dream is moving into a gated community set-up. It is more secure and our children will have an opportunity to interact and play with other kids,” she says. For her, the cooperative model of housing remains the surest way towards home ownership. She says, “I am looking forward to enrolling for the next project with Urithi so that we can move to the next level.” She says that a two-bedroom house that costs not more than Sh3 million and given a reasonable payment period would be within their range, and relatively affordable. Asiya Mohammed, a 55-year-old kiosk vender from Kibra, poses for a photo with her sister's children outside her house in Kamulu Phase 4, off Kangundo Road. PHOTO | DELFHIN MUGO OUR CHAMA TURNED COOPERATIVE PULLED US OUT OF THE SLUM Asiya Mohammed is a 55-year-old woman from Kibra. The mother of three who also takes care of her late sister’s four children sells vegetables for upkeep. Hers is a story of ultimate determination and zeal to succeed despite the odds. In 2011, Ms Mohammed and her friends formed a chama where members could borrow money to boost their small businesses. A few months down the line, they came up with a bigger idea: to transform their outfit into a housing cooperative society that would see them out of the slum. In March 2011 when Razak Housing Cooperative Society (known simply as Razak) was born and registered. The society also joined the National Housing Cooperative Union (Nachu), the umbrella body for housing cooperatives that provides low-cost housing to low income earners through training, technical, and financial support. Today, several members of Razak including Ms Mohammed are the proud owners of one-bedroom houses in various areas of Nairobi region, including in Ruai, off Kangundo Road, on the outskirts of Nairobi. Ms Mohammed told DN2 that it has not been an easy journey. “It is a miracle that I managed to do this. I don’t make much from my small business. Sometimes we live from hand to mouth but in a good month I can put aside Sh5000, which is the money that has brought me this far,” she says. Despite starting off the journey with her friends in 2011, she could not share in their joy in 2013 when they received keys because she had not reached Nachu’s set target of Sh200,000. She never gave up though, and in 2015 her time came, when she got the key to her own house. “I still had monthly instalments to make in order to offset the Sh525,000 loan from Nachu and also complete construction which has been happening through a new house incremental model,” she says. Under this, one builds a section of the house say, just a room with some facilities like a toilet then keeps building at their own speed until the house meets the standards of a three-bedroom house, as designed by architect. Ms Mohammed’s three-bedroom house is in Kamulu Phase 4, off Kangundo Road. Her sister lives there together with the children who have already been enrolled in schools around the area, while she remained in Kibra to run her business. Since she made her first deposit, it has been nine years and she is happy she is almost at the finishing line in terms of clearing the money she owes Nachu. Her story and that of her friends is proof that with systems in place and willpower, it is possible to turn around the fate of slum dwellers and make them decent homeowners. OWNING A HOME WAS A DREAM COME TRUE At Juja Farm, in the outskirts of Juja town, we meet Margaret Ngugi watering her grass lawn outside her three-bedroom house. She looks happy to welcome us into her home. “This is a dream come true for me. It is one of those goals you have at the back of your mind that one day you want to live in your own house,” says the mother of two. Asked how she feels now that she is a homeowner, Margaret says: “It feels good. There is a comfort that you feel when you are in your house. Even before you move in, because we bought the houses off-plan, you feel content that after you finish paying for your house, you get to call it your own. There is a good environment to raise your children and for them to enjoy their childhood. These thoughts occupy your mind and when they become a reality, you can only be grateful to God” The Thika-based businesswoman said she learnt about the cooperative from a friend. “I joined the cooperative in 2014 and in 2015 this project was introduced. My husband and I jumped at that opportunity because that time the house was going at Sh3.6 million. We decided to buy because we were given a lot of time to pay, at our own pace. Right now if you want to buy a house here, it goes for close to Sh6 million.” Margaret says it took them three years to complete paying for their house. “The thing that endeared us into the project is the flexible payment process where we could deposit any amount we had,” she says. According to Mr Samuel Maina, Urithi chairman, for one to join the cooperative, they would need to pay a registration fee of Sh2,000, which gets them a membership number. The next step is to purchase a minimum of 2 shares, each share is Sh7, 000. One will get a share certificate in 7 days. The last step is to identify a project they would wish to invest in and start the purchase journey. Inside this Juja Plains View gated community, where Margaret’s bungalow is located, there are 78 houses. DN2 could spot children playing football, riding bicycle and others running up and down the cabro tiled streets. “Here, you enjoy the security and the neighbourhood in that you have people to interact with and your children have others to play with,” says Margaret, of the advantages of living in a gated community. For the family, Margaret says they have achieved a great milestone. WHY COOPERATIVES ARE SURE WAY FOR KENYANS TO OWN HOMES Margaret Ngugi’s and Asiya Mohammed’s position in life is where the family of Grace Wairimu would want to be in the next few years, that of owning a three-bedroom house. Ms Wairimu is however at a vantage point in that she has already taken some initial steps and already owns a one-bedroom house, which would earn her Sh7000 in rent when she decides to move to the next level. A majority of Kenyans lag behind though, and despite the government’s effort to propel them forward, experts argue that well managed cooperatives still remain a sure path to home ownership for most. According to Mr Samuel Wachira, a consultant with a performance management firm based in Nairobi, owning a home the cooperative way works very well if you are part of a cooperative or a group that is willing to join one. "For cooperatives, you may not realise full benefits if you join alone because of the guarantee aspect. For one to realise the full benefits of a cooperative, they would need to join as a group so that they can guarantee each other’s liabilities," he says. "Most of these projects are actually quite good, but they are usually long term and you might have to face quite a number of compromises," Mr Wachira adds. How cooperatives pool resources "I would say that (the cooperative model) is more effective than taxing everyone a portion of their salaries. For the tax to work, my thoughts are, government itself should not be going into the business of building houses. That housing levy should be put into a mortgaging company and give Kenyans mortgages at very friendly rates." Data from Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) indicates that the country’s cooperative societies cumulatively have 10.8 million members as at 2016. This vast membership, Mr Samuel Maina, the chairman of Urithi Housing Cooperative Society says creates a big proportion of the demand side of housing. Added to that, co-operatives’ wide geographical spread means if deliberate attempts to make cooperatives members homeowners were made, the country would solve the housing crisis sooner, Mr Maina says. Unlike individual developments where personal tastes and preferences are likely to influence the development, Mr Maina says, most cooperatives have membership with a common bond and drawn from the same profession or social economic status, hence their income levels are likely to influence the kind and value of the houses to be constructed.

"Cooperatives mobilise resources into a common pool, thereby taking advantage of economies of scale. They are able to utilise the money from deposits raised by members without borrowing from financial institutions thereby mitigating on the costs of financing," says Mr Maina. Other factors that place cooperatives at a vantage point when it comes to provision of affordable housing include flexible payment terms, friendlier and affordable loaning policies. According to Mr Francis Kamande, Nachu chairman, out of the three models Kenyan use to access housing in urban areas — mortgage loans, incremental housing and through housing and investment cooperatives, mortgage loans has failed terribly. "The number of Kenyans who accessed housing through mortgage from all commercial banks in 2017 were less 2300. Total number of Kenyans currently servicing mortgage loans from commercial banks are less than 27,000 and the total mortgage debt as a percentage of the country’s GDP is 3.15 per cent. This is a drop in the ocean when compared with South Africa at 30 per cent," he decries, adding that this calls for urgent policy and legal framework to mitigate the current challenges in mortgage sector. Until that happens, he says, the incremental housing model as seen in the case of Ms Mohammed and the cooperatives models as demonstrated by Grace and Margaret remains the surest ways for Kenyans of modest means to snap up houses. Source: nation.co Read the full article

[readymade-journal-en]

Sharon Cheung / Yi Jie Communication Company Limited CEO Paint Crisis Into Opportunities

As you grow, you experience more of the world. All these new people you met and glamorous events you went to are silently dragging you into this boundless social network, the swirl of society and the midst of the crowd. Gradually, solitude and self are obliviated.

Sharon Cheung, the former anchor at i-Cable News, spent 11 years of her life running around newsrooms. In 2000, she reported at a Beijing press conference and triggered the former Communist Party head Jiang Zemin, who hit back with the well-known comment of "too simple, sometimes naïve". Jiang's temper did not just fail to deter Cheung from repeating her question, instead, it had her risen to fame in no time. Despite the heydays in journalism, Cheung chose to leave the industry to further study at Oxford University. After that, she joined Media Asia Group for another eight years, before founding her own communication company. Today, she is also a book author, a brand spokesperson, and a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Although she has planted a strong and fearless image in our minds, she had her moments of darkness and negativity in life. Trying to walk out of depression, she picked up the paint brush after twenty years, and began to fill her canvas up with strokes of colours and emotions. In the end of last year, she gathered all her paintings together and decided to hold an exhibition to raise funds for a non-government organisation. Once again, there she was turning crisis into opportunities, and misfortune into success. 

Now, if emotions was a party crasher, would those who lost themselves in the midst of the crowd still remember their way out?

You were a journalist , an entrepreneur, an author, a spokesperson, an artist, and a lecturer, which experienced brought you the most benefits? Every industry brought me a lot of benefits. I worked in journalism for 11 year. I met a lot of people and cultivated a lot of good qualities, such as not to be afraid of unfamiliar people and things. Every day, I need to report different things, meet different people, go to different places. If one is not courageous enough, you cannot do well in journalism. Under ten years of intensive training, I become fearless, and this is in fact a great advantage.  Besides, journalism requires instant judgement, especially when I work in politics news around the clock. For example, when official Jiang Zemin visits, he only shows up once, and you only have that moment to catch him. You have no time to struggle but think fast. I am a Virgo and Virgos are problematic. We think a lot and analyse too much. It has been with me since I was small, but journalism does not allow that. It improves a lot of my personality weaknesses.

Cheung worked at i-Cable TV News as a journalist. Source: CUHK

Then I started working for an entertainment company. I worked there for eight years. It opened up another door for me. In the past, my whole world is about politics news. All my friends are from that circle. Entertainment is another world, a very glamorous world. Their values, the way they dress and the way they think are completely different. There are not many people who have the chance to soak in such different worlds for so long, one for 11 year and another for 8 years. Those places have trained me up. I met a lot of people and understand different people's values and benefits relationship. After that, I wanted to test myself, and so I found my own company. 

Cheung worked in the Journalism industry for 11 years. Source: CUHK

You were so  successful in journalism when you chose to left for Oxford to study. Why did you make that decision? At that time, there were indeed quite a number of people who know about me, my development at the TV channel was going smooth and they gave me a lot of resources. But the problem is I had been working for 11 years, and journalism is such a fast-paced job that I have been giving all the time. As time goes by, I felt like I gave too much and took too little. All the things I had learnt were no longer sufficient to deal with my daily duties. In fact, this is very normal. Once you have worked in the same job for so long and every day is so demanding, you will realise how you do not even have the space to think. It is time to stop and absorb, think about the future, consolidate the learning, and think about how they could help you in the future. Eleven years have taught me a lot, not the traditional way to learn but learnings from everyday life and people I met. That was why I decided to spend a year to study, as an interval to stop for a while.

Cheung studied at Oxford University after leaving journalism. Source: Oxford China Office

What are some other areas you wish to develop in the future?

I quite like paintings. I did think of spending more time on painting. Last year, I did an art exhibition and it was more successful than I expected. We raised funds for Food Angel and donated 250 thousand dollars. They are happy and I am happy. 

As I was painting I  came up with new ideas. I want to start on a new series of a new theme. I have high expectation in this series, it should be able to make some noise.

I also thought of having my own studio. I have a lot of artist friends who like painting too. With a studio, I would have my own place to art-jam and teach children to paint. But this is just an idea, I have not come up with a detailed plan yet.  

Cheung held charity art exhibition Woman in the Nude World in 2016.

When did you start painting?

I started since I was small, but not a lot of people know about this. I had been painting for seven or eight years but stopped after going to college, as there are much more exciting things to do, such as student union and associations. It was around twenty years later, I passed by here (Swiss Studio) after I left Media Asia Film, and I thought of how long I have put this hobby down. It has been hidden for 20 years in my mind that I almost forgot that I could paint.  Since then, I picked up painting again until now.

Cheung's work at her art exhibition.

What are art, painting and creativity to you?

In my opinion, painting is a very personal thing. Colours cannot lie. When you see the colours of a painting, you know how the person feels or what the person thinks. When you are down, the colours are dark. Look at this colourful painting, it actually looked like this before: a woman walking towards the water and snow mountains, very dark, almost scary. I painted this in the beginning of last year when I was in a really bad mood. I could not use any bright colours, I almost felt uncomfortable seeing them. But the best thing about paintings is that you can change them afterwards. Recently, I decided to change it completely, to something colourful and upbeat. Painting really allows me to let my emotions out.

Cheung's art exhibition at the Harbour City.

Besides, I think art may not directly contribute to a society's GDP, but it moves hearts and sooths emotions. Art can add taste to a society. Similarly, taste may not have very visible contribution to economic growth. But when a society with taste is compared to a shallow society, the difference is huge.

Cheung's painting during her dark days.

How does painting help you let go of your negative emotions?

Painting is a very peaceful activity, as in I do not have to talk to people. Sometimes, I paint continuously for eight hours. Painting could be very tiring, especially to large ones. My eyes get tired since you get very focus. This is a good form of therapy, as well as a sustenance, especially for Virgos who think and calculate too much. I kept calculating things that I almost felt myself going crazy, but I could not control it. All I could do was keep painting, until I get exhausted and fall asleep.

Cheung's art exhibition raised HKD250,000 for Food Angel.

Cheung's sharing on her charity exhibition Woman in the Nude World.

Do those dark and negative paintings undermine your strong and fearless image?

I think if someone tells you that they are the superman, it is not true. Even the president could feel down and probably hide crying at the corner. People nowadays are smart, they no longer believe that superman will always be a superman. Human is always in 360 degrees, has strengths but also weaknesses. I don't think this will make me look fragile. I admit that the emotions was dark, but when I was in the darkest days in my life, I was strong. I held an art exhibition to help those in needs instead of taking drugs and drowning myself. Helping myself and the others, what in the world could be better than that? At least  I answered to myself by spending time on something meaningful.

Cheung is the spokesperson of a beauty brand.

Cheung writes about personal branding in her book Brand U.

As a professional personal brand builder, how do you see the KOL (Key Opinion Leaders) nowadays?

I think KOL is a new profession formed under the Internet era. The emergence of social media means that youngsters can choose what they like to see and follow who they want to follow. The era needs KOL, because people needs somebody to take the lead and give them viewpoints to follow. When I am teaching in Chinese University of Hong Kong, I teach them how to maintain a Facebook fan page. You do not always post your pretty pictures, as people will get tired of it, but your special content. What kind of content do you sell to your followers? This is a very healthy habit, as everyone must have something they like or some strengths. It could be painting, politics, fashion or food. When you share this knowledge, there are people who like and follow you. This makes you think about your personal brand and your strength. Nowadays, there are different social media, free of charge and barriers, why not do it? This is also part of the self-reflection process, not bad.

Cheung was involved in John Tsang's Chief Executive Election Campaign.

How can traditional media be sustained?

I believe in "content is the king". The content is always expensive, but the distribution channel needs to be changed. Traditional media is like when you turn on the television, you passively take what is fed. Newspaper is spoon-feeding as well. However, since social media and the Internet are so popular today, everyone actively takes what they like. For instance, the mode of myTV SUPER is to satisfy today's habit of reading things: read whatever you like, whenever you like. The key is convenience. Besides, content is also changing. In the past, we watched soaps, but people nowadays like reality shows. People generally have more reactions for something related to current issues, especially the atmosphere in recent years has got us care and resonance more. So content became different, distribution channel became different.

Sharon Cheung Facebook Page

Video Interview by Michelle Wong

Text by Michelle Wong