April 11, 2009
Thursday of the Global Engagement Summit began with a 3-block walk from my homestay to breakfast at the Norris Center, Student Union at Northwestern University. Each delegate attended four 40-minute sessions as part of the “Core Curriculum.” I began by learning about Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) from Dr. Paul Arntson. The ABCD approach directly counters the current commonality of needs- or deficiencies-based development, wherein people or organizations come into a community and identify its needs, then try to fix them. Instead, ABCD involves mapping a community’s assets, combining these with your organization’s assets, and then putting these together for community development. Interesting to me, the capacity assessment we began with included identifying and sharing our gifts of the head, heart, and hands, which happen to be the three focus areas that we use to organize the Lay Marianist community I am a part of.
My next workshop was on Impact Assessment and Metrics, run by Allison Johnson of Mission Measurement, a Chicago-based organization that helps nonprofits to measure how effectively they achieve their missions. I am excited to further explore this topic, as mission measurement is important for our fundraising, strategy, and communications. She especially emphasized the importance of tracking our outcomes versus our activities.
The third workshop was a grant writing primer by Noah Jenkins, a freelance consultant, which provided us with information about basic sources for grants, pieces of a typical grant application, and some good tips. Finally, I attended a workshop by Molly Day of CampusCatalyst about Mission and Vision Development. While Salud del Sol has hashed out our mission and vision statements multiple times, it is still always good to take another look at them and ensure that these statements correctly portray our goals.
Over lunch, we each had a 10-minute consultation about what Outcomes we should apply for. GES provides many Outcomes for its delegates, that range from consulting to fundraising to metrics, so this was our first chance to learn what Outcomes to apply for. After lunch, I attended a workshop, also by Dr. Paul Arnston, about Community Consulting. We first explored the difference between community expectations and institutional expectations. He spoke of consensual interdependence as an important part of the ABCD model. We discussed communication, and how all communication has to end with feedback in order to be effective. The most interesting topic we discussed was the importance of three feedback loops between three “players” in community communication: the community’s values and beliefs, the problems of the community’s citizens, and the professional’s treatment plans. If there is not two-way feedback between each of these three players, communication will be ineffective. This is especially pertinent to our project in that we should further explore the values and beliefs of our community partners, particularly the nurses and other health providers, to ensure the acceptance of the solar autoclave technology.
We ended the day with a small group discussion about our personal motivations for our projects, especially challenging ourselves with Ivan Illich’s article, “To Hell With Good Intentions,” in which he spoke against any and all mission or development work. The conversation was sooo fruitful, and I’m still working through the arguments that came up. We finally got to experience Open Shutter, an art exhibit by Northwestern students showing socially responsible art intended to raise awareness and cultural appreciation.
The day was so full of new knowledge and conversations… incredible!!! I’ll continue blogging over the next few weeks to delve deeper into the issues raised and relationships developed… all that will be so beneficial for Salud del Sol.
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