A few days ago a friend asked me "do you have a retirement plan?" That question made me think hard....it's true many organisers like us who have already been involved in community organising for some time do not usually know how to answer this question!Yes, we have strong "commitment and passion", we ourselves had decided to be an organiser and nobody had forced us! BUT we still find ourselves keep having to worry about the "day to day" living, especially those of us who have families... "What about money for the house rental? Paying telephone bills & putting food on the table? Children's school fees, books, and many other needs to keep us alive?"
Please share your thoughts, stories, experiences, and feelings! Come on and blog freely on this subject!
4 comments:
I this is very important aspect related to CO, specially CO the SEAPCP way. Because, as staffers doing the projects we earn something to support our household expenditure. But if we are doing it on our own or we volunteer; the problem of sustaining our homes always carries with us. But we have to be creative on that part as well, like freelancing with our services could help us get income for our home, still we can continue with our CO efforts. Some good examples before me is that my friends John Salong (Vanuatu) and Adnan (Pakistan). Although john currently is working with an organization; but he is farmer, sort of landlord actually; he earns from his farms and they works with people on human rights issues. Similarly, Adnan is consultant in Pakistan, he renders his services to different NGOs for trainings, research and evaluations; and then supports his advocacy work; like he has been very active in movement for independence of judiciary. Yes, in SEAPCP too, we have example of Jo Hann having almost same practice, as I know. I think for people passionate about bringing change, there is no such thing like retirement; because their vision is change and till they don't see that change they struggle till last breadth.
Dear Jo Hann and Hassan:
I have following ideas:
1. Identify like minded donors who are working at least 5-7 countires of our alumni members
2. Negotiate with the donors to take up the CO training and then operationalization process for their partner at experimental level.
3. Here our core team can take care of the training process whereas local alumni can take up the post training follow up.
4. Whatever the consultancy income is getting generated we can donate that to our SEAPCP corpus and our country level alumni will be incharge of that corpus. This can infuse ownership and responsibility.
5. We can initiate a competition among all the country level alumni on who can mobilise maximum corpus.
6. We need to facilitate our country level Alumni to think of larger projects cutting accross various sectors- my only concern is that we should not lose the principle, flavour and ethic of our CO work.
regards Paul
dear paul and hassan! thanks for the comments..paul you have an interesting idea, excellent..we can study more on this and hopeflly we can explore this together in the advance co course!! yes we will all gather again! hopefully by mid of this year in malaysia! the use of folk media like songs was also very creative and powerful! thanks! Jo Hann
Hi Guys:
Yesterday I was working in field with my team members and found that our agriculture progrmame could have been made more innovative which would have saved time and gave better output. This learning came from self assessment.
Likewise as SEAPCP we can give support to various donor agencies to be innovative in their existing projects where time and budget saving is guaranteed. And we can charge on ESCO (energy saving company) model. This can be a new activity along with CO training.
I am confident we can do it very well and the donors will be very happy to share some % of their project cost if we can save them good money. Here added advantage is that gradually we can also push our agenda in donors' programme.
Regards
Paul
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