As some of you may know when I came here it was under the wonderful and vague statement or work that mandated me to do “Capacity Enhancement Workshops.” Being a fan of vague and loving to figure out things like, how best do I determine what capacities I should be enhancing and how best can these workshops serve the community, this challenge was something I was looking forward too, so trying to prepare I bought a bunch of books on development, downloaded even more stuff on things like asset mapping, capacity inventories, asset based community development, etc… and began reading. This of course was only nominally helpful. Less helpful were the files on the organizations whose capacity I was planning on enhancing in the FSD Kakamega Office. So began my work here. What I have spent my time doing so far is interviewing all of the host organizations, their interns who were here with FSD, and gathering as much information on them (i.e. project work past and present, areas they would like to see improved, discussing where there are problems within their projects, sousing out common themes between organizations). What became apparent really quickly was that (1) the partners knew very little about each other let alone the plethora of other development organizations doing work in the Kakamega area, (2) that there was a ton of overlap in their work, and (3) that they had no means to really solve either of these problems as there is not really Yellow Pages for Kakamega… this could be my entrepreneurial beginnings, creating a Nynex Yellow Pages for Africa [side note: does Nynex even exist anymore or was it bought out by AT&T like New England Telephone… I miss those commercials with the parrot that pecks out the “We’re the one for you New England, New England Telephone” jingle on the piano]. These factors lead to some consideration on how AT&T sucks and has a crap jingle, and more about how I could address these glaring problems… that of course led me to the big event. What pray-tell is the big event, it’s a Capacity Enhancement Workshop with all of our partners, even host families, that is really a giant networking event where I can get all of them, or at least enough of them together in one room and help them make connections with each other. More than that, it’s the crux of what I am interested in regarding development, how do organizations that should to meet each other as they are doing similar or reciprocal (dare I say symbiotic) projects find out about each other? This is not just the case in the developing world because there are no Yellow Pages for all the development organizations out there… I have looked (Wiser Earth is a good beginning though). So we had this big event where I created a baller PowerPoint (three times since I had done it on the previous computer, and then PP crashed and I lost half of it on this one… thanks Microsoft), Peter explained the FSD philosophy, history, and addressed some common misperceptions, Kirsten and Damaris went over the benefits and requirements of hosting an intern as host families and host organizations, we had some delicious lunch, and then the main show at the big event, me. I discussed the importance of networks to an organization as an asset, the details of which I will leave for another entry, and explained how to use the newly created FSD FAMILY DIRECTORY… I like to call these the Erin Pages. It lists each organization, contact information, their mission, and their current and potential projects, as well as each host family and their occupations… though this section desperately needs some work – the host families really weren’t my main interest here. Hopefully they will use this directory, they seemed very excited about it with one partner going so far as to say to the others it is on us to make this incredibly useful document more than just paper, we have been given a tool, it is up to us to use it. This made me happier than I can possibly explain… and redoing all my work multiple times due to issues worth it.
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