The tenor of activity on this trip is very different from prior trips. Whereas at first, it was all about getting my name out, finding potential folks to work with. Now I have a fairly full set of folks that I am working with doing coaching. This includes six businesses I am doing JOBS Project proof-of-concept consulting and three Theodora Project women that I have found work for and am coaching in the doing of their work. The implication of this has been a drop in the number of actual meetings I have had but an increase in the amount of work being done per meeting and in-between meetings.
This trip has also been dominated by two big projects that are required for us to raise money. One has been the second round of video work and the other is the conducting of our focus groups to complete the community assessment requirement for the Rotary Global Grant application. I took charge of the first project while my partner GG has been handling the second. These two have required a lot of time and money to arrange transportation and ensure that everyone is in the right place at the right time (not a given in a country that makes being on-time a rare occurrence).
That being said we accomplished the video shoot and got good takes in an environment much improved over last time. I have actually seen the first cut of the video and while it still needs a lot of work, it is worlds better than our last effort.
The first focus group for our six first Theodora participants took place yesterday. We had a celebratory dinner afterward and all the ladies seemed very upbeat and engaged. So hopefully the last two go as well.
A few more days and this edition of the adventure will be over.
5 comments:
as we say here - goed bezig!
It's wonderful to know of your good progress!
What do you want/ need to learn from the focus groups?
RMG - Rotary International is exceedingly concerned that whatever projects it supports, that they are fully understood by and supported by the population the project is supposed to help. As I am sure you are aware, a lot of social giving goes into projects that local populations neither understand nor support. Therefore anyone seeking funding from Rotary has to do a community assessment to ensure that the population that the project is intended to serve is indeed understood and supported by that population.
The focus group is one of many approved vehicles for doing the assessment. What we wanted to learn was how the population of sex trade workers would react to a program offered training and job development in return for their firm exit from sex trade.
Thanks for the detailed explanation! We use interviews for understanding whether our proposed interventions will work, whether we understand the root causes of the problem, and whether we are making a difference. Learning about people's attitudes to your program sounds like an extremely important input at this point.
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