Sharing skills - in supporting organisational assessment
on Michael Cashman (Ghana), 03/Jun/2010 21:00, 34 days ago
I've been asked to put togethertips and help on the assessment process forvolunteersthe usage and customisation options of the Organisational Development tools. As a result I have prepared a one-day workshop which is planned to be run in Bolga, Tamale and Accra for volunteers who will be taking on, part-time, the "Organisational Development Support" role which was created when I volunteered to help back in September 2009 on In-Country Traning.. Today is the Bolga session with Damien and Jemimah.I catch the Metro Mass Transit bus at 7.30 from Walewale - always a good start to the day if I can travel on the bus rather than a tro-tro - and this gets me to Bolga in loads of time. A "John Bosco Teacher Training College" pick-up truck stops - Sam Cashman's organisation - and out pops Sam for 2 minutes chat! I confirm my view yet again with Vodafone Bolga that their bills are wildly overstated. And plenty of time to set up the workshop in the VSO Bolga office. When we get started, we brainstorm what we want to cover - luckily most of this was on the plan, but we have a couple of additions, including clarification on the VSO Ghana OD Policy. An early activity is "Set Up Shop".They discuss the services that they will offer and what they need to be equippd with. This is interesting, and brings out the role that Jemimah is already playing in supporting the Programme Manager for Participation and Governance.We role play differemt participatory methods aof assessment - e.g. private scoring which is then shared, and a "walk to parts of the room" exercise as a group scoring method. Doing this for real brings out a number of points for reflection, e.g. about the differing levels of privacy.We then put the scores into the assessment tool and do some work practising tailoring the tool to suit different organisations' needs. Also a little data analysis work in Excel - I ran this last week with Cath in Jirapa and she was thrilled with what she had learned in a few minutes - this goes down well today too.We brainstorm their top tips and compare with 'some I'd prepared earlier'.The picture above with Jemimah waving a pen around is an exercise called "I feel ready"!It basically seems to have gone very well, especially the role play, despite the ten-minute overrun on the day.An interesting poster seen in Bolga on the way home.