Transitions in SAA L&S team

You have probably received the communication, but it's worth to remember: in January we started a transition process in SAA. Nowadays, SAA CIV is part of the Learning and Support team (L&S), which is different from other Compassion Area Offices. So, we started to move the CIV team (Carlos and Guilherme) as part of the line management, working under the SAA Associate Area Director – Lawrence Tormey. The transition process will be happening in the next months, until the end of this FY. We pray for a smooth transition process. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need more information about this!

Strategic Plans

Congratulations to all Countries that submitted their 3 Year CIV Strategic plans. Special thanks to Mexico that worked well using the forms sent by GMC and submitted the plan on time!

How far is your country from the goals of the FY 12 (this year) strategic plans? Please, take some time to review this FY’s plan and check how your country is doing to complete it. Let's work hard to reach our goals!

Akwaaba (Welcome in Ashanti language, from Ghana) - Insights from the Summit

The last CIV Summit took place in Accra, capital of Ghana. First of all, be in Africa was amazing! That would be enough! However, we also had some leaders of our Organization with us: Mark Hanlon (Senior VP of USA), Chuck McGinty (IPG Senior Director) and Mark Yeadon (Senior VP of International Program).
It was a casual but very important meeting with the CIV Ministry. We would like to share some of that experience with you.

What do our leaders think about CIV?
See below some insights...

“In order to understand CIV, we must remember that there are things that the projects do that won’t be successful without a CIV intervention. That would be like wasting resources… With CIV activities the resources applied through the Child Support can be leveraged and the project will accomplish its objectives. CIV interventions must remove obstacles!” (Mark Hanlon)

“We cannot grow if we continue doing things the same way as we do today. Everything is too manual, complex, amateur and immature. We had been reactive instead of proactive. Planning avoids reactivity. We need to plan! There comes the importance of the STRATEGY” (Regina Hopewell)

“Compassion has grown 10 times in the last 10 years. We must run to be able to do what we must do. It’s necessary to work hard and have a clear objective and then, make a huge endeavor to keep going in the direction defined. With clear objectives it’s easier to say NO to things that have nothing to do with our objectives, but still it’s needed to work hard, incessantly, to keep going into what was defined as objective.” (Mark Yeadon)

There are donors who ‘test’ before giving large donations to Compassion. They start with small interventions and then, if they feel safe, give major donations. (Mark Hanlon)

Before, the priority was proposal writing. Actually, project management and implementation management are priorities. (Regina Hopewell)

Future State of CIV
We discussed in an activity a definition of what is CIV and started to design a prototype model to be tested in the future. We also tried to identify the “big rocks” of a future state. We worked in small groups and each one analyzed a Tier from a prototype model proposed and well presented by Regina Hopewell. At the end, each group presented their suggestions/recommendations and we hope to have some more news about this prototype once the CIV Cabinet releases more information. This new prototype will be tested in one country of each region next fiscal year. The general opinion is that a change is needed and it seems that with Beyond Compass, our ministry will also go through a big change in a near future. I invite you to pray for this process and participate giving your opinion. Think about the questions below and leave a comment with your answer:

1. If we need to work to reach the neediest within our reach, what would be the impact for CIV?
2. We want to finish well. This means more focus on the adolescents skills. What CIV can do to focus on adolescents?
3. Addressing the wider context of the child also means more CIV funds. How could we address the wider context of our children?

Those were questions that we were challenged to think about during the Summit. Join us and leave your answers below!

Some places we visited in Ghana

Kitchen built with CIV funds

Children dancing at the project

During the Summit we had the opportunity to visit 2 projects where we saw a WASH intervention and also an Income Generation activity. The WASH intervention helped the project to built bathrooms to the kids and now they have a better environment to serve the beneficiaries. The same project also built a kitchen using CIV funds. The second project we visited completed an Income Generation activity that consisted in a "Grasscutter farming". Go ahead and click the link to know more about the Grasscutters. Besides that, these were very cultural visits, we saw the children dancing with traditional costumes and singing beautiful songs! Some of our team also took a chance to show their dancing skills!


Cape Coast Castle

We went to the Cape Coast Castle, place where the slaves were brought from many regions in Africa to be sold and taken to many countries of our America. It was a time of reflection about our history and how it affected lives of many people and families in the past. There's a door that was called as "Door of no Return", which was the gate that the slaves passed to go into the ships and never returned to their land. Nowadays it's called "Door of Return", name that was given after the end of the slave trade. It’s crucial to know the history so absurd mistakes like the slavery are not repeated ever!

"Door of No Return"