leadership development

In our years working with community-based organizations, we've learned that strong leadership is crucial.  These small organizations are only able to organize the community, execute their program plans, and resist corruption if they have strong, committed leaders who involve all the stakeholders.  Yet these leaders often work in isolation, without much knowledge of other, similar programs, and with limited training in leadership and management skills.  In 2010, Pangea began looking for ways to support its grant partners--by mentoring them, by connecting them with other programs/leaders, by offering the professional skills of Pangea members where they can be useful, and by bringing one of our grant partners to Seattle to participate in a unique leadership training program.

In July 2010, twelve Pangea members traveled to East Africa to visit our project sites.  Small teams spent several days in five communities, where they offered training in grant writing, electronic communications, organizational development, team building, financial management, and instructional design.  Joann Schindler (pictured) and Sydney Munger facilitated a 4-day leadership training program in Kitale, Kenya, where they worked with the leaders of five women's groups who have decided to form an agricultural cooperative.  Joann teaches in Seattle University's Organizational Systems Renewal program, and Sydney is a retired environmental scientist.

Allan Paulson, Pangea's president, met Raphael Okumu in 2007 through work with another organization.  Raphael is executive director of TEARS Kenya, an organization that uses street theater to engage at-risk youth and others in the slums of Nakuru to promote healthy lifestyles, raise awareness about HIV/AIDS, and teach skills that lead to self-reliance.  Raphael showed a thirst for management knowledge and skills, which Allan, an organizational development consultant, was able to provide through long-distance mentoring in the intervening years.  In 2009, TEARS became a Pangea grantee when we funded a project on urban agriculture to give young sex workers an alternative means of livelihood.  In September 2010, Pangea sponsored Raphael to participate in the iLeap fellowship program at Antioch University's Center for Critical Change.  iLeap is an intensive 3-month program to strengthen and expand the leadership capabilities of experienced social change leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  Along with 5 other fellows from Central America and the Philippines, Raphael received training, coaching, and experiential learning around four central themes: Collaboration and Partnership, Leadership, Digital Media and Communication, and Sustainability. As a fellow, Raphael collaborated with and learned from Seattle-based leaders and organizations in their field, developing many contacts and relationships with members of the global development sector in Washington state.  He is shown receiving his certificate from iLeap director Britt Yamamoto.  We look forward to a giant step forward for TEARS once Raphael begins to apply his many learnings.

On an everyday basis, each grant partner is paired with a project liaison at Pangea.  The liaison keeps in touch, answers questions, and provides assistance in any way possible.  When appropriate, we put our grant partners in contact with other, similar programs with whom information sharing might be fruitful.  On the same trip to Africa, two grant partners travelled with the Pangea team to visit other partners in another part of Kenya.  This mixing was valuable for Pangea, because our partners observed things we didn't, but also for all the partners involved.