CC-ASTD Makes a Difference in Africa
by Donna Steffey
Voices of the orphans
sang out in unison as six CC-ASTD members entered the simple dirt-floor classroom.
CC-ASTD ambassadors Jennie Montgomery, Janet Harding, Alice Obermiller, Loukia
Verhage, Ed Bancroft, and Donna Steffey traveled halfway around the world to
hear these children sing.
We also came to help by sharing our business knowledge with the people dedicated to working with orphans and HIV/AIDS widows in Tanzania and Kenya. Fifteen CCASTD members back in Chicago donated over 300 hours of community service time to design and plan our training, because they too wanted to help program directors learn more about operating and developing sustaining enterprises.
It started in January, 2005. I had finished reading The Power of Intention by Dr. Wayne Dyer. Having just completed my CC-ASTD presidency, I had our 2004 board message, “partnering to make a difference in business and education,” fresh in my mind. My intention was to try and continue to make a difference in business and education. But how?
In e-mail that day was a message from ASTD National. Global Alliance for Africa, a Chicago-based non-profit organization, had posted a volunteer request on the job bank in DC by mistake. National, located in the DC area, remembered the volunteer China HRD project our chapter accomplished in 2003, so they forwarded the request to me.
I immediately called Global Alliance for Africa. Volunteers Debra Pickett and Victor Villanueva described the training project help they wanted, which was based on needs assessments done in Africa.
CC-ASTD then sent out a request for designers/trainers who had international training experience along with a history of volunteerism. Fifty CC-ASTD members responded. From that group, fifteen were selected for Phase One.
Global Alliance for Africa collaborates with African organizations taking innovative approaches to the care and education of HIV/AIDS widows and orphans in Africa. Their goals are to strengthen the organizational structure of the programs, help them develop long-term, self-sustain-ing auxiliary businesses to support the programs, and improve their ability to teach and coach teen orphans and widows on how to start and run small businesses.
CC-ASTD’s volunteer project was treated like any other performance improvement initiative. A number of needs analysis conversations took place between GAA and our CC-ASTD consultants. These conversations involved the expertise of our own Andi Dunn, PhD, who completed her doctoral research in Tanzania, Nancy Kramer, African Peace Corps volunteer, and Glenda Van Jaarsveld of AVSC, who was born in South Africa. Following this needs analysis, we took the steps of:
1. defining our deliverables;
2. deciding on courses: two Business, one Train-the-Trainer, and one Coaching
course;
3. setting up project activity plans and time lines for a June delivery in Tanzania
at the GAA African Partner’s meeting; and
4. scheduling pilot programs for May with a group of recent African immigrants
to the US to test our training materials.
Our business design team included: Letitia Robinson, Kacie Walters, Don Bee-man, Janet Harding, Judith Filek, Loukia Verhage, and Ed Bancroft. Our Training and Coaching team included: Robert Israelite—who had traveled to Uganda in April and who, along with Bridget Pur-done, became an invaluable consultant to us on drawing up the final design—as well as Lisa Bly, Megan Morse, Alice Obermiller, and Jennie Montgomery.
GAA decided that our CC-ASTD team should deliver the training we had designed. Any volunteer willing to go to Africa had to get a series of shots and pills, pay their own expenses, and endure 22 hours of air travel.
More importantly, we had to be ready to immerse ourselves in the poverty and grief of a nation that has endured slavery, civil wars, and now HIV/AIDS. We had to be ready to meet orphans whose eyes smiled and melted our hearts. We had to be ready to visit widows who were operating small businesses. These are women whose husbands may have given them HIV before they died, and whose husbands’ families may have taken their homes and left them homeless because that is what the law allows. We had to be ready to meet remarkable community leaders, many of them widows themselves, running these programs. We needed to teach and not feel guilty for having the fate of being born in the US, nor feel completely inept in the presence of such heroes.
Six CC-ASTD members answered the call. We worked together, side by side with our GAA partners. We laughed and cried together, we visited an AIDS hospital, we pulled bodies from an overturned vehicle on the road and administered first aid, we counted in Swahili with a group of children in a “school” under a tree, and we did our chapter and our profession proud.
What follows here is an offering of team members’ perspectives on what we taught, the challenges we faced, and the training principles we practiced.
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