 Hello Everybody! I recently sat with Nancy Padron & Sallee Reynolds from ASCEND. This is a fantastic organization doing great work all over the world. This was exciting for me. So I'll just step aside and let the lovely ladies' words speak for themselves. Oh yes, visit their site here: http://ascendalliance.org
Transcript of 3/30/07 Interview:
Nancy: Thank you for the opportunity to let your readers know about ASCEND, a Humanitarian Alliance. My name is Nancy Padron, I keep the ASCEND website buzzing and get lots of opportunities to hear from people around the world who are making an impact for good on our planet. Also, with me is Sallee Reynolds who works with our Regional Managers in the countries where we work.
Robin: Can you give us a brief history of your organization?
Nancy: ASCEND was first organized in 1982 as the Andean Children's Foundation by Timothy S. Evans to address poverty issues in Peru. This foundation was later reorganized as Chasqui Humanitarian. In 1984 the Engage Now Foundation, organized by Tim Evans and Carolyn Dailey, was established to focus on poverty issues in Ethiopia. In 2005, Engage Now merged with Chasqui Humanitarian and became known as ASCEND, a Humanitarian Alliance.
Robin: Can you give the Oprah's School Blog readers a synopsis of the services you offer?
Nancy: We work side-by-side with some of the most impoverished people of the world in the counties of Ethiopia, Mozambique, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. We help communities with life-skills mentoring, school construction, education materials; enterprise training and small business development; health training, medical and dental services, building health clinics; technology training, clean water systems, gardens, greenhouses and food storage, stoves and other energy sources, latrines and community bathrooms.
Our volunteers become Service-Learning Participants. Ways to be involved include going on a week-long expedition, serving as an intern, sponsoring a sister-school program. Sponsors and partners are also vital for the work to proceed. Participants are challenged to expand their own potential and become informed with a rich, global perspective. We become partners in progress; sharing the power within ourselves to help children and families in need to ASCEND.
Robin: What are your goals for 2007 and are you on track to meet them?
Nancy: During 2007, ASCEND celebrates 25 years of international outreach which empowers those in need to save their children and ascend out of poverty. We set realistic goals each year building on our past experiences in our four areas of focus which are: Education, Health, Enterprise, and Simple Technology / Construction.
We are on track to meet our goals for Education which includes the construction or remodeling of 12 schools, graduating 90% of those in literacy programs within 1 year, to enhance our curriculum (FAMA-literacy for social change) with lesson goal sheets and supplemental literacy materials; and recognizing graduation.
Robin: Your organization has been building schools in Africa since 2001. How do you select an area to build?
Sallee: Quite truthfully we have very little to do with the choosing process. Our programs are started at the grass-roots level with community counsels who work with our local permanent in-country staff. Our staff starts by asking the community what assets they have. As a group they discuss all the things they have to offer. Then they talk about their goals as a community and think of ways that their assets can help them get their goals. We come into play in the last part of the discussion where they talk about the gaps; the places in their plan that still need to be filled in. We love to fill in the gaps.
We don't like to give people schools. We have found, in our 25 years of experience, that when we drop a project off at the door of a community we don't get the same results we do when they become and invested part of the project. If they are donating all of the manpower to build a school and they've pooled their resources and saved $100 and have gotten the government to agree to send teachers there and all we have to do is supplement the $100 with $5000 to buy bricks and mortar, suddenly it's their school and not ours; chalk boards aren't broken, desks are always clean and women can often be seen sweeping the floors that they helped to lay.
We don't want to give anyone anything; we want to help them use their assets to improve their communities. That means that not every community builds a school. Sometimes they want a health clinic, sometimes they want a community center and sometimes they want a soccer field. It takes a little faith, but we've found that they do know what's best for their communities.
Robin: Cooperation from the community is essential. What are your thoughts on this and how do you make the most of it once engendered?
Sallee: As mentioned we work very closely with community counsels. We also work with people that we call community workers. They are people chosen by their communities who receive training from our local staff. They then return to their communities and instruct their people; sort of a train the trainer model.
Our development programs are also fairly comprehensive. We not only help build schools (or clinics or soccer fields) but we work teaching reading and writing, basic math and business skills, we teach classes for business owners to help improve sales and income, we teach hand washing, orphan advocacy, AIDS prevention, nutrition. Then, we follow up by helping the people build gardens and latrines and stoves that get cooking smoke out of the huts. Our rapid action management development program (RAMP) helps us to introduce these teachings and technologies over time and also helps us know when communities are becoming more self-sufficient. It helps us know when communities no longer need us and are ready to graduate.
One of the other things we do to keep community involvement is that we focus in what we call cluster areas. Clusters are groups of 5-10 villages within a certain geographic area which changes depending on the country where we are (in Ethiopia it's normally about 30 Km). We work in several communities in each cluster. We originally did this to help utilize staff time better (less commuting) but we found that it provided an amazing side benefit. We found that leaders and active community members from one community wanted to be involved in helping train their neighboring communities. It's a wonderful way for them to stay involved and to continue learning by teaching and serving other people.
Robin: Can you give a brief, soup-to-nuts, description of how a school gets built? How do you keep costs down?
Sallee: First, a community has to decide that a school is their goal and then they come up with the things that they can do to help in the construction. This normally is some monetary donation, or donation of goods and materials that can be used in construction; things like sand or poles or even bricks and cement, and the majority of the labor. We don't often pay for general labor, but do pay for some contract work like foundations, cement work and electric work if it's called for. In all of the countries where we work we've also made arrangements with local, state and or federal governments to match the money that we put into the school building. We were a little nervous when we started doing this as governments in these countries have reputations for corruption and greed, but we have had nothing but success.
In Ethiopia the government can get us cement at less than 1/2 of cost to the public. We've also partnered with religious groups and other NGO's and international organizations to get the same kind of deal. We have been very pleased to see the way that the government officials and other organizations are doing their best to help their people. It becomes a mutually beneficial relationship because all of us find that our money goes further and helps more people.
Robin: When it comes to building schools in Africa, what were some things that you learned?
Sallee: I think we've already mentioned some of the lessons but to summarize 1) don't give people things, help them as they work for them. 2) do your very best to work with other people and organizations. 3) do love the people. 4) do listen to the people and recognize their knowledge of the area and their needs and wants
Robin: What is your best "success" story?
Sallee: We could list stories of governments and NGO's coming together to work in a deserving community; those things have happened. We've seen miracles. But I believe that the true level of our success is something much smaller and bigger at the same time. The students who attend the schools that we help facilitate write letters thanking the people who donated money to help build their school. I have the lucky job of having those letters go across my desk before they are mailed out to the donors. I think our greatest success can be found in those cards, normally written in pencil on construction paper which is smudged with fingerprints and has holes torn by erasers in it. The letters normally just say, "I love my new school. Thank you."
Robin: Do you have any advice for Oprah?
Nancy: One of the things that we appreciate most about Oprah is her ability to bring important issues to the public. We applaud her efforts and her decision to get involved in social issues when so many people in her place wouldn't and don't. It is clear that she loves the people and we know that that is paramount in being able to serve them.
Oprah's School is a wonderful opportunity for the children selected to participate. We commend her commitment to education in Africa. We also believe that education particularly that of women and girls is key in the fight against poverty. Education is the foundation to all of our focus areas. ASCEND changes lives by working closely with the community to offer life-skills mentoring. Those who participate strengthen and change their community. Our programs must first and foremost be sustainable; able to continue even if we are no longer to be involved.
Robin: Finally, how does one donate to your cause?
Nancy: Donations can be made on our website. We utilize Google Checkout which is a trusted and secure method of payment. Go to: http://ascendalliance.org/page.php?institutional to make a donation or what we call, adopt a project.
For a $15 donation, a school kit can be provided to two children. For $25, a desk can be built. $75 provides a community worker the training manuals needed to serve their community. $365 (one dollar a day) rescues an orphan; over 20,000 die every day! $1,000 with provided matching funds brings a health or literacy campaign to rural areas and a $5,000 contribution, also with matching funds builds a school, health facility or enterprise training center in an impoverished area of the world.
Education is key to success. A school can open up new windows in a child's life and give them hope for the future. Health centers offer a clean, convenient place for childbirth, dispensing medicines, offering immunization, patient care, and training community health workers. Such facilities also provide an opportunity to bring a government-sponsored doctor or nurse into the community, where otherwise, there would be no medical personnel. A community enterprise center can facilitate enterprise, vocational training and cooperatives to help those in need to ascend out of poverty. |
