EASER Blog 12.2.09

Development Blog 12.2.09

After spending 10 hours yesterday at EASER, I was very excited to come back today and continue working. The director of the organization had arranged for the two of us to meet today. We had planned to discuss the information that I found yesterday and try to find a way to incorporate it into EASER’s own goals. Unfortunately, the director did not come to work today, so the plans for today changed.
Since there was nobody at work today that speaks English, I decided to continue working on the project that I was working on yesterday. I had a difficult time finding a lot of mainstream youth organizations in the Middle East. I found many organizations yesterday, but today I did not come across too many more. The majority of the organizations that I found in my research today are grassroots organizations. It is possible that the organizations do not have a lot of funding, or possibly limited knowledge and access to create a website that offers information and opportunities for international funders to participate.
Through my research, I found one organization’s vision that is particularly interesting and relevant to EASER’s vision. The organization is called Seeds for Peace, and it is a youth empowerment organization. The organization aims to help youth from different conflict regions to develop leadership skills. The organization empowers youth through a variety of cross cultural workshops that encourage the members to see their enemies as humans and equals. After reviewing this information, I compared the vision of Seeds for Peace with EASER.
EASER is looking to attract more of the youth population in Cairo to become involved in participating at the organization. I think it would be a good idea if EASER is able to adopt a youth empowerment program at the organization. There could be a training session to give the youth a few basic ideas and concepts of leadership skills in order for them to take on their own projects.
After the original youth leaders have achieved their desired goals and proved to be good leaders to the organization, they could recruit more youth members to be trained as leaders. The original leaders could pass down their knowledge to the new leaders in order to keep a sustainable leadership program working. Training the new members of the leadership program would empower and give the leaders a sense of responsibility. The leaders would have the autonomy to create their own community based projects, and they may take more pride in their work if they feel more of a personal attachment to their work. Currently the community based projects that EASER works on are normally decided by a few people at the organization. Although the people at the organization may have more knowledge and resources to discover what exactly the community needs with regards to development, giving the youth leaders the responsibility to choose and run their own projects will create a situation where the leaders truly want to follow through with their tasks.
I will be back at EASER tomorrow to continue my research, and I hope that the director is here tomorrow so that we can discuss the findings of my research.