Building a stable foundation

ICA News byte - Peru

 
Training Center in Azpitia – rooms for 40 plus four training rooms and agricultural demonstration areas.  

increasing number of clients available for our “Self-Development” approach to community development.

In early 2008, a client asked us to do follow-up with the new leaders in their communities to get them established. That initiated a 4-month Implementation phase of our program. Later that year, a client asked us to do the recruitment of the 30 people, and so we added a Launch month at the beginning of the program. With these additions, our 3-week AVANZA PERU program had expanded to a 6-month “Auto-Desarrollo” (Self-Development) offering which is now becoming accepted as an alternative to the normal direct-assistance community development projects. Although the global economic crisis was a setback to our programs in 2010, we have managed to fill our calendar in 2011 and have strong prospects for 2012.

As we celebrated the growth of our programs, they brought new challenges - expand our staff, find ways to formalize the operation of our institution and stabilize staff support. Over the past two years we have done the painful work of formalizing the legal and financial structures of ICA-Peru, qualified ourselves as a non-profit to receive donations and international grants, and built financial structures to support a staff of 16.

Quickly integrating new staff into our type of work is a cultural and economic challenge which has required the invention of new structures. We have a 5-person Founders Team which makes employment and compensation decisions and mentors new staff. We have basic salaries which are intended to be equal for all staff once they have acquired the skills to assume full responsibilities.

Like all other ICAs, ICA-Peru has been working to create a viable and sustainable mission, institution and staff team since our global transition in 1989. For many years the staff sought project grants to sustain their work in training local leaders and sharing sustainable technologies with a focus on individual support of staff families. In 2006, the 6-member staff created a new 5-year plan to build a corporate mission and self support system which would care for all staff equally. This article is a brief report on our five years of experience.

From the start in Peru in 1979 we were focused on building a National Demonstration Community with a Human Development Project in the small community of Azpitia, just 80 km south of Lima. Then from 1983 to 1985 we built a residential training center where we could bring people from around the country to experience Azpitia and the potential of developing their own communities without outside assistance. Therefore, in 2006, it was natural for us to decide to use the Azpitia Training Center to focus our work on the in-depth formation of leadership teams in rural communities, with an updated 3-week curriculum to serve the needs of today.

Initially we offered individual seats in these AVANZA PERU programs, but it was always a struggle to fill our center with 30 people. We then began to seek sponsorships for groups of 6 or more people and found that companies with social responsibility mandates were interested in building leadership in the communities in their impact zones. While these programs often offered excellent interchange between people from different regions, the sponsors were concerned about conflicting influences on their people from other companies. So in 2008, we made our 3-week leadership formation program exclusive to one sponsor, and began to offer 10 of these programs per year. At this point we had a mission which gave us a clear identity in Peru and found an

 
Humphrey (OPAD Staff) checking the quality seed for a farmer before a government inspection.   

These basic salaries plus institutional costs are our “overhead” which we must cover each month. Fortunately, we had built enough reserves going into 2010 to sustain these basic expenses without having to cut staff numbers, and now we are rebuilding those reserves for the future.

 
Demonstrating commercial yogurt making in the village of Canchan by a new grad from Azpitia (foreground) with no assistance from ICA staff. She had 8 people in uniform helping and about 30 people watching – all on her initiative  





The final phase of our institutional development is to diversify our program offerings to amplify the impact of our mission and add more stability to our ICA monthly income. The first approach that we looked at was to extend our 6 months of work in the communities. We have one of these small projects in operation throughout 2011, and have offered a similar plan to three clients. One company is talking with us about a 2-year project to deal with youth unemployment in the rural communities in their impact zone. Then just this month, a client asked us to prepare a very large proposal for it to enter into a competition for major funding, and that proposal was submitted in late August. While the outcome is uncertain, our bond with the company has grown stronger and we will do further work with it whether the grant is won or not.

And finally, this year we have created a new program called UNIDOS. It is a 6-day training program to get rural laborers to use their new salaries for the benefit of their families instead of indulging in the typical drunkenness and prostitution. This program strongly complements our community leadership formation work. Just one ongoing contract can fully cover our monthly overhead with just the use of two staff members. UNIDOS has received an enthusiastic reception from our clients and we now have several moving toward contracting.

Our 2006 plan had 7 scenarios ranging from a full corporate mission and team -- to scenario “Number 7” which was to dissolve the ICA and seek individual employment and new careers. We frequently laugh about “Number 7” these days as we experience one surprise after another in the daily unfolding of our lives. Now we are becoming ready to turn some attention outward to collaborate with our ICA colleagues around the globe.


While basic salaries are about double what they were in 2006 they are still not adequate. So we have added a monthly bonus system which, after setting aside funds for reserves, distributes the surplus on an individual percentage basis. These bonuses have the potential to double the basic salaries when individual skills and responsibilities grow and the program calendar is full. Beyond this, there are government-mandated benefits required after 5 years of employment which also add security for the staff.


Focus on viable rural cities

In the midst of our busy calendar, ICA-Peru was asked by one of our company clients to submit a proposal for a Canadian grant which requires an innovative approach to community development. Our proposal is titled Auto-Desarrollo: Facilitando Ciudades Rurales a ser Viables en el Siglo 21 (“Self-Development: Facilitating Rural Cities to be Viable in the 21st Century”), and it is for at least $600,000. The community in question has a population of 4,500 with about 500 people earning company salaries. Nearly all of that money goes out to a large city 7 hours away with no benefit for the community at all. There is an urgent need to build businesses and cultural services in the community

so that these salaries can be spent within the community. Without such services, none of the youth will remain in the community either. This is the pattern throughout the 5,000 rural communities in the mountains of Peru. This grant will help us do a demonstration project and document how this trend can be turned around, thus helping to recover viable communities throughout the rural areas of Peru. Whether we are awarded this grant or not, we have decided to turn the direction of our leadership training toward the development of viable rural cities throughout the Sierra of Peru, and will be sharing the models we develop with the ICA global network.


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