Building a stable foundation


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 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. 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.