That is the question we ask to ourself when we see the news from all corners of the world, where people are having problems to find shelter and food, where people are suffering from poverty or sickness, where people are leaving their homes, where loved ones are escaping from war.
I spent my nine years as a search and rescue volunteer and trainer, and have been on several national and international rescue operations. I volunteered as a rescue worker in disasters such as the Pakistan earthquake in 2005 or small scale operations searching for lost mountaineers after an avalanche. Once you are in an NGO, you become more aware about what other NGOs are doing. You try to cooperate and help them as well. One thing I can say after those experiences is, there is a great number of people with promising ideas, and even more people are fully motivated to bring these ideas to life. Unfortunately, the dedicated time and motivation are not always enough. In most social development and humanitarian aid projects, they do not reach their goals or their potential.
The corporate world spends billions on trainers, consultants and coaches to achieve success in their projects but NGOs do not have the budget for such expensive support. What do you think would happen if they had tools and know-how to enhance their performance? What if they were coached to reach their goals?
Thinking about those questions led us to the idea for a charity initiative, IPMA Coaching for Development (IPMAC4D). An initiative which aims to provide project management knowledge and experience to social development and humanitarian aid projects for free.
In IPMAC4D we want
to support such social development and humanitarian aid projects to be successful and to contribute to society,
their projects to exceed their goals, not their budgets,
to help them to create benchmarks for project management in their area,
to assist them to enhance their effectiveness,
their good work to be known and to inspire others all over the world,
social development and humanitarian aid projects to be successful.
We want this project to contribute to the vision of IPMA by promoting project management competence throughout society to enable a world in which all social projects succeed.
With these aims, we created IPMAC4D. As a team of six with support from the IPMA, we have started to develop this idea into a running initiative. During 2016, we will create our concept and construct the foundation for the future of IPMAC4D. As part of this concept phase, we have decided to conduct research in the social development and humanitarian aid sectors.
We have created an online survey to understand how familiar project management ideas and concepts, to the people in the development sector and also to be able to understand the challenges and needs of their projects.
Therefore, we are asking you to help us on spreading this online survey link to project people in NGOs, INGOs or people who you know working in a social development or humanitarian aid project.
