Madrid, November 2009 IJR Mid Way Meeting
The World in 2009 Why is it that we only document the big events? In IJB we always seem to release “minutes”, “documents” and “attachments” that are either related to IJBC or to the IJR Mid Way Meeting. Over some coffee in Madrid, this year’s IJRs thought that perhaps it would be a good idea to document the big-picture improvements of IJB as a whole, and of IJB throughout the year. We are a global movement, and we work towards furthering our goals every day, not just at conferences or at meetings. We are constantly developing: both in the way we do things, and in the kind of things we attempt to do. As a way to celebrate this, we decided to stitch together a document that would reflect our impressions on how IJB developed in the past year. We hope this is interesting to those who were involved in Junior Branch in the past, to those who are currently working within our movement, to those who might be curious about what happened in 2009 in a few years from now, and to people who are working in other areas of our organisation and want to get a better picture of what Junior Branch has been doing. With love, Maru Ayam | Rowan El Shimi 2009-2010 International Junior Representatives ijr@cisv.org
How this document was thought out and written You’ll see that the content is structured under four headers: JB Goals, Decentralisation, Theme and LMOs. These four titles are not arbitrary – they are the topics that the IJB Team chose as Foundational Content for the first Global Training Strategy (GTS). You can read more about the GTS below, under the Decentralisation section. Also check out the GTS page on JBPedia to be referred to further resources related to it.
Decentralisation Making it available: first information, then training As you might know, in 2009 we implemented our first Global Training Strategy (GTS), with the purpose of increasing the quality and the consistency of our trainings, as well as increasing the opportunities to access these. Each training under the GTS offered two kinds of content: Foundational Content (common to all IJB trainings), and Community Content (that varied according to the specific training community’s needs). In 2009, the four topics identified as Foundational content are the ones you can see as headers for this document: Decentralisation, JB Goals, Theme and LMOs. Throughout 2007 and 2008, the idea of decentralisation was increasingly gaining importance in the way we work in Junior Branch: the democratisation of information (through the creation of JBPedia, the JB Library and JB Community) was a big step that we took in that direction. We believe the adoption of a GTS really helped improve decentralisation in IJB: we created more opportunities for people to participate in trainings, and consequently access and create new training conent. In 2009, there were a number of GTS-planned trainings: JB South WS Santiago, Chile Middle Eastern Workshop Amman, Jordan EJBM Graz, Austria JASPARC Bangkok, Thailand ARMM Atitlán, Guatemala IJBC Antigua, Guatemala Ibérico Lisbon, Portugal There were other trainings that took place in 2009, but these were not planned under the GTS framework and are therefore not included in the list above. We are expecting for most (if not all) of the 2010 trainings to be GTS-planned. At the moment, the Growth & Development section of our committee is working on gathering feedback from the trainers involved in the above. They will evaluate the methods and effectiveness of the current GTS framework, in order to improve the 2010 GTS.
Contribution from all over: Connect developments The Connect section of the IJB Team has significantly improved our channels of communication this year. The management of the IJB emailing lists (regional teams, project addresses, the NJR list, among others) has been working wonderfully, and communication has been greatly facilitated. Connect has launched two new channels of communication: JB Faces (a YouTube channel, JuniorBranchFaces) and IJB News (a Twitter account, IJBnews). We believe that these new developments favour decentralisation in IJB, since they constantly encourage widespread contribution from people from all over.
IJR Candidacy In the days after IJBC 2008, a discussion on IJR Candidacy began. The people involved in this discussion believed that it was important to take these issues beyond the setting of a meeting in Florence – the general atmosphere was one of wanting to involve as many people as possible. Once that meeting was over, the 2008-2009 IJRs Kelly and Maru facilitated an online discussion about the issues that had been raised. The exchange of ideas took place over email, mostly over the JB Community group. We believe that building consensus globally – regardless of people’s possibilities of being present when discussions take place– is a big step towards decentralising participation and decision-making. The IJR Candidacy process was changed according to the outcome of this discussion.
IJBC 2009: planning and running Along with changes in candidacy, there were many changes in the way IJBC was planned and run. The responsibility and creativity no longer was put solely on the IJRs and Candidates – planning and running IJBC now became something the IJB Team did collectively, as a group! The process was facilitated by the 2008-2009 IJRs, and it proved to be a very smooth transition into a new model of IJBC. There were mostly positive reviews about this on the IJBC 2009 Evaluations, to be released shortly.
LINKS TO RESOURCES / DOCUMENTS RELATED TO THIS: GTS JBPedia Page: http://bit.ly/55AZjH Training Calendar: http://bit.ly/5fKS7V JB Faces YouTube channel: http://bit.ly/63VCu8 IJBnews on Twitter: http://bit.ly/67CSSX IJBC 2009 at JBPedia: http://bit.ly/5NbFN3
JB Goals A world that’s familiar with the JB Goals? In 2008, some members of the Quality Lab worked on a project to clarify the JB Goals. These were reformulated into a more comprehensive format: now, each goal had a title, a sentence and a paragraph. Also, in 2008, IJRs Marcos and Kelly wrote a set of documents called the JB Essentials, with the purpose of further clarifying the concept of what Junior Branch is, does, aspires to be and feels like! It was a year full of clarifications, wouldn’t you say? In this scenario, we arrive at 2009 with a world that probably isn’t fully comfortable with handling these concepts – yet. Those who had attended trainings in 2008 had heard about these new tools, but since not all trainings ensured to cover the same topics, there is no way to be certain that everyone knew the JB Goals or Essentials. This is a challenge that the GTS helped overcome: by setting one of the Foundations to be “JB Goals”, we were making sure all trainings covered this topic. About 70 local JBs were in direct contact with this concept, through their attendance of GTS-planned training! We also made the goals available online on JBPedia and the JB Library, in order for people to be able to download them and work with them locally. We are also encouraging the Goals (and their indicators) to get translated into as many languages as possible – they’re already available in Spanish and will soon be released in Portuguese, and we think that it would be very positive to have them available in people’s mother tongues!
Self-Evaluation: the Equalizer At IJBC 2008, a new self-evaluation tool was introduced: the JB Equalizer. The Equalizer is online at our JB Library and it takes about one hour to run locally. The purpose of this tool is to assess how well a JB is achieving the JB Goals, and it gives a graphic reflection of which are a JB’s strong points and which are its weaknesses – therefore making it easy to prioritise what to work on. The Equalizer is currently available in English, Spanish and very soon in Portuguese, and you can download it from our JB Library. We are also encouraging translations of this tool!
Global Evaluations In 2009, the Equalizer was run in local JBs and we have collected the data in order to perform a Global Evaluation. In total, we managed to secure 63 Equalizers that provided valuable information about how each of these JBs was doing. The information was collated and analysed by the IJB Team, and the conclusions of our “weak points” were then chosen as the 2010 GTS Foundations. We are looking at conducting a 2010 Global Evaluation to then decide the 2011 GTS Foundations, and so on...
LINKS TO RESOURCES / DOCUMENTS RELATED TO THIS: JB Goals at the JB Library: http://bit.ly/7lamJm JB Equalizer at the JB Library: http://bit.ly/58ePXS 2010 Foundations at the JB Library: http://bit.ly/6oZri2
Theme A love story begins: IJB and Educational Themes Junior Branch first started working with an international Educational Theme in 2005. CISV International was adopting its first Strategic Plan at the time, and Juniors took one of the Strategic Priorities and developed it into our first IJB Theme: Exclusion. The idea was to actively contribute to the development of the organisation’s strategic plan as IJB. It ran from 2005 until 2007. A Packet with an explanation, some activities and suggested resources was produced and distributed.
IJB Theme 2007-2009: Conflict and Peace Education As the Exclusion theme was drawing to an end, the IJB Team decided to develop and launch a new theme – this time, on Conflict and Peace Education. A Theme Packet, a Toolbox (with resources) and an Activity Jar were released in early 2008 in order to support Theme initiatives all over the world. The 2009 GTS included the Theme as one of its Foundations, so we provided first-hand training on how to work with the Theme to around 70 local JBs!
IJB & YM Theme 2010: Identity and Peace Education At IJBC 2009, the IJB Committee and the Youth Meeting Committee decided to join forces develop a common theme, and to design the educational tools and resources to support it. IJBC 2009 had a Theme thread that introduced the concept of working with themes, presented and explored our new Theme of Identity, and provided a space for a creative burst of ideas to contribute towards the Theme’s development. The 2010 Theme is about to be launched an a set of resources will be made available too: a Theme Packet, a Toolbox and an Activity Jar. All the material included in these was put together by a process of collective contribution from JBers all over the world during IJBC 2009 and, afterwards on JBPedia. We are very proud, not only of the outcome of this new and exciting team, but also about the way in which this project was worked on! We are also very enthusiastic about this theme because it contributes towards having a successful 2010 Year of Diversity in CISV. We think that Identity is very related to Diversity and we believe it will generate a lot of positive experiences related to our 2010 Annual Content Area.
LINKS TO RESOURCES / DOCUMENTS RELATED TO THIS: Exclusion at the JB Library: http://bit.ly/8uTmJ5 Conflict and Peace Education at the JB Library: http://bit.ly/8w4oBq Identity and Peace Education at the JB Library: http://bit.ly/6BznLz Theme page at JBPedia: http://bit.ly/6vUb3U
LMOs A nice (yet incomplete) attempt: the International Theme Conference In 2009, IJRs Kelly and Maru had contacted a like minded organisation called Justicia Global, based in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. With the support of the IJB Team and the NGO Relations Team, they had coordinated to have IJB’s participation in a conference organised by Justicia Global: the XI International Summit on Art and Revolution. IJB would send a group of JBers to participate in this conference and exchange ideas with people belonging to other organisations, and hopefully we would start a solid partnership with Justicia Global. Unfortunately, given a few obstacles, this project didn’t materialise – but the attempt was there, and we are still hoping to establish a partnership with another organisation.
LMO thread at IJBC At IJBC 2009, there was a thread about working with LMOs. It provided a comprehensive training on the process of approaching other organisations, working together with them in order to futher both groups’ goals, and establishing significant partnerships with others. In the last session we had the contribution of the NGO Relations Team of CISV International, who came to introduce themselves and to gather feedback on the way our organisation reaches out to work with others.
Cooperation with ORC At the moment, IJB is in constant communication with the Organisational Relations Committee. As of AIM 2009, we have a member of the IJB Team who is also working within ORC (Marietta Möhlen), and so far this has greatly helped in building a stronger bridge between the work of both committees. At the moment we are working on getting IJB representation in the European Youth Forum (YFJ), which will hopefully result in our full membership in a couple of years. Cooperation with ORC also is happening at another level: in the second half of 2009 IJB has been collecting information related to projects, partnerships or activities that local JBs have conducted together with like minded organisations. This will help populate CISV International’s NGO database. Rou, who is the IJB Thinks 2009-2010 Editor, along with Marietta (mentioned above for her work with IJB and ORC) work on an LMO cooperation section in said publication. Its purpose is to encourage people to work with LMOs and introduce them to LMOs they can work with.
LINKS TO RESOURCES / DOCUMENTS RELATED TO THIS: IJBC 2009 at JBPedia: http://bit.ly/5NbFN3 ORC at CISV Resources: http://bit.ly/57Pi2Z IJB Thinks at the JB Library: http://bit.ly/8FSZqK