Winrock Volunteers blog: new location

Our blog site has moved to http://www.winrock.org/volunteer_blog/. We invite you to check it regularly!

Today’s post reflects on the 4th of July holiday and how American volunteerism honors the values that this holiday is all about.

 

Entrepreneurship…A Way Forward

Farmer-to-Farmer volunteer, Michael Lowery just completed his 7th volunteer trip for Winrock since 2003, and his 3rd volunteer trip to Nigeria. This latest trip took him to Kaduna, Nigeria where he worked with the College of Agriculture and Animal Science. The Nigerian government tasked six of the agriculture colleges in the country to develop entrepreneurship curricula and to build Entrepreneurship Development Centers(EDC) to reach out to local business start-ups in their communities.

Below Michael describes his recent trip:

“My project was to meet the principals at the College of Agriculture and Animal Sciences in Kaduna (about 150 miles north of the capital, Abuja) and conceptualize a development plan for their Entrepreneurship Development Centers, built in 2008 but never implemented as a fully-staffed operating facility. My proposal, developed over a course of two weeks, was to hand off the center’s program to a board of directors recruited from the local business community, with programs taught by the College entrepreneurship faculty. I prepared a strategy paper, budget and grant proposal to sustain the EDC for a period of three years, combined with some additional donations from the local business community, with a handoff of funding to the business community in the fourth year. With the assistance of the College Provost, I met with several local business leaders to begin the process of recruiting a board.

A second task was training the College’s entrepreneurship faculty, a project that was expanded to an introductory training for students and later, the overall college faculty. Using PowerPoint presentations developed in earlier assignments, modified for Nigeria, 18 hours of training was provided to a total of 97 interested participants. Training materials and relevant spreadsheets of start-up business projections were provided to the faculty and interested students.

…..[F]unding is tight in the university system and the local job market is difficult. As a result, there is great interest in entrepreneurship as a way forward for students, and my efforts were rewarded with a lot of smiles, diligent note-taking, and pertinent questions.

Having visited Nigeria several times on similar assignments, thanks to the pre-assignment efforts of the Winrock staff, I was able to use my time and talents effectively, felt perfectly safe at all times, and appreciate working with the professionals of Winrock International, Nigeria.”

–Michael Lowery

Why volunteer?

Continuing our Volunteer Week reflections, Winrock staffer Abby Phillips shares her thoughts:

“As we celebrate National Volunteers Week, we often praise the volunteers and the great work they are doing at home and abroad. Their work is vital to their communities and to development across the globe. As a new Program Associate at Winrock International responsible for recruiting volunteers for USAID’s Farmer-to-Farmer program, I have been pondering what motivates people to volunteer and what motivated me to join Winrock to recruit these individuals. I had some assumptions about the types of people that would volunteer their time to go to Southeast Asia for weeks at a time. They would have expendable free time, or may have very flexible work schedules. Although this may be the case in some instances, the majority of people that volunteer for overseas development assignments are extremely busy. Their schedules are packed because they are experts in their respective fields, but they find a way to stop their work for weeks at a time to volunteer. Why?

I know I can’t speak to each individual’s motivation to volunteer, but I think the meaning of volunteerism and why talented people decide to participate are one in the same. Volunteerism is about selflessness and a genuine desire to positively impact the society you are working within. Winrock’s volunteers are experts in their fields because they have a drive to find solutions to problems that impact agricultural and economic development. That same drive motivates them to bring those solutions to other countries to bolster their resources, which leads to greater agricultural and economic development in those areas as well. However, it is their selflessness that sets them apart from others. Many people have a desire to positively impact society, but volunteers do so by sacrificing their time at home and at their jobs to take off for countries and work situations that are very different from their own.

Volunteerism is about receiving payment in the form of a changed world view and invaluable insight from those you are working with on a volunteer project. Winrock’s volunteers are motivated to assist others and in return they receive life-changing knowledge and experiences with people of different cultures. These are the reasons why I joined Winrock. I am excited to recruit individuals who are motivated to provide technical assistance even when it isn’t convenient for them. I look forward to working with volunteers who want to make an impact, and I cannot wait to see how it impacts them.”

—

Are you inspired yet? -Check out http://www.winrock.org/volunteer for more info on Winrock’s volunteer programs and open opportunities around the world!