Envisioning

Today, I finally got to see why Cape Town is the most beautiful city in the world!! The weather broke and the sun shone over the mountains and the skyline and the sea and the houses and it was all so breath-taking! We went out to Rondebosch for the morning ECD meeting which is sort of the weekly re-cap and planning meeting. Because of transportation limitations, we can't make it out to the creches everyday so we focus our planning on one or two of the days in the end of the week so that the beginning of the week can be focused on getting out ot the creches. There's so much going on in the creches along a lot of needs so we spent more time that I had expected. All of the volunteers are so fervent in their commitment that everyone puts in these thoughtful suggestions and opinions on the matters which makes for a pretty productive meeting. We ended up discussing bits of my fundraising plan and the overall principles of philanthopy and from that I plan to put together a piece in the Volunteers' Handbook on fundraising, a Sending-Off packet of suggestions for ongoing fundraising, and a direct ask letter for all of the volunteers. I had spent last night setting up a demo of a charitable contributions database and showed Jane this morning. I think she was a little dazzled but I'm going to try to write up some guidelines for her to be able to mess around with the database this weekend. Norton was just plain floored (he's a bit more techno-savvy) and made me feel like I had made a huge difference in the progress of the organization. I really feel like I've started into the substantial part of my development contributions here.
After the ECD meeting, I headed out to the office that houses their high school and gap year programs which turned out to be in a proper office building in downtown(ish) Rondebosch. The first meeting was to discuss a proposed budget for a prospective program that would significantly improve the high school program by having staffed tutors that hold after-school programs everyday at 2-3 high schools rather than the program now that stretches volunteer tutors across 6 high schools. This gave me sort of an intense run-down of this side of SAEP and I was able to ask some pointed questions to the people who have gotten to know the program and the challenges involved very well. We went out to lunch and I got to see more of Rondebosch which is so ridiculously like American suberbs you would forget where you are if not for the gigantic mountain towering in the sky (again, I was so happy to actually be able to see the mountain today!). For the rest of the day, I sat in with Norton and Ryan (one of the grad students from the Clinton school) and we basically discussed the vision, goals and future of SAEP which is what I had been missing in my sort of development perspective but now I really feel like I have a grasp on at least where they are in the process. It's such an incredibly exciting to be taking part in the innovative thinking and strategic planning that's going on at this time in SAEP's lifeline. I found today to be one of the most exhilerating experiences I've had working with a non-profit in quite some time and I'm very excted for the direction they're headed and the role that I can play in helping them get there. Plus, the sunny skies and the plan-making for hikes this weekend did not hurt - on to Lion's Head tomorrow after work!!