Chair's Summary of the Year

The year of 07/08 is coming to an end and in August CISV International assembles in Florence to have its Annual International Meeting. So as you can imagine, there are a few things to do before everything is ready and we can present our past year to the board at the same time as we ask to be given (entrusted with) new responsibilities for the coming year.

I was just at the International Office in Newcastle to work out the new mosaic programme goals and indicators together with our educational officer Kiran Hingorani. I also discussed the administrative procedures with our admin officer Helen Pringle. Two great and productive days. Newcaste was showing his or her best side as well.

But I will try already now to make a summary of the year:

To start off with, IMC have met all strategic objectives of the committee, as said in the plan for 07/08. This includes
- Continuous support to hosting NAs
- Increasing hosting NAs
- Maintain NGO database
- Increase the number of qualified project coordinators

The plan of the year was to consciously move from ‘performing’ back to ‘norming’ to ensure that everyone in the committee shared the same picture of the vision of Mosaic. That job was very successful during AIM 2007, which allowed us to again during the year move up to ‘performing’ again. This applies specially to the training field and we hoosted two big trainings in the americas, USA and Brazil bringing many potental trainers and project staff together. Adding to that we have had seven first time and return visits to chapterns and NA’s. As a result of the trainings we’ve done the amount of approved projects have increased and for the two first rounds of proposals we have 23 approved projects. It should be compared with 27 alltogether for the whole of 2007. At AIM we will probably be beyond that. Worth noting is that the quality of projects doesn’t differ anything in the differet regions. Mosaic, as a programme, is capable of showing increased growth and quality worldwide.

However, lots of focus has been put into creating good ‘norming’ instruments during the year which garantuees certain standards and delivery. Here, most developments have been on support and approval of projects as well as training tools. This allow us to have more unity in our feedback to project coordinators and chapters. The job to get more efficient on this feedback is ongoing. On the support and approval development we are piloting, during all of 2008, a project to balance growth and quality. We are, at this point, half way there, and at AIM necessary changes will be made to ajdust the original idea to our present situation.

Lastly, I would like to highlight the new IMC website at resources. Our communication with project coordinators, mosaic trainers and chapters now have an excellent comunication channel, that will increase the quality of our communication of course. And adding to that, I hope you will read the Mosaic Magazine : )

A big thank you to all project coordinators out in the chapters, to all volunteers helping out with training and support and to my committee-members, who are hard working, committed and constantly ready to take on leadership, when their chair might lack the time, which sometimes happens.

//Per