United Nations Development Programme

I won my first grant in Albania on Monday! The Association for Women with Social Problems (AWSP) won an award from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for an anti-domestic violence campaign this week and I'm psyched to have worked on it. I was a little surprised about the timing, we had only submitted the grant the Monday before and that meant turn around of less than a week. I'm not sure if that's the norm or an exception in this case though.

I'm especially pleased at the turnout because the project started off with some bumps. I didn't get told about the grant competition until Thursday afternoon on Nov. 6 and proposals were due Monday morning, Nov. 10 which left me with about 1 business day to write this.

Ok, fine...deep breath...

Fortunately they had started on it (sort of) and at least had a clear idea of what they wanted to do (mostly). My counterpart Aureola gave me her first draft which made me a little uneasy. All of the staff at AWSP are program people (social workers, psychiatrists, etc.) so their development work lacks a certain polish. UNDP had included a rubric with their RFP and a quick check against AWSP's proposal found that a lot of the requested information were missing. The planned project itself was pretty good but it hadn't been entirely thought out to its completion and none of the supplemental information that usually goes with a grant proposal was ready.

The project itself is pretty well designed: it's an awareness campaign aimed at reducing domestic violence in low income areas by targeting high school students. Most of the campaign was pretty standard stuff (discussion groups, posters, training peer-to-peer educators) but there were some very innovative components too. AWSP was organizing an art exhibition depicting students' perceptions of domestic violence to be displayed in participating schools and a street theater piece doing much the same thing. For the theater piece the organization is copying a model actually developed by a Serbian NGO in Belgrade that forces people to visualize the violence and its consequences. They showed me a DVD of the performances from the Belgrade campaign and it's pretty impactful stuff, I was impressed.

I had gotten to the office around 2 on Thursday (I work with Civil Society Development Center on Thursdays and Fridays) and ended up leaving around 7 after working with Aureola and other staff to fill in the (many) blanks on their proposal. I finally left when they closed up shop but not before making them swear on their mothers' graves that they would get me the outstanding information I still required by the next day. I mocked up the visual over dinner that night, which, I really think is one of the most important parts of any proposal. Probably the most important thing I learned at Alford is: if you can represent it visually, you should. It's really true, how much of your work do people generally read? Especially if they have it all laid out in a single powerpoint slide? Unfortunately working in the developing world means limited access to color printers so I had to work in black and white.



We got the technicals and supplementals done on Friday by COB but I ended up coming in on Saturday anyway to look over the financials and oversee production. Hopefully that won't become a habit here but I had enough crunch times in the U.S. to know that I should expect them here too. The one ambiguous point about working through Peace Corps that I can't decide whether I like or not is that I don't have to really account for my time at the end of the week. It's great in a lot of ways because I can do a 48 hour push like this without a) having to worry about getting overtime approved and b) being able to spend as much time on something as I think it needs without someone demanding why the project is taking so long. I remember doing 9 drafts of a project outline at Alford until my boss was happy and then his boss coming to me and telling me to justify the long development period. Sigh.

The downside of being detached from the traditional work schedule is that, now, if something needs to get done, it needs to get done and it doesn't matter if work hours are over or not. When I left my cubicle at 5 in the U.S. I was done working because I was encouraged not to work on projects after hours. After all, they'd have to pay me more then. But here spending nights and weekends in front of RFP's will probably be, if not regular, at least not unusual.

I prefer being busy to the alternative though. After a month of doing nothing in Armenia waiting out the war I'm not going to complain about having too much to do.

We got it wrapped up on Saturday although I did make sure to meet one last time with the Executive Director to do one last rundown. The project AWSP was proposing was slightly different than the focus of UNDP's grant so I made sure to talk that through with her. I was worried about getting disqualified after all that but she just smiled.

The ED at AWSP has built her organization and her reputations like most founders of non-profits do. She's a smart and motivated woman with great people skills and has relied on the relationships she's built over the years, not the quality of her proposals, to keep her groups funded. That usually works to get an organization's immediate needs but it usually means there's never much motivation to put the effort required into funding requests. It's like an oil rich country: most of the money comes from a single source (in this case, the ED) so other sectors never get developed. The problems usually come when the founder retires or the funders start asking for details.

So when she told me "don't worry, I'm dropping it off myself, there won't be any problems..." I was about ready to strangle her. Fine, you got funded in the past but how long is that going to last? Your personal relationships will only take you so far and international aid isn't going to stay in Albania forever.

Sigh, I knew this was going to be a problem going in but it's still frustrating to see, especially in a high functioning organization like The Association. I imagine that's going to be my biggest battle here: working with people to build professional capacity. I'm working with Civil Society Development Center on a plan to that effect but that's another blog post.

For now, we won and I'm happy. After going through about 4 months of training I finally got to get to some real work and I got a great start already.


Special Note: I almost forgot! Special thanks to Katie for helping me proof-read the project! Thanks sweetie, it was a HUGE help!