Sylvia's Journal

After our first day of work in Ghana I can say that we made progress on one front and were set back on another. The senior leadership program is beginning to take shape. We got something I have wanted to get for months: a determination of which teams shall participate. We also have a rough idea on when this program might start and who will facilitate. I am testing the model that we constructed only a week ago in Cambridge on what sets senior leaders apart from the district teams we have been working with here in Ghana – that got a good response too.

The next hurdle will be to get attention from the very (very) busy senior leaders and their subordinates so that we can explore what they are up against, collectively and individually. We are calling and trying to get appointments but so far no luck. I have used up one of my 4.5 days here, so this will be an exciting race against the clock.

The setback is that the submission of our research proposal to the authorities, which we had thought had been duly submitted as required three weeks ago turned out to have been lost in between offices. This led to a frantic scramble to get official letters from collaborating institutions here and in the US, and a new document, written according to guidelines that have only now been revealed to us, a literature review, consent letters, etc. People and organizations like ADRA and GIMPA are coming to our rescue.

The document has to be delivered, in 13 bound copies, at the Ministry’s Research Unit early this morning – with no guarantee that the review board will get to it, or consider our handiwork of last night sufficient. The next meeting is in 2 months, too late for us to piggy back the low budget research project to the leadership development program that starts in one month. This delay would effectively nix the research project.

La Rue, bless her soul, is doing the re-writing as she knows about research and the requirements of Institutional Review Boards. I would have been totally flummoxed. My contribution was to deliver the connections and a cell phone with enough minutes to produce at least some of the letters and endorsements, including a phone call from the highest authority. Whether this will help remains to be seen and we are keeping our fingers crossed behind our backs. One step forwards, one (or two) backwards.

In the meantime a surge of energy is coming in through the internet from Sita who has set out, with her Value Web colleagues and graphic facilitator buddies to connect the dots around the world. The dots are all the people who are working for social justice and eradicating all sorts of bad stuff from the globe – not for profit but out of a deep sense of obligation, or simply the excitement of trying out something new. She is bringing idealist fervor to the table that is in sync with what our new president is trying to hold on to in the midst of public outcries and self-righteous and simplistic demands.

Sita wants me to connect her to other people who are experimenting at the edges, innovators, creative geniuses, social experimenters. It makes me search my mind for people in my network who love this sort of ambiguity, open-endedness, and would embrace the idealism of such an outrageous idea (what? work together, hook up with people around the globe, across disciplines to make the world a better place?).

It has been tried before and it can be tried again, each time a little different. The codeword I am learning, as I follow her quest, is re.co.de which stands for repetition (as in iteration), collaboration and design. I made a subfolder in my inbox to hold all this energy tightly together. I named the folder ‘Sita CTW’ – the last letters stand for Change The World.

But when I go through my network I find very few of the kind she is looking for and more of the kind who, I think, would ask me: what’s this all about ?(answer: an idea as in idealism); what’s the result ? (answer: we don’t know); what’s the outcome? (answer: something good); how would we measure that? (answer: beats me); who would benefit? (answer: everyone except the really bad people); who’s funding this? (answer: no one in particular moneywise, and everyone who joins, energy wise).

At a closer look of her last email last night I noticed that her signature stamp said, Sita Magnuson – Vice President, US – The Value Web. Imagine that, we have a VP in the family. I am so proud of her, not so much of the VP title, although that is certainly cool, but because of the energy she is applying to this connecting people to one another around the world for a greater good. It’s a long way from the moody adolescent who said she wanted to be a garbage collector in New York City because someone had convinced her they made so much money, and that’s what she wanted.