Second Board Training

We only had a day to prepare for our second and our third Board trainings, as the schedule had to be changed from what we had originally planned. We used the feedback that we had received to really shape the structure of the second session, which gave us a ton of room to work with.

My Dad helped Graham and I out a few weeks back when we were initially struggling with the concepts of the training. We had previously been looking at it as a mandatory requirement, some sort of obstacle between the elections and the first Board meeting. It was an afterthought, and we were trying to figure out how to make it sound like it wouldn’t be such a burden to the members. Dad suggested that we switched our focus from having it as a requirement to having it as an educational opportunity. Since this is a culture where education is highly valued but few people are highly educated, turning this into a certifiable course would give members an incentive to be involved. I was unsure of if the members would even realise this was what we were trying to do. But listening to the members tell their stories proved me wrong. Rose, who is very shy, told us how she had never been given either education or the opportunity to interact with foreigners. She wasn’t the only one who placed a high value on the education we were providing. I found it very amazing to watch the work I had put into the project transform into an invaluable experience for seven individuals.

 Our theme for the second session was Goal Setting and Community Involvement, which gave the Board plenty of topics to talk about. We tried out role playing between a ‘board member’ and a ‘client’, which did not go as smoothly as we had planned, but gave the members plenty of opportunities to critique ways to talk with clients. We taught the concepts of SMART goals and how to talk with clients about moving forward with the Bank.

We also held a very important conversation on Wednesday with the Board that we had been quite nervous about.We had to bring up the differences between confidentiality and transparency. Both were hotly contested topics at the focus groups, and we felt we had to make it very clear what information we wanted to be spread throughout the community, and what needed to stay within the Bank. Thankfully everyone agreed to what we thought about regarding member privacy and leaking information. What a relief.