An interview Mari Velasco, Lorene Staka, and Joanna Eng of the Idealist
Photos in flickr
The Idealist, a project of Action Without Borders,connects people, organizations, and resources to help build a better world. If you want to get involved in social change issues or work with nonprofits anyplace on the globe, the Idealist is one of the first desinations on the web you should visit.
The Idealist recently launched a new initiative, Can You Imagine a Better World? Next week, participants from all over the world are holding start-up meetings to imagine, connect, and act!
Action Without Borders is an 11 year-old nonprofit organization with an amazing history of accomplishment and growth. I recently tracked down several women who work for the organization in their New York and Buenos Aires offices, including Lorene Straka, Joanna Eng, and Mari Velasco for an interview.
1. Lorena, you've worked for the organization for almost 8 years, starting as an intern and moving to Chief of Staff position, what was your background prior to your internship? Why did you decide to intern for the idealist?
8 years! Wow. It all started with a subway ride...I met the founder, Ami Dar, on a subway two weeks after moving to New York in 1999. During our commute uptown he very, very briefly told me about the Imagine project and I was intrigued. As part of this bigger project, he was looking for an intern to research countries that didn't allow their citizens to create nonprofit organizations.
When I joined, we were a staff of three, and we're now at 55 in two countries: the US and Argentina. It was, and continues to be, a great crew of people.
2. The Idealist.org has a long history of using the web for delivering it services/programs, what do you think the opportunities are for the idealist to extend its impact embracing new web tools (e..g web2.0 Social media, etc.)
Lorene Straka:
We're about harnessing every resource and tool available to promote connections between people, ideas and resources and the more ways to do that, the better! We're a small organization with limited resources, but we're creative, ambitious and are doing our best to keep up and capture the best of what's out there.
Mari Velasco:
We have made some recent changes to expand our use of new web tools, but there's always more we could do! We have started to make our presence known on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and we're encouraging people to use sites like Flickr and YouTube to share their photos and videos with the Idealist network. We'd still like to do more, though, to integrate these tools into the flow of our website.
We've also started using a wiki for a volunteer research project, and we'll probably expand our use of wikis in the future. The wiki model has great potential for us: since we are always looking to share resources through our website, why not make it easier for the public to contribute great ideas and resources they know about? The key with all of these new web tools is that they help us make our work more collaborative, help our network come alive!
3. Can you tell me some stories about how your organization has connected people, organizations, and resources to realize change?
Mari Velasco:
I am originally from Ecuador and have two stories about connection. I lived at the Galapagos islands for 2 years and last year a friend who runs an important NGO in the islands wrote me thanking me because through Idealist he managed to find 2 volunteers from Spain to work on a project about organic agriculture. He said he felt it was going to be impossible trying to find people from a little island in the middle of the Pacific ocean and that he was thankful that there's a site like Idealist to connect people all over the world, and that it works!
The other story is from another friend who is the executive director of a great NGO (Fundacion Futuro del Ecuador) that works with indigenous communities living on the highlands, helping them have access to decent health care system. They empower the communities so they can run the program themselves through "cooperativas" and she needed desperately the help of volunteers for a nutritional project to complement the health care program, and two argentinians from Patagonia traveled to Ecuador to give her a hand with the project and they have done amazing things and had a great life experience. This happened from the connections they made on idealist.
4. I understand that there will be over 200 start-up meetings in 53 countries scheduled for the week of February 5-11. What are are some of the common themes?
Most are about improving their communities and networking. There are also meetings focused on youth, sexuality, volunteerism, and persons with disabilities.
5. What else would you like to tell us about your organization or programs?
Come take advantage of this amazing oportunity to connect with people in their communities (and all over the world) to work together and improve the place where they live. This is the best way to empower ourselves and to pass our enthusiasm to others. The world can really be changed by the power of positive and active people working side by side with the same objective.
Comments