Community Outreach Coordinator in Lesvos
Description: Reaching grassroots NGOs to assess their needs, assets and evaluate their metrics. Based on this to create project proposals or match NGOs together.
Organization: Campfire Innovation
Location: Lesvos Island, Greece
Year: Feb 2018 – Oct 2018
Context
I decided to join Campfire Innovation to take a step back and get a broader expertise of the humanitarian field.
It was a way to put my strategic skills back to work in a more conventional office setting. My goal was to assess NGOs and develop project proposals for them.
What problem did I solve?
My work has been divided in two parts.
During the first period, my work was to evaluate NGOs needs, problems and resources. I had then the responsibility to match and connect the local NGOs together so they could help each others.
The shift came suddenly with an insight: “grassroots NGOs are struggling with finances. They start to fundraise to friends and family but after months and years, it exhausts the donors. If the NGOs can’t diversify their income, they have to shut down by lack of funds. Why? Because to receive a grant, you need one or two years minimum of metrics showing the impact of your work. Grassroots NGOs don’t have this.”
This insight made us change our work. I then had to make a research about the metrics used by grassroots NGOs and then to work on the creation of a platform helping them to follow up with their metrics.
How did I solve it?
At first, it was a real networking job where I had to meet coordinators, write reports to the team in Athens and see, following our strategy, whom to connect with in priority.
For example we connected a Search And Rescue NGO with a legal NGO because there was a lot of tricky questions about maritime law in this difficult context. This evolved into a partnership were the legal NGO decided to extend its work on a new location.
When we shifted our work, I was able to use my existing network to interview NGOs about their internal process and gather insights on how they measured their impact. At the end of the research, we gathered around 20 different metrics.
What was the impact?
I understood how NGOs were organised. I became confident on advising my network on their strategic development, their online communication or their potential local partners.
I have used this experience to create a 3W map with 113 NGOs and services of Lesvos, and to become regional advisor on the biggest channel for Lesvos volunteers (Facebook group: Information point for Lesvos volunteers, with 20.000 followers).
