Reflection #3: Sharp or broad

Picture CISV as a pyramid. I usually say that the development of CISV is not pending on the sharpness of the few at the top but on how high and open the lowest level of knowledge is. Surely it's great if the EEC, the committees, the national boards, etc are competent and good leaders. However, in line with my reasoning here, the development of the organisation is more pending on how open the organisation is to new individuals, how quick they can take on roles of responsibility and how much support they get for doing that. Meaning, the organisation is not built from the top but from the wide (app. 200 chapters) bottom and up.

Secondly, I sometimes talk about "the positive spiral". When one has a leadership position in CISV one are often faced with the fortunate challenge that the financial resources are less than what are needed. Fortunate since if it was the other way around one should question the combined will of the organisation. The positive spiral is prioritising among available resources in a way so that you build the organisation in an order that feeds it self; one thing leads to more members, which leads to more human resources, that leads to more camp, that leads to more money, etc...

We can all agree on this and should ask ourselves why I spend your time giving my point of view on something so obvious.

Well, the reason is that I think this is obvious for us in theory but not yet in practice. When someone finds CISV and shows interest to join he or she is usually bombarded with acronyms and the answers to his or her questions is to often "since that's the way it's always been done". To my knowledge that person does not get a full and easy accessible explanation on how CISV works as an organisation (he or she is put into a box and trained within that box, i.e. programme leader)

When someone joins CISV as a child in an activity, parent to a child or as a programme-leader he or she takes his first step in CISV. After that one can take many steps – do more programmes, take on roles of responsibility, and engage in the chapter/national/international level. During a few years I've taken these steps, both in number of programmes and with different responsibilities at different levels.

It's a bit hard to follow the red-line in this reflection and I'm sorry for this. But here comes a shot at a summary. When we need to prioritise among available resources, in order to build a positive spiral one has to look at the organisation as it is today and ask what we need to do first to make a lasting positive development.

I think that we need to put a full focus on chapter development. We should support the chapter by making easily available guidebooks on best practice for how to build a local chapter. The guide should include concrete tips and checklists. The parts in the guide should be i.e. democracy, economy, diversity, training, the programmes, hosting, sending, information, recruitment, structures, etc. And the target groups for this should be 14-18 year olds and my mom (who is not active in CISV).