Professional Development: Peace Corps/ Project Design and Management Workshop

Project Design and Management Workshop in Nakhon Ratchasima Province

August 28-30, 2013

While serving in Peace Corps Thailand, my counterpart - a Thai English teacher named Sirilak Happana - and I applied for and attended a Peace Corps run Project Design and Management Workshop. We decided to apply so we could learn how to generate buy-in in our community to launch English education service related projects that targeted youth and older community members. We had been having trouble acquiring funding and also convincing community leaders to invest in our ideas and projects aimed to raise the English literacy rates in my rural community.

In Nakhon Ratchasima, my counterpart and I spent two days learning about how to create a project plan and how to apply for funding through grants offered by different non-profit organizations throughout Thailand. During the conference, we spent most of time working hard, completing various tasks and identifying key components and people to help us achieve our project goals. To design our projects, we first created a vision for what we would like to see come to fruition in our community. Next we identified community assets, people and organizations, who could help us reach our goals. Then we looked at different examples of goals and how they relate to their corresponding visions. After understanding this relationship between vision and goals, we were able to set our goals according to our chosen vision for our community.

During the second day we were able to look at the relationship between goals and objectives in order to help us create objectives for a number of our goals.

We were required to write our own objectives which corresponded to one of our goals. Next we were asked to look at the feasibility of our working project plan and outline the potential problems that could cause our project to fail. After identifying and outlining these risks, we created a detailed action plan for each of our objectives with a timeline and specific steps to take in order to reach the objectives.

We also filled out a chart that identified the actions to take (in order to reach our objectives), when the actions should be taken, who would be taking these actions and who would be monitoring these steps. Lastly with our projects, we looked at creating a budget, how to outsource in-kind donations, how to apply for grants, and the initial steps for our project. Our budgeting chart explained which materials, supplies, equipment, and transportation would be required, and the cost of these items. After going through our project monitoring checklist, we filled out a community project evaluation plan and identified the first steps to be taken in order to launch our projects. By signing the first steps agreement, we had completed the workshop.

This workshop was incredibly helpful for my counterpart and me to brainstorm together and work together. It provided us the time and access to information we otherwise did not have in our community. However only one out of two our projects were successful. I believe that in addition to my counterpart, a community leader should have also been asked to attend the conference - however because of budgeting the conference was only offered to one counterpart and the volunteers.

Once we returned to our site, we had a lot of trouble generating buy-in for our second project, mostly because the individuals who could grant permission for us to execute our project did not attend the workshop. We had a difficult time convincing my community's leaders to invest in our ideas because of their own prerogatives and certain cultural and social norms that prevail the country.