First Meeting with Sonrisas

On last Wednesday the 10th of June I had my first meeting with the "Executive Board" of SonRisas and was my first direct contact with the group who run the NGO SonRisas. The exec board consisted of five adults’ ages 25-29 who were friends from earlier, some from elementary school through college, and the meeting was held in one of their houses in a very relaxed and friendly environment.

At the meeting we evaluated the strengths and weaknesses that the organization has and what can be done to promote and advance the organization. We used a technique that they recommended called the SWOT analysis and I have actually done this in some of my business classes in the US, so in a nerdy way it was awesome to see something from my classes being used in an international setting. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In this type of analysis we selected three main topics to analyze and then broke down each of the four categories and to better understand what was being done right and what could be improved in the future to better the organization. The topics included donations, alliances with in the community and SonRisas itself. This gave us a great idea of what we could do to improve problems as well as what we needed to continue doing and what was worth the effort.

I was very happy to be able to contribute to the group my first meeting and really felt that I had a positive impact in my first meeting. Two of my contributions included an idea for a news letter to the businesses that donate money and resources so that they can know exactly what their resources are being used for and give them an idea of a tangible impact they are having. I also recommended that we copy and paste some information from their website directly to Wikipedia and then continue to edit it in Spanish and English at a later date. I think this will be extremely important because before I came to Guatemala I had a very hard time finding information about the NGO. I think that Wikipedia is a great resource and it’s FREE! Utilizing this resource will allow businesses, students, and community members to easily search Google or Wikipedia for what exactly this NGO does and find a wealth of information on the topic.

Before the meeting I was excited to get to start working with SonRisas and making an impact on the community. Now after this meeting I am excited and encouraged by the fact that a group of young adults that were friends from earlier in life could come together (3 years ago) and start an organization to take an active step towards community development. This gives me great motivation that it IS possible for young people to come together, identify a problem in society, make alliances with in their community and actually make an impact. I think that my time here with SonRisas will be rewarding to the community as well as extremely rewarding for myself seeing young professionals at work to make their community better.

I have a meeting every Wednesday and work with the children on the Saturdays so I will continue to post about new information and insights.

Paz,

Jesse