Rumbo al Exito

Being a community economic development (or CED) volunteer here in Panama is a job that has many parts to it. Obviously the bulk of our efforts and work as PCV’s is focused on one community and often one group and one specific business. The range of projects amongst CED volunteers is pretty amazing. Some of us work with fisherman’s cooperatives, chocolate producers, farmers, artisans, tourism groups, and community microfinance. Big or small, Latino or Indigenous, CEDers work to help people improve their businesses, by helping identify areas that can be strengthened and teaching them the skills to do so.

In addition to the work we do in our communities, we often participate in and facilitate seminars which are designed to help us with our work. For example, a seminar that all volunteers attend with their counterparts is Project Management and Leadership or PML for short. (Side note: a counterpart is our main work partner in a community. Often the president of the group or someone motivated to organize a project. My counterpart is Esperanza, the president of my tourism group). PML teaches basic project planning and management skills such as time and money management, organizing a group, running a meeting and problem solving.

Recently, there has also been a push to develop a comprehensive seminar to teach professional business planning. Over the years PCV’s have worked to develop and adapt material to most effectively teach the material to people who often have no formal business training and little or no computer skills. Last year, I was able to participate in the seminar "Rumbo al Exito" or "Path to Success". With the vice president of my tourism group, Sergio, we wrote a professional business plan complete with full qualitative and quantitative analysis of the business. It was a lot of work, especially in Spanish but we both learned a lot. This year, those of us who took the seminar we asked to serve as facilitators. We had over 40 participants...20 volunteers and their counterparts took part in the seminar which took place over two weekends...one in June and the other just finished up on July 9th. The first seminar focused on the qualitative information then in the month between they were required to gather information about all the costs. It was a lot of work, but a great experience. Below are some photos from the two seminars. Enjoy!

Pumping up the energy with some games or dynamicas. A favorite is a version of rock, paper, scissors called "hombre, tigre, rifle"

Maria, a officer from a IPACOOP (Panamanian government agency that manages cooperatives) and Ben G. talking about including salaries for your employees to your operating costs.

Teachers extrordinare! From left, Lisa S., me and Lisa A.

Part of the group hard at work. We divided up the room by type of business. This is the tourism table.