GRACARO hosted a meeting calling on organizations to partner together and be in a network. This was in a one-day meeting at the GRACARO office, up station, Bamenda, Saturday February 17.
The idea of the network came about as a result of the challenges GRACARO faced. According to the CEO of GRACARO. Mr Chiabi Martin, the initiative of the network came about to sharpen ourselves for better implementation of our projects in the public. We are calling on organizations to sharpen ourselves together and share experiences together to see how we can move. The first criteria to belong should be a registered organization or one with hopes to register. If not registered, it would be difficult to develop a profile to be used for projects. For the network to be functional, each organization has to be registered to be founding members of the network where members agreed to register with an amount agreed amongst them. The CEO of home of hope, hopes they can register in installments to be able to move on. The network is out to project different visions.
The organizations present had some assessment sessions with GRACARO to evaluate their activities to see if they can be able to work together as a network. According to the CEO, the assessments were to see how we are strong and weak such that when plan of actions are developed, we can know how to help each other. Even when there is a project, we can know which organization is the lead. If there’s a project on mental health, not every organization can better manage it. We can delegate it to an organization working on mental health like FACIA.
It was agreed that, deadline for the registration should be late April. The registration is a seed capital to use. to generate things to start moving. It is important to strategize how things can start moving and they as well need to put things in order to quit talking about the vision in theory.
Due to the meeting, some suggestions were made; To contract a grant writer, empower the person and what it takes, put on a salary and we can pay and target to have at least five projects running.
Websites, professional emails; we should put a plan for that as soon as possible. It gives some form of credibility.
It was also agreed that between now and ending march, we should have our first capacity building seminar. CEOs should understand how to use the internet, how to run meetings, how to lead our different teams. To handle topics that can build us as CEOs in organizations.
Training center. The focus is to empower three training centers for now. Bamenda, Boyo and Bena Kuma such that our different websites can be saturated with those trainings and catch the attention of funders. Activities in the training centers would include; Sewing, computers, cookery, traditional wear marking. We can train someone who does cakes to learn and be at the center. It was also suggested that, if anyone comes across a person with disability, we should encourage them to learn a trade. We can bring them to our centers. It will give us a lot of credibility. When we have about three projects and implement well, we will hardly lack a project. When we see something beneficial to us, we will see how we can raise to attain our goal, as pointed out by Mr Chiabi Martin
The training centers has 3 advantages
It will give us credibility to funders
We will achieve our objectives our focus is to empower and restore hope.
Generate us income through the articles that will be sold and through projects.
We should encourage persons with disability in our quarters to be trained in our center of which they will be motivated at the end with a machine and some materials.
