At the beginning of June we held our fourth Global ICS Workshop in Nairobi, Kenya. Attended by 10 of our 11 agencies, including our two new ICS Entrepreneur agencies - Balloon Ventures and Challenges Worldwide - we totalled 35 participants including our facilitation team from the ICS Hub - our biggest global workshop yet!
Unlike previous global workshops which have covered a wide range of topics from community integration to monitoring and evaluation of projects, this week focused on two aspects of ICS programming in much more detail, so I led the first half on volunteer learning and my colleague Phil led the second half on supervising and supporting diverse intercultural groups of volunteers. Being able to dig into the detail of the challenges and opportunities that these topics present led to some really interesting discussions and outputs/action plans from the week.
The other main difference between this and previous workshops was that nearly all ICS agencies were represented through a combination of UK and in-country staff. Working in a consortium of different agencies all delivering the same programme comes with its challenges at times, as anyone trying to work across multiple stakeholders with differing perspectives can testify, but it also brings a richness of opportunity for sharing and learning from different experiences, and a reassuring sense of "we're in this together".
My two volunteer learning days included how to support volunteers to set (and achieve) individual learning goals and how to support them to take their learning forward beyond their ICS placement (whether that be into the job market, further education or enterprise). We also looked at how to motivate volunteers by enabling them to see the bigger picture of ICS and how they, as one of 14,000 other young volunteers from a total of 30 countries are able to have a real impact. It was great to have Lattitude Global Volunteering and Raleigh International facilitate some of these sessions during the two days. As well as providing a welcome break from me(!), the power of agency-agency learning is immense as it's an opportunity to share from personal experience what works and what doesn't. Finally we did some sessions on writing strong volunteer development case studies, where the participants actually interviewed some ICS alumni from the UK and Kenya in order to write case studies.
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| Writing up flipcharts for sessions |
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| Recapping the volunteer learning journey |
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| Chisomo from Lattitude Malawi sharing a case study on setting volunteer learning goals |
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| Nana from Lattitude Ghana presenting on supporting ongoing volunteer learning |
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| Introducing the session on linking volunteer learning to impact and monitoring/evaluation |
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| Ruth, a VSO Kenya ICS alumnus from Kenya sharing her volunteer story |
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| Hamish, a Skillshare Botswana ICS alumnus from the UK (now working at Lattitude) sharing his volunteer story |
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| And with the case study the group designed to represent his story |
In the second half of the week, my colleague Phil took the lead on sessions around supervising and supporting a diverse group of volunteers. One of the things I'm most proud of in ICS is that we're not a gap year programme only open to the most privileged young people. We actively support and encourage applications from all different backgrounds, including those that are more challenging. But with this comes the need for strong supervision and support so that volunteers are able to work well as a team during their placement. The mental health of volunteers is just as important as ensuring they've got the right vaccinations and are drinking enough water for differing climates, so we also had an external facilitator from Interhealth Kenya lead a session on recognising and supporting volunteers with mental health issues.
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| Team leader role plays |
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| Interhealth Kenya session on supporting volunteers with mental health issues |
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| I'm only putting this in because it looks like I'm the only one in Phil's session and it makes me laugh! |
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| Small group discussions on the role of team leaders and staff in supervision and support |
On our penultimate evening in Nairobi we headed out to a local Ethiopian restaurant for food - a welcome break from the cabin fever of the hotel (due to the current security situation in Kenya we were advised not to go out alone). Then, as my flight home at the end of the workshop wasn't till the early hours of Saturday morning, I also squeezed in a quick visit downtown for an obligatory Tusker beer with some of the agency staff and an even quicker trip out to the local giraffe centre as they're my favourite animals in the whole world (and didn't disappoint).
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| Dinner out at the Ethiopian restaurant |
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| Speedy last evening Tuskers in downtown Nairobi before heading to the airport |
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| The downtown chaos below from the bar |
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| Best animals EVER |
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| Come on - aren't they! |
