March 12 to 18th, Stairway had the pleasure and the honor to host the Asian Regional Capacity Building Workshop for the 7 other Asian recipients of the 2015 Stars Impact Award. Aside from honoring the recipient with a 50,000 $ price of unrestricted funding, Stars also helps the awardees with organizational development assistance over a couple of years following the award.
In connection with the awarding ceremony in Paris last December, we had a number of workshops and sharing sessions between all the award winners. One objective was to identify where our major challenges lie. In our Asian group, we reached a consensus that fund raising and human resource management probably pose the greatest challenges for our efficiency and sustainability. Thus, the focus of our Regional Capacity Building Workshop was directed towards those 2 major topics, and Stars found a very capable facilitator, who made sure that we all left the sessions with new knowledge and inspiration.
Aside from the technical learning sessions, the week offered plenty of opportunity for all of us to get to know each other better and to better understand the work that each of our organizations is engaged with. As a host of the event, we had the privilege to share more in detail, and we could treat our guests with 2 different theater presentations (the Lorax and Cracked Mirrors), our family home program, a farm visit in the mountains, a sail and snorkeling trip on our Sea Adventure School boat, and much more.
Gauged from spontaneous feedback and the post event evaluation, everybody had a wonderful and very enriching time. Thank you to Stars for this initiative in bringing all the award winners together once again for further capacity building, and thank you to Kate Griffin for excellent facilitation. We look forward to a follow up session next year!
Images by Shallah Montero