Marc Young has been stymied for a while, but yesterday (June 27th) received his China visa, and will fly to Beijing Monday AM. He'll spend 2 days or soin Beijing making the rounds of NGO, UNDP, and business contacts that might be informative or helpful, then will head down to Chengdu.
Stefanie Chang and John Hancock have been in Chengdu for several weeks, and through the wonders of Skype Marc and I have been able to do mostly-daily conference calls as they work through many approaches to find the combination of access, need, and authority that might allow us to have an effective project.
Clearly there are sensitive geographic areas, and also some sensitivities re the need/benefit to have outsiders help with the recovery effort. Stay tuned, as I believe this situation will resolve itself within the next two weeks or so, though the outcome is uncertain.
If you have contacts in China that you believe may be helpful to us drop me an email at david@hodr.org and I'll follow up.
We had a pleasant HODR social event in Boston ( again, I know....) June 11th, including a helpful open discussion forum during that afternoon. About 20 were on hand for the afternoon, and about 50 for the evening.
Some take-aways: need more geographic balance, and weekend events would allow more traveling/workers to participate. So, we will have our next event in Portland, OR sometime in early October, trying to be sensitive to day-of-week. Eventually we would like to have a get-together about every 6 months, moving them around the country (-ies, any votes from NZ or UK?)
Comments at the meeting complimented HODR on our traditional transparency re financials, but suggested more openness around hiring, management decisions, etc. We'll try to use this vehicle, and maybe the volunteer newsletter, to accomplish that. The general sense was that we don't send TOOOO many e-mails, though we worry when we pack a deployment announcement on top of other stuff, but we'll try to stay sensible.
Another obvious suggestion ( duh) was to allow those who couldn't attend to send in questions, so we'll do that next time; also we'll be sending out a satisfaction survey ( are we becoming too corporate?) so we can tell the skeptics that "our people" really do like our minimalist model.
We have just completed a job search to replace Paula Ogletree, who made a personal decision to return home to Atlanta. Beca Howard, who's been a great HODR (and Persevere) volunteer and project#2 over the past 3 years will become our Communications Manager, and bring her experienced perspective to volunteer dialogue, plus fund raising activities with vols and with the public. Teryn Weintz is our first Director of Development, and will concentrate on introducing our model to foundations, corporations, and major individual donors. Our overall plan is to raise sufficient funds to increase our project capacity, eventually to the point that we have projects available, in major geographic areas, at all times! We'll talk more about those plans, and why, in future blogposts.
Lastly, Marianna, and others at the June event, opined that we don't have to update this blog every week for it to be helpful, but we'll commit to at least monthly, and see how that goes.
Keep your cards and letters coming, send info@hodr.org updated email addresses, and I hope to see you at a project soon.
davidC
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