Dr. Muthusami Kumaran, Associate Professor of Nonprofit Management & Community Organizations, Department of Family, Youth & Community Sciences, CALS/IFAS, has been assisting the NGO sector in Belize during the past two years through a grant funded by the U.S. Embassy - Belize. Entitled “Strengthening Civil Society and Civil Servant Capacity in Belize through Partnership,” this grant project’s primary purpose is to train 100 NGO leaders and 60 civil servants through technical workshops and various hands-on activities for organizational management capacity building and collaborative partnerships.
This project’s innovative approaches include: providing basic & advanced-level management training to selected NGOs through the Training of Trainers (TOT) process; and establishing a Community of Practice (CoP) for NGOs and civil servants to promote collaborative partnerships. Originally planned for the duration between September 2018 – September 2020, the project had to be extended until March 2021 due to the pandemic. In the first year of the project, Dr. Kumaran conducted basic training workshops for NGOs across three cities in Belize.
Due to Covid-related cancellations of his several planned trips to Belize in the second year, he had to convert all project activities to online platforms. During the past two weeks, he conducted two advanced training workshops online (Zoom) for more than 150 NGO leaders and government officials. The topics covered by his workshops included:
* Strong foundations & legal aspects of managing NGOs/CSOs
* Good governance & Executive Leadership
* Systematic program/project planning, monitoring & evaluation
* Strategic planning
* Communication and community relations
* Marketing for fundraising & volunteering
* Grant writing
* Networking and collaboration (with NGOs and Civil Servants)
Dr. Kathleen Colverson, Dr. Emilia Hodge, and Dr. Michael Spranger (Emeritus Professor, FYCS) were members of the project’s UF team and contributed to the success of various activities.
"This is a high impact project with long-lasting benefits for the civil society of Belize. Essentially, through our TOT model, we trained more than a hundred NGO leaders on vital organizational management strategies and provided them with all the resource materials needed to train their colleagues across Belize. We’ve also established a platform through the project’s CoP for NGOs and government officials to work together as partners in public service delivery.", said Dr. Kumaran.
This project is truly a testament to the reach of UF/IFAS on a global scale, even during a global pandemic.