This week’s SoroptiVoice comes from Robyn Cain, SI South West Pacfic’s Federation Programme Director. Here she explains the structure of SISWP’s programme work and how this helps to keep clubs connected.
Soroptimists all over the world work within
their clubs to improve the lives of women and girls. Their club activities are
reported to a federation programme team to indicate the areas being addressed and as a record of current work being carried out. In the past, coordinators were each responsible for a “Programme Area” such as
Health and Education. At the 2007 SI
Convention a decision was made to remove Programme Areas and move to the main programme goal and introduce 10 programme objectives. These were broadly
aligned to the old programme areas.
The Programme
Coordinators in the South West Pacific Federation were concerned that this move
did not fully reflect how they communicated with regions and clubs in the
federation and developed a new structure to improve that situation. In 2009 the
SWP Board voted on a new model aimed at improving the contact between programme
team members and clubs by reassigning the duties of the Programme Coordinators.
Instead of being responsible for a programme topic, four coordinators have been
assigned a group of regions with varying numbers of clubs. Overall the division
of clubs in each zone is almost equal across the federation.
The structure is
called “The Zonal Solution” and we believe it delivers a better understanding of programme functions across the Federation. The Zone
Coordinators are:
Zone A. Di Lockwood (New South Wales, New Zealand North, Nth Queensland, Fiji and Mongolia);
Zone B. Helena Cheah (Western Australia, New Zealand Central, Tasmania, Hong Kong (SAR),
Solomon
Islands and Singapore),
Zone C. Julie Marsaban (Victoria, New Zealand South, Sth Queensland, Samoa, Thailand and Cambodia)
Zone D. Florence Brennan (South Australia, Riverina, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and Indonesia)
We also have two Assistant
Programme Directors – Theresa Lyford (Zones A&B) and Paula Siddle (Zones
C&D). The APD’s are responsible for approving Programme Focus Reports as SWP
doesn’t have paid staff to do this task. We feel the quality of Programme Focus
Reports has been very much improved by having the APD’s reviewing and approving
the reports.
Finally, we have one Programme
Director which is me! The PD is, as in other federations, the conduit
between Soroptimist International and the federation members through the above
structure.
The structure has
been in place for a year now and we will be evaluating progress in the next few
months. This has been a major paradigm shift for members and the programme team
but we believe that by making this change it will be an easier task to keep all the clubs informed and present any future changes to the Programme Focus that may occur.
Members in ‘developed’ countries generally have
a good support base around them with other clubs close by and easy access to technology which makes asking for help when they run into minor problems very easy. There are, however, clubs which do not have
other groups close by and their work is done in some isolation. Our ever
increasing use of the Internet for communications has improved this situation
for some but intermittent, poorly serviced connections can leave many
members still feeling somewhat cut off.
This is a challenge and something we will continue to work to overcome but it does feel like the new structure has helped to ‘bring in’ isolated clubs. Perhaps the South West Pacific “Zonal
Solution” wouldn’t work in other federations as we are still small in
comparison to the other Federations. But it is a change in
thinking. We have taken this step to
enable us to work more effecitvely with our more remote regions and clubs to ensure they feel they are truly
part of our wonderful organisation!