An age old conundrum for any young person is how to get experience when experience is required in order to get experience. The challenge of experience is even greater for young people who want to go into international fields. Opportunities are few and are often expensive. The model of the IHF has many strengths, such as working through collaborative, long-lasting partnerships and supporting the implementation of solutions to community’s self-stated needs. I think another strength of the IHF is that it provides young people with the chance to gain experience in international development while contributing to real change. In many organizations that do international development work, proficiency in a second language and experience living abroad are required even for entry level positions.
Through the IHF, students and volunteers work together in campus chapters and with partners in developing communities to implement projects that have tangible benefits. They are able to gain skills in project planning and management, cross-cultural communication and teamwork. They are able to do this with the support from their chapter members, their partners, and the IHF Central Officers who are always available to provide guidance and training. They also work together to fund raise through local and national efforts to make it possible for many to work in the field with partners. No matter what IHF members move on to after their undergraduate education, they will be able to use the skills they have gained.
The work of the IHF is not all about the chance to gain experience- it is also about working with partners to improve the lives of others. IHF members have worked to bring smokeless cook stoves to villagers in India, provide scholarships for students in Guatemala and increase access to health care in Costa Rica. The benefits that community members receive from these projects are also long lasting and will make a real difference in people’s lives. IHFers do receive experience from the work they do with the IHF, but what really drives them to take the time out of their busy schedules is because they truly want to work with partners to make a positive difference in the lives of others.
In the first post in this series, I took a look at some of the successes the IHF model has achieved in its first five years. I’d like to turn now to an important question for any organization - new or old, large or small - namely, “what can we do better?”
When looking back at our first five years, two major areas of improvement jump out.
Working with an all volunteer staff presents some apparent challenges, most immediately for the IHF’s capacity. Our volunteers work incredibly hard, and the work they do is invariably of high quality. But there are limits to what a group of volunteers can accomplish – at least if they want to sleep at night! At various points over the past five years we have had to pass on opportunities to benefit our partners due to a lack of capacity. At certain points, some of our volunteers have had to make unfair sacrifices to meet our obligations to our partners. Over the past year, we have increasingly felt the pinch of how many hours our volunteers can work as we have grown. We have been lucky to increase the number of volunteers. And we have been very lucky to benefit from the leadership of our Executive Director Heidi Jutsum, who is able to dedicate an amazing amount of time to making sure all the IHF’s volunteers are working in the right direction. This oversight is particularly important to our student volunteers – both to their growth, and to ensuring that they make meaningful contributions to our partners. But the IHF is at a point where full time staff are needed to effectively manage our volunteers and fulfill our obligations to partners.
This leads to the next significant challenge facing the organization - unrestricted fundraising to support our capacity growth. We have traditionally spent less than 2% of revenue on administration and overhead. We have not focused on raising funds to cover administration or overhead in the past. As stated above, focusing donations on the needs of our partners is one of the IHF’s central tenets. We have thought very deeply about whether we want to commit ourselves to funding a staff position.
But a full time staff position would roughly double the hours spent on IHF management and administration. More importantly, it would give this person the freedom to focus entirely on meeting our partner’s goals and fostering our volunteers’ growth. It would both expand our capacity and improve the quality of our work. With a relatively small investment, the IHF could take on new partners, work with more students and better support all our stakeholders achieving their goals.
We exist for our partners. We believe an investment in a full time staff person is consistent with our mission and model. It will present challenges, but also opportunities – and it is essential to the ongoing success of the IHF and the work we do with our partners and volunteers.
I’ll be following up next week with the last post in this series. Keep an eye out…
The IHF was founded more than five years ago to make a difference – but to do it differently. We saw ourselves as different in three ways:
- Focused on communities’ goals: we feel that putting communities in the lead on setting goals and executing projects would increase the sustainability of the IHF’s projects.
- Minimizing administration: we send donations directly to our partners abroad, and with volunteers contributing the vast majority of our labor, our administrative fees are lower than two cents per dollar – which means more resources for those who can best use them.
- Creating new leaders: by giving college students and young professionals experience with grassroots approaches to development, and giving them leadership opportunities within the IHF.
All of this sounded good on paper when the IHF got started. And it still sounds pretty good today. But how has this approach worked out on the ground?
What have we done well?
Reaching its fifth birthday is significant for any organization, but particularly for one that takes an innovative approach. The IHF’s continuous growth has been driven by three factors. First, all that we have accomplished is driven by the incredible hard work of our volunteers in the US and abroad. Second, our ability to learn and execute well has supported our ability to carry out an increasing number of increasingly complex projects. And throughout this, adherence to our model – what makes us different – has led to success on the ground.
Some numbers begin to tell this story – 300 families who don’t have to worry about indoor air pollution in India, two dozen Guatemalan kids who can attend school, a clinic in Costa Rica and dozens of graduates with exposure to grassroots development work. Working with the IHF has been genuinely life changing for many student volunteers who have gone on to focus on public health and economic development. We continue to influence students to take on the challenges of development in partnership with local communities through our work at Dartmouth and Haverford, and now at Brown.
So, there is much that we have done well. But where can we improve? More on that at the end of the week…
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