Scrambling for the Philippines

By Jason Schwartzman,
Director of Program Development

Note: Jason Schwartzman, CCF’s director of Program Development, traveled to the Philippines recently for a workshop to discuss CCF’s programming. This is the first of several blog entries from Jason’s experience.

For the past five months, I've been part of a team headed by the Christian Children’s Fund Asia Regional Office that includes colleagues from Africa and the Americas designing a workshop with two broad objectives – to gain a deeper understanding of the principles underlying CCF's programming, and equally important – and sometimes I feel even more important – to build a questioning, exploring and adaptive approach to program development and implementation that is aligned with our organizational value of fostering and learning from our own innovation.

I've self-critically felt that we have not created these opportunities for National Office colleagues in recent years – a space to come together, to re-engage in how we approach programming to better help children, with experience under our belt, colleague to colleague.

So you'd think with five months to prepare, I would have delivered the workshop module I was personally responsible for a long time ago. But I'm madly trying to polish it off, closing the door to my office the last few days, preserving battery power while I'm in the airport, scrunched up over my tray table frantically making changes to the PowerPoint before my battery dies two hours into my flight to Manila in the Philippines.

Even in the airport pick up van, on my way to the hotel where we'll be holding the meeting, I'm still making last second changes. I'm late. Once again. I've successfully lived up to my reputation.

Coming soon: Jason steps back into CCF's past.