Preparing by procrastination

Disclaimer: I've never read a blog. I have no idea why people read blogs. But for some crazy reason, I thought it might be interesting to write a blog on my 4-month volunteer experience.

The Back-story
At 6am, I left Los Angeles and flew to Washington, DC to start my next life adventure. Starting tomorrow, I will begin volunteering at the Grameen Foundation to work on a Social Performance Measurement project as well as volunteer in Haiti with an organization called Fonkoze. This is an extremely exciting opportunity yet -- by 9 pm last night, I hadn't packed, purchased clothes for the difference in weather, and had only cursorily read the materials related to my assignment.


What Will I Do For 4 Months?
As part of a work assignment, I have the opportunity to work at a non-profit. In my case, I chose to work with Grameen Foundation, an organization focused on alleviating global poverty through "micro-finance, technology and innovative solutions." My primary project while working with Grameen will be to identify and build to measure the social impact of micro-finance programs -- effectively, help develop a tool that will objectively measure the effectiveness of an organization's claim that they are assisting the poor and measuring their ability to help move people out of poverty.

There are loads of social investing programs and funds that claim to reach the poor, but unlike financial metrics such as ROI, the micro-finance industry does not have a standard to measure their claims. Grameen hopoes that their Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) can help bridge that gap. In my assignment, I will focus of developing a tool that can be used in multiple micro-finance institutes (MFIs), in multiple cultural contexts AND THEN, specifically focus on implementing the tool within Fonkoze in Haiti. For Fonkoze, their hope is that the tool can be extended to integrate their food security metrics, entry & exit evaluations, and other social metrics they are already attempting to capture.


So, why was I procrastinating?
In actuality, I had done quite a few things to start preparing -- read materials about the programs, spoken to Haitian nationals about their country, watched films about the changing economic conditions in Haiti, began learning kreyol, and have read some suggested accounting principles for MFIs. The reality is that there are so many things that I could do to prepare mentally, spiritually, socially, economically, etc. that I have just taken the approach to tackle small projects to create some progress. Frankly, regardless of my preparation, the rubber hits the road come Monday morning!