The organization was founded by Victoria Wulsin, whom you might know by her recent Congressional bid against Jean Schmidt. Victoria is actually an epidemiologist by formal training, and that knowledge led her to create SOTENI, an organization aimed at using education to help stem the spread of AIDS in rural Kenya.
I met earlier this month with their Executive Director, Randie Marsh and a member of their Board, Chuck Hollis. Its clear that SOTENI is led by passionate people who are committed to seeing it succeed and grow its mission.
The opportunity I laid out for them is to provide Monitoring and Evaluation help. By helping them better measure the effectiveness of their programs, I hope to help them parlay that knowledge into improved operations, and a better ability to secure additional funding. As I've noticed in my review of the non-profit space, M&E is routinely cited as a critical need but one that is difficult to meet. Its just so hard for leadership to get their hands around WHAT to measure, and HOW to measure it. And the problem is exacerbated by the knowledge that funds spent against M&E today will take away money from current field operations -- your classic vicious cycle. Lack of money makes it hard to fund M&E which makes it hard to justify future funding for the program which further reduces the ability to fund M&E (and on and on).
By providing my services to SOTENI, I hope to create that initial bridge that helps me transform my program evaluation skills into the non-profit arena. My effort here should be unfolding over the next 3-6 months and I'll use some of my future posts to keep a running dialog of what I'm learning as I go along.
Another good step on the journey.
1 comment:
Great opportunity, Steve! I think measurement is so critical for fund raising. People want to know that their dollars are really having an impact - whether they are giant corporations or individual donors.
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