At Large Young people as do-gooders

By Rina Jimenez-David
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Filed Under: Awards and Prizes, Youth

A “medical” film festival, a community lending program that starts with members saving money in piggy banks. or “alkansya,” a tutorial program where college students teach public school teachers computer skills, a de-worming campaign that involves the painting of a school mural as a reminder to the children to follow good hygiene practices, and a reproductive health program for teens that uses theater as an educational tool. These are just some of the winning projects of finalists in the Sixth TAYO Awards, or Ten Accomplished Youth Organizations Awards. Judging took place Monday and as one of the jurors, I must say that the “stories” told that day convinced me that the future of the country lies not in our national institutions and leaders, but in the efforts of young people who are doing what they can—despite their youth and scarce resources—to change the world they live in.

For some, the world may be as narrow as the school campus, a world populated by students, teachers and non-teaching personnel, but where even small changes can have a major impact. For others, the borders may expand to encompass communities or villages, or even cities and provinces, where the challenges are more difficult but the will to make a difference remains.

But good will or good intentions are not enough. To succeed, and more importantly, to be sustainable, a project has to be evaluated in relation to the goals it set out at the start, whether it addressed the identified problem, missed it entirely or made it worse. And for these, project proponents need what has been called “measurable targets.”

* * *

Among the observations made by the judges was the need to integrate “indicators,” or means of measuring success, from the very start of a project’s conception. Indicators are important because they tell you if you are accomplishing your goals or merely going around in circles. They also need to be measured somewhere or some time in the middle of the project’s existence, while there is still time to correct mistakes or turn the project in another direction.

The young champions, when asked how they knew that they had succeeded, cited feedback from the beneficiaries, or from the group members. While useful for documentation purposes, personal feedback is not really all that reliable. A project has to be measured in terms of goals and accomplishments. For instance, what percentage of residents in a village did you set out to provide with health services? If your aim was to reach and treat at least 50 percent of residents, but some months later you find out that you were reaching only 20 percent, then you will need to either raise your efficiency levels or re-think your approach to the target population.

Indicators of success are not so difficult to integrate in your plan. To measure the impact of a stage presentation, for instance, all you need to do is hand out a form asking the audience what they knew about, say, reproductive health issues before the start of the presentation. Afterwards, ask the same audience to fill out a similar form, and by comparing their responses, you can measure whether their awareness was raised.

* * *

Being able to measure one’s accomplishments is useful not just for project retooling, but also for future fundraising. It is not enough to simply claim your project made a difference. Funders, particularly multinational institutions, will demand concrete measures and accomplishments, and these you can present only if you had integrated a monitoring and assessment tool from the very start of a project.

Some may ask: Are indicators of success really all that necessary for youth projects? My thinking is that if young people are serious about getting involved in social issues and do-gooding, then it is best that they start off on the right foot. Good intentions are not enough. One must take a careful, pragmatic approach, being clear-headed about one’s goals and realistic about one’s limitations in terms of resources and time. And if one is working with grant money, all the more that one should be very clear about one’s goals and mapping out one’s path towards meeting those goals. After all, you have been entrusted with other people’s money, money that was meant to alleviate poverty and save lives. It would be a tragedy if that money was frittered away in useless projects—projects initiated with all sincerity and goodwill, but ultimately still failing to make a positive difference in the lives of people in need.

* * *

Still, the fun may be in the learning for all the youth organizations who took part in the TAYO Awards.

Each year brings a crop of groups who bring not just their energy, but their creativity and heart to their projects. True, some projects may have been embarked on only for the recognition. But one can smell such projects from the get-go.

As a judge, what I was looking for was focus, in a specific area or concern. Which is why, for instance, I immediately liked the computer tutorial project of the computer students of Jose Rizal University. By focusing on the need to impart computer skills to public grade school teachers in four schools in Mandaluyong City, they ensured that they would easily accomplish their goals, and success was measurable by the improved skills of the teachers they worked with, as well as by the greater efficiency in these schools. The project also proved tremendously replicable.

The “medical film festival” of a medical student fraternity in the University of the Philippines, Manila, was likewise focused, but what it had going for it also was the “outside-the-box” thinking employed. As Bong Osorio, of ABS-CBN Broadcasting and also a judge, remarked, “It’s such a non-medical approach to health education.”