Leadership

A start on leadership this month! Finally! I have been working for the past two months on starting our leadership series and it finally got off the ground. Like last year, I want to work with our new village banks to create a learning space where our bank members can grow into leaders. Give them the tools, ideas and safe space to try out new things and self-evaluate their self-esteem, strengths and vision.

This group is much different than my leadership group last year. During this leadership workshop ( which is a total of 4 workshops) I invited all (27 women) bank members from 3 different village banks. This loan cycle a women may not be President or Secretary, but next loan cycle she might. We want to find the leader in all our women.

Although the majority of women I invited to the workshop know how to read and write, the majority of women that actually came to the workshop didn't know how to read and write. This created some difficulty when it came time to do certain exercises. Furthermore, although we had a childcare provider, many of the women didn't want to leave their toddlers in someone else's care. So we had some little crys from below the table, here and there, throughout the workshop.

However, since I have such great co-workers, they helped facilitate the movement of our first workshop despite the little crys and other problems that came up. And, they were full of ideas of how to improve for the 2nd workshop. My favorite comment from the workshop was from Nancy in our village bank Margaritas, "I want to learn how to speak in front of people, like leaders do."

Paz ~ Nora