Last year, India’s Uttarakhand Cluster celebrated its 10th anniversary. And last month, they held a meeting of their members to plan for the next five years. Cluster President MADHU SINGH shares more…
Tell us about your plan. As you know, we hold ‘Linking 2 Learn’ training sessions throughout the year, where Cluster members gather for training on topics that matter to all of us. A lot of people attend, but over time we’ve noticed that it’s the workers from organisations who come, not the leaders. Leaders sometimes feel too busy, or think that the training is not for them. We want to change that – we feel it’s important and valuable that leaders get involved. So the idea behind our plan is to make the Cluster work for leaders as well as workers.
Who attended the meeting? There were about forty leaders from our fifty member organisations. We thought it was time to ask them what they would like to focus on. In terms of training, they talked about income generation, fundraising, proposal writing, management skills and addiction management. They also talked about training on government laws – especially laws concerning faith and conversion – because many members are church-based organisations working in the field, and they need to be careful about it.
Are these skills within your Cluster? Yes, many people know about these topics – especially government laws, income-generating and fundraising – so we will be starting to plan these trainings.
What other plans did you make? We discussed how to communicate better with one another, using Whatsapp, social media, having an event calendar, and simply visiting other member organisations occasionally, to learn from them. We’ll also start having prayer meetings together three or four times a year. Through this we can support, strengthen and uplift one another.
We have a few other ideas as well. As a Cluster we want to work even more on disability – a lot of our members work in this area, and there is still a lot of need in Uttarakhand. We also have the idea of a spiritual retreat for workers, but for fifty organisations this could be expensive!
These plans sound exciting, Madhu! We'll look forward to hearing how they progress.
Learn more about Uttarakhand Cluster here.