Question

Describe your experience of any charity based organization and explain it's Planning, Organization, Controls, Leadership and Staffing functions.

Answer 1

One of the charity organisation that I have worked is build personality of kids (both needy and well do households. The details are below:

Objective: the objective of this organisation was to provide out of usual class room education and build kid from 5 to 15 in more holistically. The closest similarity could be something like pioneer group however this organisation was working more at local levels.

Planning: Set of young people in our community approached senior local councillor with our vision and mission statements. Once we got on principle go ahead we started our next level planning. At the beginning, it was decided the sustainability of this organisation was planned. In other terms planning for necessary financing and volunteering services for a longer period has to be ensured. Although this was charity yet there are certain costs involved to ensure smooth functioning. At the next level we planned the functioning of the organisation. We decided to run the show every afternoon once kids are back from school and typically prefer to play or spend time during this period. Hence we decided that we will operate from 4 to 6 p.m. every day or the week. We have also left one day free for volunteer relaxation if required. Then we planned activities to be performed. We decided to restrict to few non-school activities like games, quiz, debate,dancing,drawing and drama sessions in different days. This means we would need volunteer to manage this activities. Once activities are panned we reached out local young people who would be comfortable and ready to spare two hours every day.

Once the back ground is set, we reached out to local houses requesting them to send their kids for this organisation. We started with 10-20 kids in the age group 5 to 10 to start our operation. Although we decided to have some minimal fees but that remained relax able condition for those of whom even this amount is going to be difficult.

At next level we decided a place to run the show. Fortunately local club was ready to let us use the ground and other infrastructure free of cost at the beginning.

We have also planned certain annual events like fundraising, functions, sports and parade to gain more local visibility.

Organisation: as we started our operation, we built an organisation structure in order to maintain governance intact. At the top of our organisation, local councillor remained as local guardian to provide on principle and moral support. This also ensured any policy implications for running such organisation. Local councillor was given four senior local guardian as a supervising committee. We established our operation committee reporting to this supervising committee. In our operation committee9executive committee) we have mostly local young fellow who are also volunteer. The positions involved treasurer, administrative head, cultural head, communication head and guardian representative. We lined up close to 10 volunteer who would spend evening time with kids for free.

Controls: Our control structure was quite inline with our organisation structure. Lead volunteer and administrative head was the most active on day to day basis. Whereas in annual events treasurer and cultural head become quite active. In order to ensure that we are not deviating from our mission, we have set up monthly informal audit of activities performed and improvements done. Improvement of kids we assessed through regular intervention by someone from volunteer group. This also helped us to give message about our seriousness.

Leadership: such organisation becomes extremely susceptible to collapse when one or two active member get busy. Being non-profit retaining volunteer motivation and hence kids motivation becomes difficult. In order to ensure that there are adequate leadership in all dimensions we started rebuilding volunteer leaderships by providing them necessary training from outside professional canters like a certified art school for the volunteer acting as a drawing teacher. Such efforts were sponsored from any surplus money from annual events. Local councillor along with professors, doctors and senior guardian was regularly meet with volunteer and kind about the benefits they can reap from this activities. We decided to heavily involve all families who were sending their kids for this activities. One of our leadership objective was to ensure more stickiness with all key stakeholders. The organisation was run more like a participatory leadership rather than authoritative leadership. For instance in one instance one of the kids mother agreed to run some workshop on the healthy food habits.

Staffing: The staffing of our initial volunteer was done on request. We requested our friends and local guys to participate. Subsequently we were able to provide some certificates signed by local councillor to those who consistently volunteered for long duration. Being a good addition to their resume, we started getting decent response from capable young adults. We campaigned local high school to receive volunteer request. At any given day we decided there will not be more that 20% volunteers on the ground. ( i.e. if there are 40 kids being trained, volunteer number should be less than 8 in any functional day). However this rule does not apply during annual events, sports days or fund raising days.

During subsequent years we started appointing volunteers from with organisation. We appointed couple of kids who have performed all round as volunteer along with inducting capable volunteer from outside.