The last three weeks of February, Field Band Foundation (FBF) conducted a seminar funded by Ronnie Lubner named the Lubner Leadership Seminar. The seminar was for local band management staff from all over the country. The Project officers (PO), Band Coordinators (BC) and Social officers (SO) around South Africa were divided into three groups and each group had a one-week leadership seminar at Mimosa Gardens, Parys. The importance of having a seminar like this is that the leaders of the different bands in FBF is on the same page and are running their bands according to FBFs guidelines. Topics such as personal and organisational branding, monitoring and evaluation tools, FBF Educational programmes and stakeholder engagement, community event etc. were included in the seminar.
The part of the Lubner Leadership Seminar that PULSE was engaged with was under FBF educational programmes. The main topics were educational band visits (round 2), lifeskills and new for this year: HIV and Aids activities. The session also included how a new system of reporting all of this is going to be essential for the coming year. The importance of the POs to write reports is that PULSE and the rest of the staff at head office will be able to monitor the on-going programmes in the bands. For both the staff in the bands and for the head office it will mainly be to evaluate what was good and why with the current activity, and what can be improved and how. The last section is especially important for PULSE since the new activities regarding HIV and Aids that PULSE recently has developed are now in the face of being implemented in the bands. PULSE will monitor the section on both HIV/Aids and lifeskills. If the POs are handing in a good report, the POs are getting scored on how well they are reporting. Head office calls it the Scorecard, as a way of motivating to make good work.
Wednesday, the last week of the Lubner Leadership Seminar, there were two representatives: Tafadzwa Ngorima and Tatenda Tagutanazvo from U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) attending to hear PULSE talk about how the HIV and Aids activities and how they are going to be implemented in the bands. It is due to funding from PEPFAR, that awareness about HIV and Aids is now the main focus of the lifeskills sessions in Field Band Foundation.
Lisa and Hanna from PULSE with the representatives from PEPFAR and a group of leaders in FBF
As mentioned in the last blog post, the Lubner Leadership Seminars were running simultaneously as the Super Heroes Workshops in Free State where the final event was the Amazing Race. All the POs, SOs and BCs attended Amazing Race where they were included in the execution of the events. This was a big success, and everybody; both children and staff seemed to enjoy themselves a lot.
Written by: Hanna Bakke Negård
Pictures by: the PULSE team and Eva Bortne
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