A Vision for the Future
On January 31st and February 1st SOIL’s management teams from Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haiten gathered together to spend two days digging into the following questions: what is the five-year vision for SOIL’s work and impact? And what work do we need to do in the coming five years to ensure we reach our goal?
This workshop was a rare and welcome opportunity to bring SOIL leadership from both offices together under one roof – although many of our staff travel between the offices frequently, it is difficult for management to set aside large chunks of time to be away from their desks. The team was incredibly excited to have time to work “tèt ansanm” (or “heads together”) as they say in Haiti to begin mapping out SOIL’s next five years. We were incredibly fortunate to have the support of some long-time friends and partners from the Swiss research institute EAWAG: Heiko Gebauer and former SOIL advisor Grégoire Virard, who both travelled from Switzerland to facilitate and participate in our workshop.
To frame the workshop, each SOIL team gave a presentation about their team’s work, including a review of progress towards existing objectives, current challenges, and strategic opportunities and roadblocks they envision encountering in coming years.
The team then broke into groups to discuss SOIL’s five-year goal – aiming for a target that felt both ambitious and achievable, especially around the number of EkoLakay clients we hope to serve, and the work that must be done to reduce the all-important cost-per-client of providing our household sanitation service.
The workshop was a great success in allowing staff to construct a shared vision of the challenges we face in scaling up our service in the next few years, and we look forward to continuing to share updates as we put the key takeaways and lessons learned into action. Additionally, the team found this workshop such a useful exercise that we are going to hold similar strategy development workshops on an annual basis moving forward!
Huge thank you to EAWAG for supporting this work.
Malthus Anderson
March 6, 2017 (7:43 pm)
You guys are so good; I can’t understand why the big donors don’t pour money into your business so you can distribute thousands of these toilets and not just in Haiti. And maybe extend your business to teaching sustainable food production techniques. You can save the world!