Recently, I had a chance to connect with Chris Worman to learn about his team's efforts in creating a local philanthropy workshop in Romania. I was interested to learn about the event and how they are continuing, even after the event, to build understanding about local philanthropy in Romania and throughout the region.

The Local Philanthropy Workshop (LPW) took place between August 31 and September 4, 2010 in Odorheiu Secuiesc, Romania. More than 35 NGO and IT practitioners came together to explore ways of strengthening Romanian civil society through communications and local philanthropy development, lowering barriers to outreach through involvement of the Romanian IT&C community and developing a practical best practices repository with a platform for ongoing discussion.

Chris is the Executive Direct of the Odorheiu Secuiesc Community Foundation, an affiliate of TechSoup Global, and the host of the LPW. He has been in Romania for nearly 5 years working in philanthropy development and last year helped establish TechSoup in Romania.

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Q. What was the impetus for creating a local philanthropy workshop?

The Local Philanthropy Workshop was created out of a need to improve the state of citizen engagement in philanthropy in Romania.  While exact numbers are very hard to come by, it is understood that we are talking about single digit percents in both categories.  This state of disengagement with civil society has many reasons but it is clear that things must change if civil society is to grow and reach any semblance of sustainability.  The first steps toward change are often communications based (hard to get donations if you are the world’s best secret…) and communications can be greatly enhanced through IT&C.

To this end, the conference sought to bring together IT&C and NGO folks around this pressing issue and build better understandings about how the two sides might work together to better engage citizens in philanthropic processes.  Another main goal was to create a space where what is happening and working in citizen engagement could be catalogued and shared to help NGOs wanting to begin learning methods and tools that are applicable and functional in the Romanian environment.

Q. Who was the target community?

Since the goal was to bring together development professionals and IT&C folks interested in social change who might be partners, we targeted both sides of the equation.

Reaching out to the IT community was an interesting exercise since, other than our 40 or so IT Mentors through Cisco Networking Academy, we were not so well connected.

We chose to target the open source communities – Drupal, Mozilla, Joomla, etc… and are happy we did because they have been instrumental in developing ongoing activities like our recently launched Saturday School (lovingly called NetSquared Juice) for NGOs interested in learning open source tools.

Q. How did it go?

The conference seemed to go really well.  The reviews were great and people have started using the tools they learned about.  Part of my job is to follow up with people as they implement the plans they proposed so I will know more later…

Q. What were some of the conversations that came out of this year's event?

One of the main points that came out was a need for more of the same.  Too much of the available training opportunities here are theoretical and often do not inspire organizations to implement ideas as they are short on tools and practical steps.

To that end, we launched the Local Philanthropy Workshop blog which is heavily focused on cases and the tools that made those cases go.  There are also two NetSquared Local groups in the works, the first of which has had several meetings in Bucharest and launched its Saturday School.

Q. What's next for the workshop? Do you intend to hold another?

We will repeat this workshop format but we hope to add new workshops so that will have a more IT specific focus.

We are working on a series of these, led by folks who came to our workshop, that will be meetings for programmers in the morning and then bring in IT folks in the afternoon to explore tools and work on solutions to social problems.  The first will be hosted by the Romanian Drupal Association in November and will be called something along the lines of DrupalSoup – watch the blog to see how it goes!

And, if any of you have tools or tips you would like to share, consider sharing with Romania through the LPW blog.