NVVN'12 Sharing Session with Innova Junior College

On 12 Oct, the Niem Vui Viet Nam ’12 team had a sharing session with our partners from Innova Junior college(IJC).

The two hour session started off with an insightful talk on community development by Prof Teo, which was thought-provoking and engaging. He challenged the needs-based approach in which community involvement programmes tend to revolve around and introduced another perspective on how we can approach the issues in our community. Focusing on the topic of overseas community involvement programmes, he shared about the importance of listening to, instead of assuming, the concerns of the community, something that we tend to overlook. Because in assuming their needs, we reflect our arrogance in thinking we can save and empower them, when in fact all we are doing is intruding their lives and not addressing their priorities. True empowerment is when we, as facilitators, create the right conditions to allow the people to empower themselves, and restore human dignity. And one way to achieve empowerment is by deviating from the needs-based approach and adopting the assets-based community development approach, where we tap on the assets in the community to solve the issues in that community. And through that, we can also achieve sustainability.

After the talk, our leader Edna took over the time and introduced the DOPE test, Risk Assessment Management and lemon theory to our partners from IJC. The DOPE test was a personality test that classified us into four bird types-Dove, Owl, Peacock, Eagle. We broke up into groups according to our bird personalities, shared about our leadership styles, and did an activity on risk assessing, where we applied what we had just learnt.  True to the DOPE test, the wise owls displayed their analytical skills by overthinking (30 lemons credited when other groups rated less than 10 lemons) while the dramatic peacocks brought life to the discussion during their presentation. As each group’s distinctive personality showed, we had a better idea of how to communicate and work together with one another.

Our partners from IJC showed their support towards our fundraising efforts by purchasing many of the shirts we were selling, and the fruitful session came to an end with a photo and a cheer by our enthusiastic friends from IJC.