Thanks to our team, community collaborators, clients, and other supporters, 2022 was a great year!
Overview
In 2022, we decided to go deep rather than wide, we rooted ourselves within Kent County High School for the 2022-2023 school year, and collaborated with 35 students in the Kent County, Maryland community.
We conducted 15 surveys and received 250+ community responses!
We launched our Y.O.U.R. Development program and hosted another Art Works™ summit in collaboration with the Kent Local Management the in the city of Chestertown, Maryland.
FHG received the gold standard WBENC certification and became MBE certified!
Our Principal Consultant, Cara-Marie, received her Master of Arts in Communication for Development from Malmö University (Sweden) and published her Master’s Thesis “Towards Decolonisation: Afro-Caribbean Philosophy and Development in Jamaica”
FHG was one of 6 finalists invited to submit a proposal for Jamaica’s Nation Brand Project.
Listening + Amplifying by Reporting Out
We used several methods to LISTEN and capture youth voices, including using 15 surveys that garnered 264 responses.
We offered a platform for amplification of those voices by writing a final report that we shared not only with our funding partner, the Kent County Local Management Board, but also with other community stakeholders including students, and parents.
ART WORKS™ KENT COUNTY
We brought our ART WORKS™ program to Kent County where it served as the culminating event for our time of collaboration with Kent County Youth.
Percentages based on results of live polling during the summit.
What We Heard
About the Re-Power Report.
The Re-Power Report is an FHG annual report that gives a brief overview of our activities related to our work of collaborating with communities and assisting greater numbers of underserved peoples in responding and leading the discussion on development at different levels, but especially locally.
Why publish an annual report?
At Findlay House Global, we advocate for accountability at all levels, and that cannot happen without transparency. But our advocacy goes beyond simply talking the talk because we are committed to leading by example.
We have decided to publish our version of an annual report for the same reasons a nonprofit organization would:
To build trust
To shed light on our vision:
To inspire others to join our mission:
and to thank all our supporters (collaborators, clients, and cheerleaders!)
Why not call it an impact report?
At FHG, it’s about having the right perspective. We see our roles as helping to facilitate impact, but we do not pretend we can presume impact upon the people with whom we work. Instead, we choose to center their experiences, stories, and voices.
In the community development space, a lot of organizations are eager to demonstrate their impact in the form of evaluating predefined goals against quantifiable outcomes. While predefined goals can make many things easier in terms of monitoring, there are limitations, and even downsides, to relying on these goals to assess true impact.
Our work with communities has taught us that:
collaboration is an open-ended process.
Entering any community with predefined goals negates any opportunity for the community to define success for themselves.
Predefined goals and preset targets ignore, or at best underestimate, the broader and more complex dynamics associated with collaboration, which include: productive synergies, intangible change processes, and reinforcing longer-term outcomes.