Magnify 2012 Final Report

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Third Year off to a great start!

RecrearMagnify 2012 held in diverse Ecuador

RecrearMagnify 2012- Conference Summary and Recrear’s Outlook This year, Recrear’s annual conference, RecrearMagnify, was hosted in Ecuador from June 17th to July 8th. RecrearMagnify 2012 brought together new and old members for three weeks of cultural exchange and training. The conference was designed to bring together the team that will be working on Recrear during the year 2012/2013 and to integrate new and old staff members. Moreover, this year Recrear carried out several activities in Ecuador and the conference was an opportunity to consolidate our relationships with local partners. Within the space of the conference we also organized a threeday follow-up on our first research project, 100 Voices, which we carried out between January and April 2012 in Esmeraldas, a northern province of Ecuador.

RecrearMagnify hosted 21 people coming from Canada, the United States, Italy, Peru, Lebanon, Morocco, Congo, Ecuador, and Russia. The following paragraphs will provide a brief summary of the program and the development of Recrear.

Week 1 Introducing Recrear We kicked off the conference in Quito with an introduction on Ecuador’s social, political, and economic development. During our first days together we also prepared a presentation on Recrear’s history and got to know our departmental teams.

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Speakers: Stephan Küffner (Foreign Correspondent for ‘the Economist’): Introduction to political and social context of Ecuador and Latin America Bernardo Costa (Professor at San Francisco University and) : Intro to economic development of Ecuador and Latin America Fernando Martin (Professor at FLACSO): Inequality and Economic Development in Ecuador.

Personal Development Course For the week between June 19th and 25th, we travelled to Tonsupa, Esmeraldas, and stayed in the beautiful space of Via Via Hotel. For three days we took a personal development course with Guido Van Moll of the La Fundación Holística del Ecuador.

The workshop helped us to create a more comfortable and open space to share our experience and integrate new and old members. Through three intense days of activities we built trust for each other, reflected on our personal growth, and took the time to understand the group dynamics that will affect the work of Recrear throughout the year.

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100 Voices follow up For the remaining three days we organized a training workshop for seven youth leaders selected from the participants of 100 Voices. The workshop prepared the leaders to implement RecrearParticipate, a project designed to help youths transform youth ideas and passion in tangible social development projects, with the youth groups they lead in their respective communities.

Week 2 & 3 Seminars and workshops Back in Quito, we spent two weeks working together to plan Recrear’s work for 2012/13. Our work was enriched by the perspectives of selected speakers who trained us with the following seminars and workshops: Eduardo Santos, Country Director, Save the Children- Partnering with Municipalities and other NGOs. • Veronica Mejia, Director of Finance, Fundación Yupana Ecuador- Financial management for small NGOs. • Santiago Andrade, President, FUDELA – Football for Development.

• Pablo Gordillo, Freelance photographer and video editor- Video Editing Training.

• Daniel Bryan, Development Theatre Expert, San Francisco University Applying theatre to social development.

• Fielding Dupuy, General Manager, Comunicandes Consulting - Consulting NGOs and Corporate Social Responsibility •

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Myriam Paredes, Professor, Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar - Food Sovereignty in Ecuador

Esteban Becerra, Chief of Party, Programa de Desarrollo Económico Local (PRODEL)- Challenges and lesson learned of PRODEL’s work in rural communities • Johanna Roldán, Principal Associate of Protection, & Ana Gabriel Acosta, Assistant of Protection UNHCR, The Refugee Problem in Ecuador

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On June 29th we hosted a Panel Discussion on ‘Collaboration in the development process’. The panel was moderated by Irene Caselli (foreign correspondent) and hosted the following speakers: Franz Rios, Senior Specialist (Programa de Desarrollo Económico Local, PRODEL) ACDI/VOCAL • Kevin Koenig, Ecuador Program Coordinator (Amazon Watch) • Veronica Escobar, Vice President of FUDELA (Fundación de las Américas) • Luis Coronel, Director (YUPANA Foundation) •

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Department Work About 50% of our time during week 2 and 3 was allocated to department work. This time was utilized to: • Approve important changes to the organizations’ structure that we are looking to implement this year; • Plan for the projects to be implemented in 2012/13 • Discuss new organizational strategies; • Set up our year objectives for each department.

Recrear’s philosophy is to maintain an atmosphere of equality and inclusion amongst all staff through the horizontal division of labor. That being said, during Magnify we elected our executive board to maintain basic leadership and organization as well as to serve as points of contact.

Recrear Executive Board 2012/13 Executive Director - Gioel Gioacchino gioel@recrear.info CSR & Consulting Directors - Aneesha Marwah amarwah@recrear.info and Kamya Raja kraja@recrear.info Project Development Director - Kirsten Williams k.williams@recrear.info Finance and Legality Director - Jess Smith jsmith@recrear.info Media and Marketing Director - Valerie Matron vmatron@recrear.info Project Evaluation Director - Gillian Aitken gaitken@recrear.info

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A special thanks goes to all the speakers that joined us during the conference.

We are extremely thankful to the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar (UASB) and to our local coordinator Dr. Michel Levi, Director of the International Institute at UASB for hosting us in the their beautiful facilities.

RecrearMagnify 2012 was sponsored by:

Recrear’s Outlook for 2012/13 RecrearMagnify represented a space to get energized to continue to grow and do original and meaningful work during 2012/13.

Our goals for the year are to: • Research and develop a sustainable financial strategy • Build an Advisory Board for the organization • Implement strategies to engage our social media networks • Publish material from the 100 Voices research project • Publish information on our website to ensure transparency on our projects and finance management.

• Build new partnerships and consolidate our relationships with like-minded organizations • Develop evaluation procedures for our projects and compile evaluation reports of at least one of each of our signature projects • Deliver at least 3 signature projects • Design and implement 1 new project • Organize and implement RecrearMagnify 2013 • Refine organizational structure, accountability system, and other internal procedures within Recrear For more detailed information, be on the lookout for Recrear’s Business Plan 2012/13 coming out in November 2012 on our website at: www.recrearinternational.org

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