Capacity Strengthening – Yours and Everyone Else’s

What you see before you on your desk, right now, is a treasure trove. I know it may look like a big pile of paperwork, reports, and other documents, and you may be considering filing it all away, but think again.

Whatever you’re doing right now, you’ve put a lot of work into it. You’ve done research, you’ve written reports, you’ve had meetings, you’ve changed things, changed them again and again, until you’ve reached the finished product. You’ve strengthened your own capacity through your project work – now you have the chance to strengthen the capacity of your colleagues.

The Health Communication Capacity Collaborative’s mission is to strengthen the capacity of organizations to conduct their own SBCC programs. Because of that, we need your contributions.

Over the life of a project, you have amassed formative research reports, materials design documents, pretest reports, samples of materials produced for the project, monitoring data, evaluation reports – it is overwhelming but it is also incredibly valuable to your colleagues.

Here’s why.

Think back to when you were starting this project. Did you know exactly what to do? And how to do it? Probably not. It would probably have been useful to see a whole package of campaign materials that someone else had already done – if only to get a feel as to how to organize all of your tasks. And not only that – think how useful it would have been to have someone to communicate with, to connect with.

Now – how about doing that for someone else? And seeking out that kind of information for yourself next time? That’s the mindset of sharing, and it has amazing benefits.

Here’s what we mean:

When you share your own experience, you give your work a “second life” – that is, all that you have done can now go on to help someone else do something similar.

When you share your materials, you make yourself available to your colleagues as a resource – and that connection will have other connections….

You grow the capacity of SBCC professionals everywhere by creating a culture of learning.

So please think about sharing all of your materials – from the formative research all the way through the actual project materials through evaluation. Contribute to the growing knowledge base of experience and the growing networks of SBCC experts.

If you’d like to contribute your materials to the Health COMpass, please register and then upload your materials.

If you have any questions, please write to info@thehealthcompass.org.