There comes a time in every endeavor when something changes, momentum is built, and people launch.

People often ask me about my long-term vision for FORGE.  To tell you the truth, I’ve never had one pre-determined vision for what the organization should look like.  Founding FORGE as a 20-year-old college student, it would have been incredibly presumptuous for me to have ‘known’ how to do what I was trying to do.  The only thing I knew for sure was how I wanted the world to look.  I had an idea of how to get there, but that idea has been ever evolving and improving.

One of my favorite things about FORGE is our true commitment to excellence from our staff.  Because no one is a part of FORGE for the money, and because we expect such high standards of commitment from all of our staff, the people who work for FORGE are people who are deeply committed to its success and growth.  They will tell you that they eat, sleep, and breathe FORGE, and I will tell you that the wheels never stop turning in their minds. 

As an organization, I believe that our greatest strength is that we are continually re-evaluating our performance and our strategies, and we are constantly implementing changes and improvements to our operations.  

This past weekend, we may have outdone ourselves.  I just returned from 3 intense days of meetings with 11 members of our domestic senior staff, immediately following a meeting of 10 international senior staff.  We’ve developed a plan for FORGE that is so paradigm-shifting, so high-impact, and so in-line with all our deepest values and beliefs, we get jumpy just thinking about it. 

I’ll be telling you more in the coming weeks.  For now, it’s nose to the grindstone.  We’ve got our work cut out for us.  I said it once, and now’s a good time to say it again: STAY TUNED.

-Kjerstin Erickson

www.FORGEnow.org

I've said it a few times over the course of this blog, and I'm going to say it again here: FORGE’s refugee staff is overwhelmingly good at what they do.  Their immense capability has to be FORGE's greatest asset.

In Mwange Refugee Settlement, FORGE built LISa (Laboratoire Informatique Safari) during the summer of 2006.  It's the largest computer lab in a refugee camp anywhere in the world.  We were fortunate enough to have Frances, a very talented young teacher from Congo, leading classes out the gate.  LISa has run so smoothly, that I have to admit, I haven't stayed closely involved.  But when I read our Project Managers' most recent report of the project, I was astounded.

Frances has not only increased the number of open classes due to community demand, but he stepped beyond the original classes of Word, Excel, and Paint classes and has moved into PowerPoint, Java, and basic coding.  He has been producing CDs and DVDs for the various FORGE-led performance groups.  He has created a FORGE photo scrapbook that employees and other community members alike regularly enjoy.  And most amazing of all – Frances has conceived of and written his own "LISa mail" email program that allows users in the middle of a Zambian refugee camp to wirelessly email back and forth between various stations within the camp.

Please keep in mind that all of this has occurred in a refugee camp with no electricity, no running water, and no real urban or financial infrastructure for hundreds of miles.  What Frances has done is nothing short of amazing.  He has taken on the needs of his students and the needs of his community and applied his own skills to better the community.  He isn't producing food, clean water, or ARVs, but he has given real job training to many of his fellow community members and has provided countless more with enjoyment, entertainment, and a sense of hope.

If you went to Mwange and met Frances, you can count on him not begging you for food or money…but you'd better be prepared for him to ask you to help him get his hands on some more advanced JAVA programming books.

It's when refugees like Frances take over FORGE's community-development projects that we see them grow their wings.  In collaboration with our camp-based Project Managers, our refugee staff consistently pushes ideas beyond what we ever thought possible.

-Kjerstin Erickson

www.FORGEnow.org

On my second-ever blog post, I discussed FORGE’s use of the internet in communication.  Coordinating well over 100 people in 4 different time zones is made much simpler with email.  But… email has never been ideal for some things, and FORGE has recently made some important moves to centralize our US-based management while maintaining a decentralized (and wide-stretching) outreach.

Previously the centralized FORGE management team has been our Board of Directors, my fiancée, Nick Talarico, and myself.  With the two of us overseeing daily operations, we accomplished a lot, but often at the expense of our own health and wellbeing.  There was an inevitable lag in response time with our also-overworked staff, and the majority of the responsibilities fell onto our shoulders.

Now, however, we have added two more important people to our Bay Area management team.  Annelisa Pederson is in her third year with FORGE.  She has spent the past two summers in Meheba Refugee Settlement and is now bringing her grant-writing experience to FORGE’s Development Director position.  Peter D’Aleo has also spent the last two summers in Zambia and has been promoted to Program Director of the FORGE Microfinance Institute (FMI), the program he co-founded in 2006.

Having a centralized US-based management team is an important step for FORGE on so many levels.  We convene daily for expedited question-and-answer sessions.  We write, review, improve, and produce materials in record time.  We conceive of new ideas in true brainstorming sessions, and can bring those ideas to fruition with much greater efficiency. 

I’ve never felt as blessed as I do right now, surrounded by such a strong and talented group of people to work with day-in and day-out.  I believe there is nothing more important to an organization than having people that are willing to make the big sacrifices and who understand that "caring a lot" and "making it happen" are two very different things: caring takes a heart, but making it happen takes guts.  It requires travelling the tougher path, putting yourself on the line, training yourself to prioritize the long-term and the bottom-line, taking risks, and picking yourself up quickly when you fall.

I can't wait to get deep into 'making it happen' with this new, centralized team. 

- Kjerstin Erickson

www.FORGEnow.org