A Cry for Help. Or at Least Email

by Michael Bear · 2009-07-02 16:48:00 UTC
Topics:

There are many wonderful things about July.  Canada Day. Independence Day. Bastille Day.  The birthday of Haile Selassi I.

And, of course, an inside look at your favorite NGOs and UN agencies.

Pulling together a blog series on what's good and what's not-so-good about working for various aid agencies.

Quality of programs. How they treat staff.  Bureaucracy. Support, or lack thereof. Endless strategic planning.  No strategic planning.  Security awareness.  Reporting burdens.  Accountability, or not so much.

Am doing my best to gather information, but would love to cast as wide a net as possible.  If you work - or used to work - for a humanitarian or development NGO or UN agency and would like to write down some short (or even short short) thoughts about the experience, positive or negative, please send them to mkleinman@change.org.

I'll aggregate the answers, and do a different post for each agency. Each response will, of course, be completely anonymous.

(And, if anyone has any thoughts on the blog - things you'd like to see more or less, suggestions, recommendations, painless criticism - please send it along.)

Michael Bear
PREVIOUS STORY:
Recommended Readings - July 2, 2009
NEXT STORY:
A letter from Bettina Siegel, "Pink Slime" petition creator

COMMENTS (2)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.