Helping improve the quality of education in the country

A colleague of mine suggested that we look into partnering with the Ateneo Center for Educational Development (ACED) back in August 2009. She said she volunteered for one of their strategic planning workshops and said it would be good to have our Corporate Social responsibility program organize a group of employees to volunteer for this activity. Only a handful of volunteers are needed to run a successful workshop and it doesn't require a lot of logistics so after a few meetings to understand the requirements of the event, we decided to do a "test run" in January 2010.

Our initial call for volunteers resulted in almost 50 volunteers signing up in less than 20 minutes so we knew that a lot of people were interested in it. The first run we had was very successful, with a lot of good feedback from both the ACED staff and our own volunteers. As such, it was a given that we would continue with this partnership and help out in these strategic planning workshops whenever we could.

The workshops are not run during the summer months so we resumed the partnership once the 2010-2011 school year started. Weekend-long strategic planning sessions were scheduled on July 31-August 1, September 11-12 and November 20-21. I normally work on gathering volunteers without volunteering myself and just swing by during the event to provide some support, but one of our volunteers had to back out at the last minute during our September 11-12 session so I had to take her place. It was a really interesting experience. Once you are used to the corporate setting, it is almost automatic for you to define specific goals and objectives, assign responsibility, and track progress. This isn't the same in other settings because people don't want to be blamed for things not going according to plan or schedule and which results in a tendency to shy away from accountability. It took a while for the school participants - which included the principal, teaches, barangay representatives, and parents of some students - to get the hang of setting priorities and defining indicators that would allow them to measure the success of their actions but in the end, we managed to come up with a pretty good plan that was actionable and achievable.

The great thing about ACED is that after each workshop, they gather feedback from the participants and the volunteers to figure out how to make things better, and I can see some specific changes to the workshop when I compare the first workshop we volunteered for in January to the one that just finished last Nov 20-21. There are a couple more schedules this school year - one in January and another in February - and we are already in the planning stages for those. Hopefully, our continued efforts to partner with ACED will help improve the quality of education in our public schools.