The start of each semester is a time when the UCP-SARnet Leadership team has to rearrange responsibilities due to the inflow and outflow of members. This semester in particular we have a small team to work with but hopefully we will be able to accomplish quality work together.

After all new members and returning members of the leadership team were briefly introduced to each other, we jumped directly into going through the UCP-SARnet reports for 2011 and 2012. These reports were already emailed to the executive team members earlier in the week. The newcomers, most of whom have taken Dr. Wosinski's Community Psychology course or who were already involved with Forks for Change, were impressed with the list of last year's accomplishments (these were summarized in the Facilitator Corner section of the December Newsletter as well). But as Fritz and Dr. Wosinski pointed out regarding how to improve upon our work, it is going to be extremely important to delegate tasks and follow up regularly on what is on and off task to better operate the executive team.  

As for the plans for 2012, the first order of discussion was the fundraising issue. As pointed out last semester, Coaching the Global Village, one of our knowledge partners, will be helping us out with fundraising and Dr. Wosinski will be working out the plans for funding with Dr. Patrick Williams. Dr. Wosinski has set up a few other meetings as well this month with World Bank, UN Foundation, UN Millennium Campaign, and Helios Foundation to present various UCP-SARnet projects. Our next meeting will be focused on fundraising and we will have to bring our ideas on how to go about this task to the next meeting .

Next the revisions that need to be made to the Regional Coordinators policy were discussed. Currently there are individuals listed on our country pages as Regional Coordinators but many of these coordinators are no longer active. In order to obtain better committed individuals we need to have our Organizational Members in various countries assign individuals to also act as Regional Coordinators for UCP-SARnet in their respective countries. We want to make things happen in other countries and improving the quality of our network of contacts is going to be a key way to achieve that goal.

Finally we were given a brief overview of the main projects that will be focused on this year:

• Forks for Change Club - Mohamed Camara, the Club President, went over the club plans for this semester which mainly involve taking part in the AshokaU Exchange, hosting a Book Drive to collect 10,000 books, and hosting a "We Day" which is basically a concert that draws attention to volunteerism and bringing about change.
• Gandhi College of Social Work - Birendra briefly skyped with the team to inform us of the latest accomplishments of the college and Dr. Wosinski shared with us photos pertaining to this project. More detailed information can be followed in the newsletters.
• International Leadership Summit in China - There are still some technical difficulties with paypal and the registration form but the team will continue disseminating information on this project as much as possible while Global Interactions addresses those issues.
• Leadership Training Workshops in Cameroon, Kenya and Nigeria - Osee is working out the details of this project and the plans will be presented to officials in each of the regions to initiate the project later this year.
• Multicultural Perspective in Community Leadership Online Course - A course that Dr. Wosinski has been trying to start at ASU for some time now has finally been accepted and will begin Fall 2012 under the NPM (Non Profit Management) category. This is the newest edition to the UCP-SARnet based courses.

After this overview of the plans for 2012, we all wrote down our task preferences and next meeting the responsibilities of each member will be finalized. Mohamed will be taking on the task of Team Coordinator and with the help of Dorav he will be planning the meetings and going over our task reports.

Photo by Loc Nguyen