Today was the day that we revisited our mission statement. After about a month or so of more in depth research we all had a better idea of how we saw PROSPER and what we wanted to achieve through our NGO. We worked through the mission statement word by word and finally arrived at one that we were happy about and that we felt best suited PROSPER.
We finally have a name! We were asked to come into our meeting today with a few ideas for our NGO name and we settled on "P.R.O.S.P.E.R." which stands for Programs for Sustainable Progress through Environmental Recovery. At this meeting we really wanted to have a set list of goals established. We all really wanted to do everything we could to help the Ogoni people so we had quite the range of goals in mind.
We had a lengthy conversation about wanting to be political advocates for the Ogoni people but ultimately agreed that we did not have the means necessary to do so. We also came across a few NGO's whose main agenda was political advocacy so we decided that our NGO would focus on more tangible goals such as water and soil cleanup. This meeting was all about pulling our research together and figuring out what other information we needed.
Education
At this point the team had been asked to start researching more in depth about various different topics within our NGO development. We all were tasked with just learning more about Oganiland, the Ogani people, and the oil spill. Our main points of research, however, were:
Oil Spill: (Hannah, Galen, Nathan) - Degree of Damage from Oil Spill (initial and current situations) - Initial efforts from clean up (Gov't, locals, Shell) - Remediation techniques - Related Occurrences/events (don't need to be really in depth but have a brief overview) Culture of the Ogani people: (Erin, Kim, Kristine, Maria) - Languages - tensions within the people - Government involvement - General history and traditions - Society + Hierarchy Education: (Hung, Meghan) - Techniques - current efforts (and past) - Comparative studies Business (Jack, Kristine) - Costs - Other NGOS? When our team first sat down to brainstorm ideas for our mission statement we started by going around the table and asking everyone what they would like our statement to include. Our initial list:
We then asked everyone to take a minute and think about what goals and objectives they would like to achieve through the creation of our NGO. We drafted this list:
The team then split into smaller groups of 3 to 4 people to come up with possible mission statements. We have a variety of different statements all employing different aspects that we wanted to cover in building our NGO. Potential Mission Statements
Key phrases that we liked and wanted to include:
Work in Progress...?
Mission Statement: Our goal is to empower people to improve and sustain land and water quality in regions affected by industrial pollution. At the end of this class we had all felt confident about the mission statement above. What we had yet to realize is that our mission statement should be a dynamic entity; something that is able to change as we research more and grow into our future NGO. |