Posters
Poster for my family/personal finance workshop
This post could also be called âProjectsâ. Most of my projects are courses, workshops, small business consulting, and those donât lend themselves to interesting picturesâthink of a group of people in a classroom or two people talking at a table. All the courses are interactive, mostly sessions where we talk about a technique, practice it, and then the homework is doing it for yourself.
The finance class in the poster at the beginning is an interactive workshop of seven sessions on values, saving, budgeting, managing conflict over money, cooperatives/banks, borrowing money, forming new habits. A neighborhood group and a social services organization asked me to do something on personal finance during my community study. I have been interested in this topic forever and I worked for many years with pension plans and companies offering retirement savings education. Every institution that holds peopleâs money is continually developing material and tools for budgeting, saving, and investing.
People are terrified about finances. Itâs probably second only to public speaking, and an interactive finance class combines both! I did the course for the first time in a night high school, for people who didnât finish or who work during the day. It has a very diverse set of students: It is very hard (impossible) to come up with a budget example thatâs relevant for both a 15-year-old living with his parents and a 56-year-old with six kids and her parents at home! To get people involved and working together, my activities were things like tossing a ball around a circle to complete a sentence. âIâm saving forâŠâ toss, âYoung people save forâŠâ toss, âSavings help youâŠâ toss. Or form groups by choosing between savings goals: Emergencies, Personal Use, Future Opportunities. Discuss and make a group presentation on the goal. These kinds of activities make up a large part of my Peace Corps work.
Slide from family finance class
Posters for a community tree planting day, and for the training on planting and care
Iâm currently working on a community tree-planting project. Some volunteers in other sectors have goals to establish gardens and tree nurseries. My project is more to help community initiative: getting donated trees, arranging training on planting and care in the first year. This work comes under the âcitizen participationâ goal of community economic development: leadership, group formation, better group interactions, like setting goals, positive communication, managing conflict. Volunteerism. I worked with a couple of community tree-planting projects in training, so I understood the need for community commitment and involvement: If a tree isnât protected from cows and watered in its first year, it wonât survive. That requires individual families, community groups, and institutions like schools to participate in the training and commit to the care. Which leads to a big, visible community improvement project. Hopefully as an example for future ones!
Business plan course
My biggest project and the one I started first, more than a year ago, is a youth entrepreneurship program called âParaguay Emprendeâ. Itâs an annual cycle of teacher training, a business plan course, a national competition and workshop, and consulting and mentoring for new businesses. I am on the national steering committee, responsible for the consulting and mentoring part.
Paraguay Emprende annual cycle
I started planning my class in October 2016 with the person in the City Hall whoâs responsible for continuing education classes. (Most of those classes are trades, like baking, cosmetology, soldering.) We began a 15-week course in March 2017, on generating and evaluating business ideas, including a community study; operations, marketing, sales strategy; budgeting, accounting, legal requirements, ethical and socially responsible business practices. Each session analyzes business examples with activities like developing a marketing plan or an operating budget; the homework is to do the activity for your own business idea. At the end, each participating has the components of a business plan in the homeworks. They write it up and make a short PowerPoint presentation in a competition judged by local small business owners. The winners of each class participate in a workshop and a national competition in the capital in August. The national winners, and others who start their businesses, form teams with a Peace Corps volunteer consultant to help with the technical issues the course was about and a Paraguayan business owner mentor who helps them adjust to life as a young entrepreneur and to the business culture. Thatâs the part I help coordinate.
Common types of businesses are a restaurant, a bakery, copyshop/school supplies/Internet access, landscaping. This yearâs winners were a phone app for local businesses, a strawberry farm and distribution business, a vegetarian/vegan restaurant, and a âFarm for the 21st centuryâ, a model rural farm focused on Stevia and milk products.
Itâs exciting to see these young people develop an idea, give a passionate presentation of it, and start a new business in their community. The participants in this project consistently impressed and surprised me with their hard work and imagination.
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I made the posters on canva.com. I canât recommend that graphic design site enough.













