Opinion Piece- OCIC meeting
By: Chelsea Lam
The Ontario Council for International Cooperation (OCIC) meeting on October 15th was a learning experience, considering it was one of the first professional meetings I’ve attended. When I entered the room for the OCIC meeting I quickly realized that it was not going to be a huge meeting, considering the size of the room they had provided.
I learned a lot within the first 10 minutes since everyone in the room introduced themselves briefly. I quickly learned about a couple organizations that I had never heard of before, such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
The meeting quickly turned towards the topic about International Development Week (IDW). Kim and Chris who organized the meeting gave us a brief overview on how the project went last year. I found out that the project had focused too much on Toronto citizens and gave no focus to other cities and regions across Canada. I also found out that some of the events last year were poorly organized. For example, they started a book club, but never followed through; the organizers never thought about how they would keep track of the people who participated in this book club.
One of the questions which CIDA had raised was that they wanted IDW to have a broader reach this year. This was a reasonable request, but Kim and Chris mentioned right afterwards that they wanted members to have as little labor as possible. This meant participants would be doing the majority of the work. Everyone in the meeting had plenty of ideas. However I thought it was unrealistic if participants did the majority of the work, because the amount of money they were given which ranged only between $18.000-25.000 (this did not include pay for staff and other materials for projects).
This year’s theme for IDW is education, but one question we raised was what does education mean to Ontario citizens? In the beginning this project aimed itself at no particular audience or age group. At the end of the meeting we thought that if it was targeted towards youth it would draw in more numbers, and also have a larger impact towards the project. Also for this project we wanted youth to have access to any information. For example, one goal was to bring communities together and decrease isolation. I thought the project towards youth was a great idea, but it did not really benefit the CLC program because we have already built our online and off-line programs on TIG’s modern web-site. Since IDW seemed to only focus on Ontario, I did not think it would expand CLC’s program. Our mandate has a national focus.
I think this meeting was a learning experience for me. Since their proposal was due in a week, the meeting was very compact with information and confusing. We spent the whole meeting brainstorming with people who had wonderful ideas, but the project was very limited because of financial limitations, and the ideas did not seem realistic. I think if OCIC needs a network for this project in the future, TIG could definitely help with capacity building.
