Shooting stars to Mentor Mainor at the first-ever PCC.
LitWorld coordinated and hosted its first-ever Latin American Partnership Coordinator Conference at the beginning of October in Colombia, as part of our ongoing efforts to deepen the connection between partners and provide opportunities for learning across organizations. Currently, LitWorld has seven partnerships in Spanish-speaking Latin America: two in Colombia, two in Nicaragua, and one each in the Dominican Republic, Peru, and Honduras.
The Partnership Coordinator Conference (PCC) served as a powerful tool to strengthen the LitWorld community. It provided training to the Partnership Coordinators and a mentor from each attending organization, a space for each partner to share their own work and expertise, and a forum where organizations could learn from one another’s experience.
Each day began with a unique community-building activity and was followed by a series of trainings. These included modules on the role of a Partnership Coordinator, key components of mentorship, setting goals as leaders and in programming, techniques to lead training workshops, using visual art as a storytelling tool, how to cultivate mentors as storytellers, techniques for reading aloud, and strategies for creating their own stories to supplement their program libraries. Each partner also had an hour scheduled during the week to share their organization’s work, expertise, and history, as well as a programming activity that could be shared across all organizations.
We received some amazing feedback from our coordinators that show the powerful, magical outcomes of the week:
“It was a wonderful meeting of learning, collaboration, fun, companionship, and shared dreams.”
“I would like to have this type of meeting more regularly since one can grow even more. Thanks for such a good and great opportunity, thanks on behalf of all those children who we help grow in a different world.”
“We are a stronger network of cooperative work, with new reasons to continue.”
“We learned that we are a network, that we can achieve many things if we are united, learned many tips for the organization, new strategies for reading aloud, group dynamics and how to develop story writing.”
“We learned that we are doing great work as an institution...from now on we feel more capable and have more ideas to continue our LitClub.”
We look forward to doing this conference again in the various regions in which we work in order to deepen institutional knowledge and build a stronger LitWorld community!
