Report from Rons Bantwal
Daijiworld Media Network – Mumbai (RD/SP)
Mumbai, May 26: CSO Partners organized a workshop titled ‘Opportunities in challenging times,’ for the NGOs recently at the YMCA International in Mumbai Central, here. This is part of CSO’s planned series of workshops across six different cities, New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad and the metro, to reach out to approximately 500 NGOs with a plethora of domain expertise.
CSO Partners president Soumitra Ghosh said that the primary objective of these workshops is to facilitate a common perspective of the context and to support the NGOs, to identify the challenges and opportunities. The workshops are designed to enable the NGO, to have individual interactions with different domain experts and to draw organization-specific action plans.
A total of 54 NGOs comprising of more than 100 participants attended this workshop. The NGOs which attended the programme were made aware of how the global economic slowdown has been affecting the NGOs, how there can be better collaboration and cooperation between corporates and NGOs, etc. They were also informed through the workshop sessions about the fund raising strategy, retail fund raising, volunteer management, financial management, start up support to NGOs and about transparency and accountability, the need for accreditation, good governance besides the roles and responsibilities of the Board.
The one-on one sessions with each of the specialist organizations helped the participants to have a primary diagnosis of the symptoms indicated for identifying strategies for efficient and effective functioning.
About CSO Partners:
CSO Partners is a non-profit organization that is committed to strengthening civil society organizations (CSOs). It aims to achieve this, by mobilizing contributions, both human and financial and organizing appropriate support services through a large network of ‘partners’ that are specialist organizations with expertise in varied areas ranging from donor service, social investment services, financial management, governance, documentation, advocacy and communications.