Making Plans

This week our focus was on planning our remaining classes, teaching, and scheduling a time to visit each project before we leave -- we've been very busy! Time has flown by and we only have two work weeks left! We're determined to pack in as much as we can to these last weeks, and a big part of that is helping our students compile their rough draft business plan.

We're compiling business plans by giving homework that specifically outlines details they will need for their complete plan. We then collect and review their homework, and place it in a folder for each individual project. By the time we leave, they will have information on the history of their business or business idea, the market they are entering, their competition, their goals for growth, and their differentiation plans. We're really excited because these folders will help the next interns understand each project and hopefully allow them to jump right into teaching and working with each idea! Many of the ideas great and we want to help DanPer's workers accurately and successfully capture their idea on paper.

Another important task we have before we leave is to visit each project and write a summary of how they are currently doing. This summary will help the coming interns get acquainted with our current projects and their successes and difficulties. We visited five businesses this week, and each of them are looking great! We're working with the receipts for a few of these projects to help them understand more clearly their income and expenses.

One issue we're working to resolve is having workers in the field bring their "socio" or partner. Because the program is offered to workers at DanPer, both in the factory and in the fields, the participants are required to have a partner to help them manage the business. DanPer doesn't want to lose it's best workers when they become entrepreneurs, but it still wants to help them take the initiative to better their lives. Partners are a very important part of the program and we need them to be at every class, because their input and learning are just as vital as the workers.

Not all of our workers in the fields have partners that are coming each lesson, and this is something we've been working on. We're trying to impress upon them that if they don't take the structure of the program seriously, it may be hard for their business plan to be approved without anyone available to run their business! We'll keep working on this until we leave, and we already had some new faces in our Friday class, so we are optimistic they'll all find partners.

Overall, we're very excited to see business plans coming together!! As our time here gets shorter we've made a list of things to do and people we need to see before we leave Trujillo. We love being here, and we're going to pack these next two weeks with everything we want to accomplish!