ADRA Work

As I suspected it would be, country directorship is vastly different from project directorship.  I am a jack of all trades and a master of none.  I spend my days writing proposals for new projects, acting as a sounding board for project directors facing impasses, writing reports for projects that are finishing, representing ADRA at meetings and official functions with government leaders and foreign dignitaries, helping to put policies in place that will make the organization run more efficiently, visiting project sites for monitoring and inaugurations, maintaining email and telephone contact with various external agencies (donors, regional supervisors, etc.), and giving occasional interviews and appearances on national radio and television.  A lot of these responsibilities are enjoyable in their own right, but I often feel too much like a generalist, like I am not using my training maximally.  It’s a tradeoff; I chose a field office over working at the regional office or a university professorship because I think that either of those career tracks in the future would be immeasurably improved by practical experience in the trenches.  Still, the disconnect I feel between my capacities and how I currently spend my time is a continual source of frustration.

One of the most complicating factors is that we are entirely donor-dependent.  ADRA-STP’s administration exists only in personnel, not in actual funds.  From a financial point of view, ADRA is only a collection of projects.  We sustain the administration through percentages of project funds that we are allowed to keep.  So, for example, a particular donor might give us a $100,000 grant for a health project, specifying that we can keep 10% for overhead administrative costs.  That $10,000 of project money is then used to help pay salaries of administration members (finance director, human resources director, etc.), utilities (electricity, water, internet, telephone), and building maintenance.  The more projects we have, the more money we get for covering administrative costs, but the flip side is that we then require more personnel to manage those projects, which in turn bleeds those increased funds and cancels them out.  Not a long-term solution for financial stability.  It would be nice if donors allowed us to keep an even larger percentage of funds to cover administrative costs, but those percentages are, in fact, shrinking these days.  Donors like to be able to say, “Instead of 90% of funds going to actual project activities, now 95% of funds go directly to project interventions!”  Some donors are even getting cheeky and saying they’d be happy to provide us with project funds if we accept no overhead for ourselves.  How do they expect to get good results when they starve the administration that sustains the projects?!  Not a formula for success.

Nevertheless, I have long thought that coming out from under the financial thumb of donors would be good for our self-determinism, and to that end, we at ADRA-STP are exploring various social enterprise ideas.  A social enterprise is a business whose profits go toward sustaining social/humanitarian activities, instead of enriching the pockets of the top brass in the administration (no yachts in my near future!).  Provided our profits do indeed go toward making ADRA’s presence and activities sustainable, a social enterprise would not violate ADRA’s “non-profit” status.