Rural Women Beat Extortion thru Local Selftraining

Dear Donors to the  Rural Women Beat Extortion thru Local Selftraining Project (Project 47130).

During just three weeks in June that GlobalGiving opened up the campaign period for donations, you and our other donors deposited US$ 6900 into the Rural Women Beat Extortion through Local Self-training Project. This upcoming project is based upon an earlier successful pilot project in the three rural regions of Ecuador in 2015-2016.  During that pilot project the participating rural women investigated, then described, then role-played their own experiences in extortion situations.  Then, using the Positive Deviance Approach, they set aside most of their experiences (which were negative,and which also were the norm), and focused on the few (Deviant) Positive  experiences.  They studied and then practiced, in pairs, the behaviors (spoken words and body language) of their successful co-participants.

Extortion situation participants prepare to practice the successful behaviors that they had just learned from their Positive Deviant peers. 2015 Ecuador

By the end of this two-day process, they understood that, among themselves, they had discovered and then learned sufficient internal resources to successfully navigate future extortion situations. 

At the same time, the CESSEC's facilitators left these workshops, recognizing that the Positive Deviance Approach works to empower rural women (and probably other human beings) who find themselves in Extortion Situations. We, also, learned new information about the capacities, needs, and interests of Ecuadorian rural women that we needed to  address in future projects.  

Based on our own new knowledge from the Pilot Project, our plan for the 2021-2023 "Rural Women Beat Extortion thru Local Self Training" Project, included the taking the workshops geographically closer to the local communities for an additional day, and to include the topic of "Coercion Situations" in the investigation and training process, based on our 2015 findings.  We, also, hope to provide post-workshop pro bono legal support for participants who experience legal difficulties arising from their extortion or coerción situations.  And we will provide trainings so that rural women can find and successfully refer in to specific national laws to raise in extortion and coercion situations.  In this next stage, we will provide Positive Deviance, Negotiation, Persuasion, and Anti-corruption Compliance training and academic education support for interested and capable workshop participants.

Before the pandemia, we had expected the  training and academic education of workshop graduates would take place toward the end of the project in 2022 and 2023.  However, as you can see in the photo, below, Positive Deviance Anti-extortion workshops include team-building and problem-solving exercises, which we will not be able to use until the cures and vaccines are widely available. 

In-person workshop included relationship and team-building exercises, like this team-problem solving exercise in the Amazon Region of Ecuador

Therefore, as we continue to raise funds for the entire project, we will begin 2021 with an online training and academic education for capable and interested 2015-2016 rural woman workshop graduates, who will then become members of our later in-person facilitation group.  Some of them may move on to become Anti-corruption Compliance Officers in national and international companies. They may be joined by volunteer trainees from Civil Society organizations and from academía, based on another grant which we seeking,  The costs will mainly be for highly-experienced Positive Deviance trainers and facilitators from around the world to work virtually with our trainees; for some technology acquisitions to provide a high-quality training experience, and to provide some or all of the rural women trainees appropriate telecom access to the training site.

By mid-2021, the newly-trained Positive Deviance facilitators will help expand and increase the number of the rural workshops as soon as the medical issues have been resolved, or as soon as we have found virtual Positive Deviance techniques have sufficiently improved.  At this time we are waiting to learn  from recent online Positive Deviance workshop experiences involving workshops on other problems other than extortion and coercion, such as the Covid19 pandemic itself, malnutrition,  environmental and cultural protection, and other forms of social injustice.  Hopefully,we will be able to apply lessons from these other Positive Deviance online training to use in our projects.

Please let me know if you need further information, or if you have ideas on how to improve our projects or our communications with you.

Bruce