Dear members!

With new professionals joining Credibility Alliance and with volunteers extending their support for administrative activities, the Alliance is all geared up to move to accreditation activities. The Alliance has formed an accreditation panel with seven expert members their background being academics, consultancy and accountancy. This panel will help the Alliance in its certification projects and would provide its expertise in finalizing the accreditations once the pilot phase is over.

June 2007: The Month in Review
20 voluntary organizations expressed their desire to join Credibility Alliance in promotional meeting organized by Manam Foundation at Tirunelveli:
Credibility Alliance was invited to discuss norms in a meeting organized by Manam Foundation, our member organization at Tirunelveli on June 16th 2007. Twenty Voluntary organizations participated in the discussion with our Regional Coordinator- Praveen (RC- South).  Praveen felt that most of the VOs were grass root level organizations and they may require capacity building to comply with minimum norms of Credibility Alliance.

Draft programme norms and feedback from pilot accreditation visit discussed at 6th meeting of the  Norms Committee in Mumbai:

6th meeting of the  Norms Committee was held at Nirmala Niketan, Mumbai, on June 23rd 2007. The agenda was to discuss the draft programme norms, develop questionnaire to assess norms and finalize the draft preamble. There was also a discussion on the presentation made by Ms. Manisha of YASHADA and Ms. Sarika and Daniel from Credibility Alliance. The presentation was to get the feel of Pilot accreditation done by YASHADA and Credibility Alliance and to understand the feedback received. Next meeting of the Norms committee is scheduled for July 14th 2007.

A two day workshop was organized By Chaitanya in collaboration with YASHADA to promote credibility norms in the voluntary sector. The workshop was held at Pune on June 15th – 16th 2007. Credibility Alliance was invited to present its Norms and process of accreditation.

The participating members represented 50 voluntary organizations in Maharashtra. Most of them were the chief functionaries of the organizations. Jt. Exec. Director, Credibility Alliance, Ms. Rewati Bhagwat discussed CA Norms and explained the accreditation process and its need. Generally all participants were very receptive and asked piercing questions related to the process of accreditation. It was observed that there was general consensus around accreditation. On the second day the participants were divided into groups and were asked to come up with Norms for the voluntary sector. It was found that the Norms that the groups came up with were more stringent than the CA norms.

A meeting with 22 NGO representatives of Orissa was held on June 6th 2007 at CYSD, Bhubaneshwar. Mr. Jagadananda of CYSD chaired the meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to obtain a constructive feedback from the Orissa voluntary sector regarding three major issues. These issues included the challenges faced by the Orissa voluntary sector, expectation from the Orissa government for creating a better environment for the sector and enabling environment that the sector envisages so as to perform in a better manner. Responses received were instructive and accordingly, the entire proceedings were converted into a power-point presentation for presenting to the Orissa Task Force on June 8, 2007.The highlight of the meeting was the participants’ request that the state government should bring out a policy on the voluntary sector at the state level in view of the final national voluntary sector policy

In the Task Force meeting held on 8tth of June 2007, Ms. Rewati Bhagwat, Robert & Rituparna jointly made a presentation to the committee. The presentation was based on feedback received from the NGO representative in the meeting on June 6, 2007.  The representatives of the government ensured that they would present the feedback from the Orissa voluntary sector to the higher authorities who will study the suggestions and grievances and then propose to the legislative assembly for bringing out a policy for the Orissa voluntary sector.