[AfH-Chapters] Update from Germany

[Tobias Polzin]

Dear national chapters,

I was just writing an email to Mark with a some update with our last 3
month's activities and I thought, perhaps you would also be interested
in it.

I would like to share some personal feelings about our local chapter
work, too. In general, things feel more difficult for us compared to
last year. The first year was so exciting. The preparation of the
translated course was a hard, but clear task. Now that we have done
that, it's not so clear how to proceed, given the limited time resources
of volunteers who are full-time employed with other jobs. So, we
*focussed our work for the next 3 month* on the following areas:

 1. Courses. Approach all people that have said they are interested in
    leading a course (hopefully using a mailing from AfH International
    database)
 2. Prepartion of a gathering weekend for Action for Happiness Germany.
    We hope that this can be an activity that can attract new
    volunteers, give them a non-internet contact with us, qualify them
    for tasks and clarify the further directions of AfH-Germany. nspired
    by something that Maurizia from AfH-Italy did, we would like to
    offer a "preparation for being a course leader" to people who
    registered as leaders in your database.
 3. Improve on organisational questions
     1. What can we offer people wanting to volunteer, without the
        ability to make individual training?
     2. For what activities does it make sense to pay for them, as they
        are not done regular enough and/or powerful enough if done on a
        volunteer basis?
     3. Apply for funds that offer consultancy for non-profit organisations
     4. Use positive psychology approaches (character strength analysis)
        within our own group

Unfortunately, a very valuable point, articles in Happiness magazines
had to be dropped due to limited resources.

Perhaps our current working procedure is on interest for you:

  * There is a non-profit association with 3 board members that serves
    as the legal foundation, but effectively does nothing.
  * There are 3 people that committed themselves to participate in the
    organisation for at least 6 months. There are around 10 others that
    participate in isolated tasks (translating the monthly calendar, ...).
  * Every 6 months, we arrange a real world weekend together, for
    revitalising the contact.
  * Every 3 months, we do a session of review (our past activities, to
    celebrate), retrospective (what has to be changed in our processes)
    and planning (what is the focus of the next 3 months) (adopted from
    Scrum methodology)
  * Every week, we have a 20 minutes zoom webcall with "one good thing",
    "current mood", "celebrate AfH tasks done in the last week", "plans
    for next week", "impediments/difficulties/questions" (adopted from
    Scrum "daily"), with up to 5 members.

After the last "review" I was impressed what we have achieved the last 3
months, although things did not feel very "fluid":

  * 3 successful courses supported
  * 6 courses in preparation
  * The homepage www.actionforhappiness.de has a new "contribute" page,
    a page with the german course material for participants. We prepared
    a German version of the "Unhappy?" text, giving pointers to support
    organisations in Germany.
  * Printed the German course book with fully revised German "resources"
    (personally, *this was my highlight*! the printed german books are
    so well received, look so cool, and the gathering of German
    links/books/videos for the resources was fun)
  * Together with AfH International we are experimenting about how to
    arrange the organisational work for courses in Germany
  * The homepage was equipped with a feature rich CRM (CiviCRM) used by
    over 11000 non profit organisations. It offers many interesting
    options (member database, mailings, event applications, management
    of donations, ...). But is also so feature rich that it's using
    sledgehammer to crack a nuts.
  * AfH Internaional supported us with mailings to members in
    Switzerland and Austria (with surprisingly no responses)
  * We started collected emailadresses of supporters and have around 200.
  * Facebook subscriptions and likes are now over 1000.
  * One request for funding / organisational consultancy was rejected, a
    second one was submitted, a third one is in preparation.
  * We found two new people interested in translating materials.

Is there anything to report from you? I would find it nice, if you all
report something about your current achievements, difficulties,
feelings, plans!

Best wishes

  Tobias


-- 
Ich werde versuchen, mehr Glück und weniger Unglück in der Welt um mich herum zu stiften.
(Action for Happiness Deutschland. www.actionforhappiness.de)

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