Latin America Representative's Report for the IAVE Board Meeting, November 2006

IAVE BOARD MEETING
LATIN AMERICA REPRESENTATIVE’S REPORT
NOVEMBER 2006

As Latin American representative I worked in four main aspects:

I Coordination of Liz Burns visits to countries in Latin America.
I worked with the national representatives of Panama. Ecuador, Peru and Colombia in order to inform them about the visit of the President, coordinate the agenda in the different countries and setting some guide lines for the visit. As a result after the visit was finished a report of each country was sent to the president. All the activities planned in each country were presented to the president before the final program was established. In Colombia I worked very closely with the Colombian National Representative in organizing the visit.

An article was written about the trip of the president to these four countries and published in E-IAVE.

II Improve service to members
In order that Latin American members receive all communications, I sent several e-mails to Latin American members to get the correct electronic addresses of each member. Several of them were corrected and the information was sent to the person in charge of membership.

Since March of this year E-IAVE were translated into Spanish and sent to all Latin American members. At the beginning, part of the electronic bulletin was translated, but since July the complete E-IAVE were translated although some of them were quite long, as the September issue.

Website was also translated into Spanish

III Increased membership
Communications were sent to members to encouraged increased membership. In some cases, the regional representative served as intermediary facilitating communication between the person in charge of membership and the national representative.

Latin America was the fastest-growing region, from 46 to 101 members, an increase of over 200%  It also is second only to Africa in membership.  Africa has 115.  Three of the top seven countries in terms of numbers of members are in Latin America:

Number of IAVE members is Latin America

In coordination with Colombian National Representative, Colombian membership increased in almost 300%,   from 13 members in 2005 to 34 members in 2006.

IV Promotion of World Conference in India
All the information received in relation to the 19th IAVE World Volunteer Conference, was translated into Spanish and sent to all Latin American members. For those that didn’t have an e-mail address in Colombia, the information was printed and sent by regular mail to all of them.

In order to motivate participation of Latin American members in the conference, several e-mails were sent to the organizing committee asking for scholarships for Latin Americans.  Communications were also sent to members of the region to encourage them to request collaboration of the airlines that flight from their country to India. In Colombia, in collaboration with the national representative, a formal request of funds was made to the United Kingdom Embassy, as a follow up action started by  IAVE president when she visited Colombia in may this year.

V. Motivation to Latin American countries to present proposals for 20th IAVE World Volunteer Conference.
Several documents were translated and sent to all Latin American members to motivate them to organize the 20^th Conference in their country. The main documents translated were those written by the Vice president, Stan Fisher, mainly:
·        Invitation letter
·        Suggested guidelines for a proposal
·        Sample of memorandum of understanding if awarded

Countries that decided to present a proposal were encouraged and supported in their decision.

These activities were possible thanks to members of the board and national representatives.