YGOAL’S Challenges During the Pandemic
Though as Linking and Learning implementers focus was made on the grantees and rightsholder groups, YGOAL’s situation was, in fact, no different from those who were affected by the pandemic in terms of job and financial security. The prolonged restrictions and quarantines had also pushed YGOAL to the brink. Its other partners who were also severely affected chose to stop its projects or put on hold new ones, including funding, rendering YGOAL unable to provide security for its project-based employees and consultants in the months that followed. As a result, only YGOAL’s original founders were left to complete the Linking and Learning facilitation role. Yet even though manpower had been reduced to just the founders in their attempt to cut costs and stretch the organization’s viability options, YGOAL was still confronted with the problem of holding the fort of hope in the midst of their own dismal situation. The founders found themselves searching for revenue-generating activities to help sustain them and their families, while still trying their best to open the space for the grantees, constantly thinking of ways to innovate, be agile, and adapt to bind the Voice PH as a community in these trying times. Their circumstances and sentiments can best be described in the following excerpt written by Yani Alonto for an article on Linking and Learning:
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“Being constantly present as the linking and learning facilitator is also challenging. The same with all the grantees and rightsholder groups, we also experienced disruptions and imbalance at the organizational and individual levels. This vulnerability humbles us and enables us to recognize that while we hold the fort in sustaining the linking and learning space, we are also members of this community. The energy shared with us by our fellow grantees and rightsholder groups fuels us to remain present. Seeing how this experience brought a stroke of hope is more than enough for us to push through.”
Because of all these, YGOAL recalibrated its Linking and Learning efforts, holding deeper consultations with the grantees on their context, time limitations, and the effects of the pandemic on individuals and organizations, resulting in putting focus on relevance such as the identified COPs and learning questions in early 2020. This led to the development of the Communities of Practice (COP) and Community of Stakeholders (COS) components into the Linking and Learning Pathways.
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