VSO Volunteer Conference '08 - Provisional Agenda

Wednesday 18th June

Depart Ulaanbaatar at 10.15am. Arrive at the camp at the camp at 1.15pm.

Program areas sessions.

Thursday 19th June

VSO Mongolia sessions:

• Communication: VSO, partners and volunteers.
• Improving continuity → sharing resources → blogging for VSO
• VSO policies including the recent document about what VSO can and cannot do.
• Disability. This still needs to be confirmed but initial ideas are that it focuses on practical things and assessing access. More work on this needs to be done.

Friday 20th June

Success stories, frustrations and solutions to these frustrations.

Q & A

Multi choice sessions on subjects/ projects that volunteers want to share with other vols.

Depart the summer camp at 1.15pm and arrive in Ulaanbaatar at roughly 4.15pm.

Conference Schedule and Agenda

After email/weblog consultation with all of you, and following on from a few meetings with Alison, Ruth and I can now present a very basic schedule for the Volunteer Conference. It is as follows:

Wednesday the 18^th of June

Leave on train departing from UB or Darkhan mid morning – handily the Equal Step Centre is on the train line between UB and Darkhan.

Arrive at Equal Step Centre at 13:30 (both the train from Darkhan and the train from UB arrive at almost the same time). The Centre is a short 10-minute walk from the local train station.

After settling in and having lunch this probably leaves us with about 3 hours of workshop time.

Thursday the 19^th of June

Full-day of workshops (9:30ish-5:30ish)

Friday the 20^th of June

Depart for home at 13:30 (handily the trains to both UB and Darkhan depart at almost the same time). For those that want there may be a possibility to stay on at the camp for the weekend – Ruth will send an email with details nearer the time.
After taking into consideration the time we need to pack up, eat lunch and then walk to the train station, we are probably looking at about 2 and a half hours of workshop time this day.

I hope that is ok with everyone. A few people were not keen on having three days of workshops, so we’ve gone for having one full day of workshops and two half days either side. Others were not keen on the idea of having a conference that would eat into the weekend. We should be back in UB and Darkhan by early evening on the Friday, so the weekend is free for those who want it. Get back to me if you’ve got strong feelings about the dates/times.

AGENDA – your help needed! The two sessions that will definitely happen are the programme area discussions (which should take half a day) and the Q&A session between volunteers and the programme office (which will probably take 1 and a half hours). But we need to put more things on the agenda!

Do you have any ideas of topics that we should be talking about, or do you have any experience/training that you would like to share with other volunteers? Sessions can be just for volunteers, or can include the VSO staff as well. It’s up to us to decide what we want to do.

It would be great if you could leave ideas/comments on this blog entry. Just clink on the ‘comment’ link below. If you experience some problems with this then please don’t hesitate to communicate by email (my email address is schlinerATtalk21.com). I’ll then post the comments up on this blog if you want.

I hope that’s clear, but get back to me if you want something clarified. All the very best, take care of yourselves,

Rob