Ethos of Aid
Delivers innovative, context-specific projects for people in service to their communities that facilitate learning, resilience and empowerment.
These are essential for exceptional results in humanitarian post-conflict and disaster-recovery efforts.
Ethos of Aid is an organization invested in supporting, educating and empowering people in service to their communities.
Why is community-based healing & empowerment essential for post-conflict and disaster recovery?
Because everything depends on local staff.
Local staff are often impacted by the same conflict or disaster as those they serve. They may be only slightly less vulnerable than recipients.
Local staff and partners possess the contextual knowledge - social, cultural and religious norms - that are the only ethical entry points for humanitarian efforts.
Local staff live and work within their vulnerable communities and will do so long-term. As such, their healing, resilience and empowerment benefits communities.
Bypassing these vital practitioners’ need for support, healing, education and empowerment in favour of recipient-only focus and externally-designed programs leads to program blockage, financial waste and a failure to reach goals.
Recognizing and developing the strengths and leadership of these practitioners moves us towards the goal of decolonizing humanitarian practice and diversifying NGO leadership.
20+ years of field experience and research demonstrates that exceptional service-delivery demands self-awareness, thematic expertise and leadership skills, accompanied by ongoing commitment to furthering these core competencies.
Two decades of field practice also reveals a direct correlation between investing in the personal growth of practitioners and the wider social change inherent in every humanitarian intervention.
Through bespoke coaching, mentoring and training, I provide safe spaces to pause, reflect, contextualize new concepts, prioritize well-being, and learn and expand their toolbox for service to vulnerable populations.
The result is ethical, decolonized, exceptional service to recipients of aid, delivered by healthy practitioners operating from a place of well-developed, contextually-driven, personal leadership.
Results:
I’ve helped teams delve below the surface of their work to see and clear blocks that were impeding performance, resulting in increased team-harmony and cleared program blocks.
I’ve helped communities express the unthinkable after long periods of conflict, resulting in personal healing, rebuilding trust and community-based truth and reconciliation.
I have helped organizations explore, unpack and contextualize loaded concepts such as mental health, and address the fragmentation that occurs when organizational directives and beliefs clash with cultural and religious beliefs, resulting in capacity-building and improved services.
I’ve helped people and communities pause, reflect, honour the impacts of change forced upon them, discover the lessons within, and move forward with power, purpose and renewed energy.