After four flights and four countries, I arrived back in Skopje, Macedonia last night, reconnecting briefly with old friends, picking up a few groceries, enjoying an excellent dinner at a Croatian fish restaurant with my buddy Jeton, and settling into a cozy little apartment that will be my home for the next couple of weeks.
I am back here working as a consultant for the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) and USAID on a project that is building the capacity and sustainability of local NGOs who are making change happen. I wrote quite a bit about this consultancy when I was here back in September. Check out these posts for more information: The Great Macedonian Adventure Begins! Arrived and How I “Consult.”
This time, I will be conducting nine more individual, on-site technical assistance consultations. Each site visit involves an in-depth discussion with key stakeholders and eventually results in a detailed STrategy, Action and ResulTs (START) Report, a tool that we developed at Common Ground specifically for this project. You can view a sample report and my original post about this tool here: Making Change Happen.