Community Pathway's Ethos and Project Approach
An interview with Louis Trup, Public Service Leader and Programme Director of CPA
I interviewed Louis Trup, a Trustee of Community Pathway Africa and Project/Programme Director about the Charity Model Canvas and how it plays a vital role in identifying and evaluating new projects and the general direction of the organisation.
With a number of factors coming into play when managing the projects, the decision-making process is not something Louis takes lightly. It is a fully thought-out plan with an emphasis on local people and sustainability.
“The question I ask myself is, how can we, as a UK based organisation, best support the local people. Part of the vision is not telling people what to do, but empowering them to allow people on the ground to identify ways to build that development piece, in the broadest way possible.”
With this in mind, it’s clear that long-term planning must come into the thinking when assessing these complex project proposals.
There is a definite need to have a clear view of the whole landscape before deciding on which projects to proceed with, and there are some tough questions to ask ourselves. This is where the guiding light for Community Pathway Africa comes into play.
The Charity Model Canvas acts as a context provider in assessing and evaluating the cultural landscape.
The three main questions we ask are:
- what’s the reality now,
- what do we want to see in the future, and
- what do we need to do to make it happen?
That’s what the charity model canvas is about. It’s using a framework that’s been quite broadly used before (Strategyzer), but it’s how we tie those strands of development into our framework. So, the first part of it is setting out our vision, and from there we go into those various details, like what are our key activities, how do we measure success, what are the challenges we face, who are our audiences, what partnerships do we want to develop, and what are our income streams. So, it combines it all into a one-pager and allows us to go forward as a team with a unified purpose, to try and achieve the vision we set out with.
Louis is passionate about making a true change and believes that an all-encompassing vision is the way forward.
“The critical thing we have to get right is a vision. We have to think about what we, the Trustees, the organisation of Community Pathway Africa, what we want to achieve and what world we want to see.”
Community Pathway Africa’s Project Approach
With a great deal of experience in the charity sector, Louis is fully qualified to talk about the issues surrounding the industry, but he admits that his time working in Nepal as a Project Coordinator really shaped his outlook on the work he does today.
“I’ve worked in Nepal on community-based projects and that’s really where I became interested in this sort of work. There was a model over there that was similar to the model used by CPA. It was understanding what the local needs were, in quite small projects, giving small part funding, where 50% of the funding would be from the UK and 50% would be by the local community themselves to carry out environmental and educational projects. So, from that I got an insight into how we can do this joint working, how we can partner with communities, using finances and resources from the UK, partner with local people with lived experience, giving us the ability to be able to solve issues locally.”
All this valuable experience has come into his thinking when working for Dream Africa, especially when identifying and assessing which projects to fund, initially in Ghana. But the pitfalls are treacherous, and these ideas must be tailored to the local community or there is a greater risk of the schemes not attaching to the needs of the people.
‘We’re looking to empower those people in, say Ghana. We’re thinking, what are the best interventions, what are the best ways we can help? There have been so many years of development work that’s been using ideas that have worked somewhere else and transposing them over. So, instead of using an idea that may work in the UK or in the west, our ideal is to flip that and use a more grassroots, bottom-up approach. So, when we’re looking at what projects to pursue, actually, what we’re really saying is, here are different ways in which local people have said they want to gain support or where we could step in to help them. So, out of these projects, firstly what can we afford, because currently we are not a huge organisation, so what can we do? Secondly, do the projects meet the aim of fostering financial freedom and growth and opportunity and do they have that sustainable element to them, so are they rooted in empowerment rather than short term support. Then ultimately, we’re looking at how they fit together to build communities and how their continuity is set by those people.’
Knowing what the people of certain locations want could be considered an almost impossible task, but Louis believes that with Community Pathway Africa’s growing network of connections the gap between predicting, and understanding, is closing dramatically.
‘That’s certainly a challenge (understanding what people want), and it’s one we tackle in two ways. Firstly, there is literature out there, there’s facts and there’s figures and there’s understanding of legal structures and education and we can find that things out, it’s relatively open source. This might identify certain places or certain issues but actually, the main way, is through our connections and leads in Ghana. Our leads have identified certain topics and have certain networks who can lead on various issues. Our leads are so important, and really provide the link to those people who are living locally in Ghana.’
Overall, Louis is happy with the work that has been done to date but admits there is more to come.
‘We are making small and sustainable interventions through our links in Ghana, and it’s going to be through those people and their stories that we shape our approach and understanding. That is what we need to focus on, to really make a marked difference.’
Starting out we were clear that we needed something simple and easy to follow, as a growing organisation but also something that we could refer to in years to come as we expanded.
The Charity Model Canvas is based on Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas template and it has been adapted to fit into a charity by an organisation called Manifesto.
The key difference with the CMC is that it doesn’t look at profit as an ultimate aim. It’s looking at understanding our measures as a charitable organisation. That’s the key difference.
Like a charity, we need to look at our expenditure and income as any profit-focused organisation would. But predominantly it is about how we select our activities, whereas a commercial based company might select these based on what’s going to make us the most money, we choose based on what is going to have the most enduring impact.
As an organisation, we also wanted the charity to be as transparent as possible in terms of how it chooses projects and manages its donations and funding.
We wanted something that was easy to share and would provide a basis for us to work towards and a basis for other people as well, just so there was that clarity across the board.
If you would like to find out about we fit the CMC into a 2 hour board meeting session, please email us on info@communitypathway.org.uk. You can also reach out to Louis Trup or Virginia Simpson on LinkedIn.
Louis is keen to impress that organisations like Community Pathway Africa will not work without trust.
‘Ultimately, you know, these organisations run on trust. We ask our supporters to trust that we are doing the best we can and the people in Ghana are trusting us to do the best we can in order to support them, and building that trust relies on being as open as possible.’