Administration for Social Change

I have spent much of the last few days in EOS International's office in San Isidro. The techs are out in the field, installing solar panels or working with communities to install water chlorinators. But the work the US team and I have been doing is just as important.

Welcome to the EOS Office

When I worked at The Mosaic Project, I worked with an incredible woman named Barbara, who has been doing accounting for organizations since the early 70s.  She began her book­keep­ing edu­ca­tion as coor­di­na­tor of a rad­i­cal book­shop in Washington, DC where the accoun­tant made every­one learn the basics of keep­ing finan­cial records with the admo­ni­tion that, “If you want to make a rev­o­lu­tion, you have to learn how to count the money.”

And I think it's true.  For any movement to be sustainable and effective, you need systems of administration that will keep things running and support growth.

My official title with EOS is the Director of Development. My unofficial title is Organizer of Everything Administrative.  I joined the organization and immediately got all our contact and donation history into Salesforce and insisted it was time to move to Quickbooks for accounting. I enjoy setting up systems and EOS has given me plenty of opportunities.

Giving a presentation to the Nica staff, in Spanish!

EOS Nicaragua is actually much more developed than EOS US.  They have to be. They have 6 full-time employees and a bunch of part-time folks.  They are installing technologies that effect thousands of people each year.  And Evelyn, their administrator, is totally on the ball.  (Plus she makes a killer vegetable soup!)

But they often don't have access to the latest information technology. So I'm helping figure out how to integrate their accounting with the US accounting. And helping them set up a database of the data from their impact surveys, that will include geo-referenced photos, so donors can click on a map and see a picture and some facts about the family they helped. And I'm helping them design their impact surveys to gather the information we need to determine if and how we are really improving the health and wealth of these families while protecting the environment.

They have been long days of troubleshooting, researching, and having half-understood multilingual conversations. But I feel confident that by the end of the nearly three weeks I have remaining, we will have great systems set up that will allow EOS to grow far into the future.