ostiral

The purpose of our finance training/workshop was to educate the directors of the little organizations we work with and sponsor. We have arrangements, called fiscal sponsorships, with each of the groups who came so they can receive funds from foundations and others who want to donate to a legal, non-profit organization -- a 501(c)(3). Most of the people there knew very little about bookkeeping, financial reports, and the nature of the fiscal sponsor relationship. So to get everyone on the same page, we created a presentation and materials that covered the basics about financial record-keeping and reporting and the specifics about working with us.

The participants were three people who we work with very closely, a couple who we've worked with in the past and whose mission doesn't exactly fit with us, and a set of five from a community group we are just starting to collaborate with. We had hand-outs in both English and Spanish and a woman from our office was doing simultaneous interpretation into Spanish while my boss and I presented our slides in English. It forced us to go slowly which probably improved the quality of comprehension on behalf of both English and Spanish listeners. I was probably talking too fast.

Overall I feel like I did an okay job but know we could've been more prepared. I wish we would've had the slides in both languages because our Spanish-only people were flipping through the hand-outs all the time trying to follow along. I think having professional interpretation would've helped too. Another challenge was that there were varying levels of experience and needs in the group. At the end everyone was saying they learned a lot, wanted more and can we do another training.