This month, we held a three-day celebration to mark the first year of Saúde Criança Recontar here in Florianópolis.   We held a children´s party with story-telling and a trampoline on the beach, an arts and crafts workshop and a ceremony to recognize the 138 people and organizations involved as families, volunteers, partners, workers and Board members.

The year has been a whirlwind of activity:  from our seaside christening last year to the legal set up, the recruiting of our staff and volunteers, the set up of our small office, the development of our first site, our launch, monthly training and information visits to the service in Rio de Janeiro, the recruiting and engagement of our Board, the selection of families, the support to families and their children, the start of the weekly arts and craft income-generation project, the development of our organizational systems, the organization of fundraising events and the continual creation of partnerships.

In numbers, we helped 57 people from 14 families.  We engaged 37 direct volunteers from everything from psychological support for the families, to website design to fundraising support.  We are now a full board of 10 people and have signed up 16 monthly personal donors in Brazil.  We have set up pro-bono partnerships with an accounting company, a financial software company and a communications´ company.   We raised 200% of our targeted local fundraising.

When asking the families if the programme is making a difference in their life, all who have been in the programme for over a month said it is making a big or reasonable difference in their lives and all said they enjoyed the programme.  One mother got emotional and put it down to ´the programme being the salvation of her child´. 

It has been a good year!   

At many times, it has felt like witnessing a form take shape rather than actively setting up an organization.  The form has its own life and needs only some direction and energy to enable it to unfold.  Time and time again, I have been surprised by just the right person approaching the organization at just the right time. I am aware of a synchronicity that I never recall mentioned in business lectures or even in the endless, detailed McKinsey presentation packs. 

In recent months, I have felt a strong sense of personal realization that leaves me, in quiet moments, with a deep sense of peace and I feel great gratitude for being part of the set-up of Recontar.  Thank you to all who have enabled it to happen – visible friends and invisible ones! 

As outlined in the business plan, we are hiring a CEO in 2010 who will gradually take over the executive role of leading the organization, while I continue my overseeing role on the Board and become increasingly non-executive …  gradually exchanging the role of social entrepreneur for the role of ARCH Foundation representative.   This step is essential to enable local leadership and organizational sustainability.   

It also frees me to focus more centrally on bringing up my children: a role that I am increasingly valuing.  For the first time in my adult life, my contribution outside the home feels truly secondary in importance to my contribution inside the home.  I am not sure if this feeling is a result of my sense of professional realization now or the growing awareness of the transience of the boys´ childhood – symbolized by Tom´s first permanent tooth that broke through the gum surface this month.   Certainly, this gradual handover in 2010 coincides with growing demands at home, including organizing myself financially, teaching Tom to read and write in English and my thoroughly unexpected, but extremely welcome pregnancy with my boyfriend Walbert.  This pregnancy hit me first as an involuntary wrench from my old life, but as it settles within me, I find there is space to cherish what is essential of the past, while opening to embrace new life.

And so I must bow to synchronicity once again – life is giving me what I need, when I need it.