By Katherine Bethany, FSAVE – President, SAVE International
Last month I described some of the great work your volunteers are doing on behalf of SAVE International. I am very pleased to add some more items this month.
Our Eastern Mediterranean & Africa (EMA) Chapter held a “Value of Risk” conference this month. I’ve included a picture of some of the attendees. Congratulations to Jacqueline Fahmy and her team on the successful event.
Also, our Gulf Chapter published a great magazine in Arabic and English (go to the back for the English version). Click here to read the issue.
Great work by both chapters!
Along with the above, I am excited – I discovered at least one person reads these monthly articles. I received a very good suggestion after my last article (thank you, George!), and must admit that sometimes I wonder if anyone reads this column as I rarely, if ever, hear any feedback…good, bad or indifferent.
This thought leads me to this month’s musing. I get a multitude of magazines, newspapers, bulletins, etc. every month. Some I read immediately, as I am really interested in the content, some I just skim and others I put aside to read later. Many items I read I love, some are challenging, and some are thought provoking. But I cannot recall more than a couple of times ever letting the author of these articles/columns/blogs know that I read what they wrote and what I felt about it.
Authors who are paid for their efforts (like reporters, fiction writers, book authors, etc.) get feedback in terms of sales – if their writing is successful, they get more money. But authors like me and the other contributors of Value World are not paid so we do not get the feedback routinely. As volunteers, it is sometimes hard to know what is working and what is not.
My excitement over one comment and pleasure at receiving it has made me realize that I need to make more of an effort to provide feedback to the other non-paid authors/volunteers in my life. So, I challenge all of you too: take a moment to send a note to an author (it doesn’t have to be me) and provide a small bit of feedback – a thank you, or I disagree, or you made me think. I will try to do the same.
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