Dear Actioneers,

We’re 3!! When CA began its Actions on Dec 16, 2008, hardly any of the Actioneers present dreamt of a day when our membership would span across more than 600 students from over 90 institutes across the world. And yet today, that is a reality. We never dreamt that our Actions would have an impact on well over 100,000 underprivileged Bangladeshis — but today, we call that a conservative estimate!

It is at this juncture that we, as Actioneers, must take a deep breath and answer some of the basic questions that arise about our work:

• What are our achievements?
• Why do we do one-day/short-term Actions?
• What is our Vision? Do we have a Mission? Where are our Values?
• What next for CA?

We’ll try to answer those questions below.

Actioneers celebrate Eid with street children. Did you know we donated 21 cows and 2 goats to orphanages across Bangladesh this Eid-ul-Adha?

:What are our Achievements?

To see the answer, click on “this” long list. Just a few random highlights are:

• We are the most active student-run organisation working with the visually impaired in Bangladesh as part of Action: Guardians in the Dark — in fact, CA is Building Bangladesh’s FIRST text-book based library for the visually impaired! We hope to never again meet a visually impaired student who says he only read 3 pages of Braille book in his entire student life; we want them to study as the rest of us do.

• We have built over 80 tube wells across the northern and southern reaches of the nation, impacting over 66,000 people as part of Action: Jolodhara! This Action was entered in the HSBC-The Daily Star Climate Awards 2011 where it had the mettle to compete against multinationals and government-run projects.

• We have distributed over 16,000 pieces of clothes across the country, and over10,000 pieces of warm clothes have already been collected through Action: Ushnota this year!

• We have shared our iftar with over 15,000 street people through our hugely popular Action: Piyaju-Beguni!

As you must have noticed, the above Actions are divided into those with long term impacts (1-2) & those having short terms impacts (3-4).

So why do we do one-day/short-term Actions?

This question is generally asked like this: What is the point of giving iftar for one day to street people?!!

We welcome such constructive questions, and we do have an answer to them!

Leaving aside the obvious virtue of feeding the hungry, in order to understand the necessity of short term Actions, we must understand the philosophy behind CA: CA wants to create trained Actioneers.

Short term actions: used to recruit Actioneers and give some preliminary training.

Long term actions: where Actioneers inculcate the real values of CA and get furthertraining. Here they work as mentors of underprivileged students, manage giving out interest-free grants and even get training in how to use social media effectively!

This is why we say our strengths are:

[1] We focus on training Actioneers.

[2] We concentrate on Actions with long term impacts.

[3] We highlight creative, low cost solutions to big problems.

A student of Singapore Management University working in rural Bogura with CommunityAction.

What is our Vision? Do we have a Mission? Where are our Values?

Since we are talking about the Philosophy of CA, let’s try to understand what that is. CA is a very philosophy-driven organisation!

Vision: Moral

Mission: Influential

Value: Professional

CA has a mantra: Actioneers > Actions , i.e. CA focuses more on Actioneers than the Actions, because if proper Actioneers are created they will themselves carry out the Actions, exactly as our track record shows. We seek to create Actioneers who are Moral, Influential and Professional, thus making them an asset for Bangladesh and the world.

What next for CA?

CA is now preparing the next generation of its leaders to take over the day-to-day running of the organisation. In the coming year, we will focus on streamlining our recruitment policies, highlighting our social media presence and formalising every one of our Actions. We welcome all suggestions from you about these.

It has been an amazing journey. And my dear Actioneer, you really did it! You made CommunityAction.

How does it feel?

Even a smile is charity, right? :D

Helpful links:

• Blog
• Facebook Page

You are completely new to a place and have got an emergency to go to hospital at midnight! Think of the situation, how to know about the nearest hospital, the way to it and the like. If you have a map in hand showing the location and way of the nearest hospital, that can be life savior. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is aimed at creating detailed map for the whole world. The effective use of OpenStreetMap can contribute to the society in multiple dimensions. Maps of developed countries are incredibly detailed.

“OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating & providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them”— www.openstreetmap.org

 

First Mapping Party workshop

With the World Cup in mind, CommunityAction (ca-bd.org), a registered student run charity, started mapping Bangladesh. To make the life easy for the foreign guests, CommunityAction first started mapping the capital Dhaka.  For this CommunityAction arranged a mapping party dated 21^st February at Base, Dhanmondi, Dhaka. At the mapping party volunteers were informed how to map using GPS unit. And then from February 25 to February 26 actioneers mapped numerous points in Dhaka showing everything from restaurants, car parks, streets, hospitals to food courts, gas stations and water sources. Mapping is still going on. Everyday actioneers taking loads of waypoints and covering more areas.

Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, a Lecturer of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Bangladesh University of Engineering and technology (BUET), first felt the necessity of taking proper initiatives of starting OpenStreetMap in Bangladesh. In July 2010, he attended the annual meeting of OpenStreetMap, called State of the Map (SotM), in Spain and presented the “State of Bangladesh”. As a part of the scholarship, Ishtiaque got 5 GPS units from the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The first mapping project of OSM-BD was MapBUET and after that actioneers mapped old Dhaka. And mapping on port city Chittaong is going to start soon.

A map on digital format can be expanded to a great scale. There is no need to carry a large piece of paper and this map can be updated very frequently, even the tiniest change. It can be carried with a laptop or a good handset and an internet connection. With the emergence of new technology and devices like Android and iPhone, digital maps are coming close to common people. Though we have Google map already at hand there are some inconveniences of using it. One cannot use Google Maps to give directions to a place not listed or work with the map data as the data are copyrighted. But OSM is open source, its completely free.

Individuals are allowed to see and manipulate the internal data behind the OpenStreetMap thus updating the map and developing own application. Moreover, OSM has a database of GPS traces being more and more enriched by people all over the world. Anyone who has travelled with a GPS device and recorded a track can donate it to the database. Anyone can search the database using the tags and download the traces, which can be loaded into a GPS device.

It can also be helpful in emergencies – one can quickly find hospitals, medical services, fire services, police stations, and also the shortest and quickest way to get that. Also one can search anything around – shops, marketplaces, restaurants, pharmacies, fuel stations, and many more things.

Actioneers are taking way-points aT old Dhaka

Click: OpenStreetMap Wiki Page

click: OSM Bangladesh Page

So come forward, start mapping your place!

Let’s Map Bangladesh!

By: Jobaida Akhtar, Lecturer, EEE, CUET

Dear Actioneers,

We are now two years old! Beginning humbly with just a handful of Actioneers, we have grown to be a thriving organisation with over three hundred members now, and increasing. We are now registered with the government, have a website, and about to get a proper office room too – but most importantly we have AMAZING Actioneers on board!

When Actioneers say, “CA transformed our lives“, they’re giving CA more credit than it deserves!

Truth is, Actioneers have transformed CA!

Even a smile is charity -- think of how many smiles we've spread!

As such, this is the time to look deep within ourselves as an organisation and be clear about our values, our mission and our vision. Why are we Actioneers? And what do we want to achieve?

First of all, Actioneers are unhappy with inequality, poverty, discrimination and oppression in our society. However, this is not what sets us apart from others. What really sets us apart is our strategy for change, that is, how we plan to bring about the positive changes we want to see in society.

Some organisations feel that education is the answer, some say it’s women empowerment, while others say it’s microcredit, and so on. But CA Actioneers feel that if our solutions lay merely in such actions, then by now the combined effort of organisations such as the UN, the domestic and international NGOs, and the government would have solved most of our problems, and CA would not have had to exist.

But if actions by themselves can’t solve problems, what can? Naturally, the answer is: ACTIONEERS!

Hence, our belief: Actioneers > Actions.

How?

Through their social service work, Actioneers are expected to inculcate within themselves the following two values:

Actioneers will lead the society by becoming moral, model citizens!

1. We are moral human beings of this universe
2. We are good citizens of Bangladesh

If CA is able to create a generation of moral, model citizens who are trained to care for the society around them, it won’t matter where our Actioneers end up –be it here or abroad, in the media or as housewives– they’ll still be serving society to the best of their capacities. We’ll have succeeded in creating not just an organisation, but a movement!

So next time when anyone asks you, “What does CommunityAction focus on? What does it want to achieve?” you can confidently answer, “CommunityAction wants all Actioneers to become moral, model citizens. We train ourselves to become such citizens by doing social service.”

The future?

Keeping these in mind, CA arranges a lot of workshops and training sessions exclusively for Actioneers. In 2011, we will not only arrange more of these, but will also incorporate this theme within the very fabric of our organisation. Hence, we’ll be restructuring all our units so that each unit arranges training programs for itself. Let’s start preparing ourselves from today to embrace this training! After all, it will make us better Actioneers!

In the meantime, stay tuned for some really exciting Actions coming up in 2011!

বিজয় দিবসের শুভেচ্ছা রইল সবার জন্য।