To Educate Itself to Educate: The Non-Profit Sector Recognizes and Rethinks Itself in the Light of Third Millennium Challenges

Abstract

Throughout the past decades, the non-profit sector has known a significant growth. Globalization, technological progress, economic crisis are factors that oblige individual practitioners and their organizations to face new professional challenges. To grow and expand, NGOs should be able to learn how to think in a strategic way; how to turn intuitions into out-and-out activities; how to generate different solutions to the same problem and select the most effective ones (Prugsamatz, 2010; Bryson, 1995). Organizational learning is an essential requirement to support and better endow non-profit organizations to successfully face these new challenges (Bahamani and others, 2012). Paoletti Foundation, within the project "School of Pedagogy for the Third Millennium" developed a 3-year training path at the benefit of NGOs workers. The result of some preliminary analyses conducted on 25 people enrolled in these training programs shows their professional development not only in terms of competencies, knowledge and abilities: problem- solving, self-determination, trust in their own professional effectiveness, broadening of their theoretical and practical knowledge, but also in terms of a more positive attitude towards their own job. People enrolled in training programs had a lower turnover rate and more significant career advancements when compared to other social workers employed in the same organization, but not enrolled in these programs. Summarizing, the purpose of these programs is to provide theoretical and practical inputs to social workers' continuous learning. Learning programs proved to be able to strengthen the capability of individual practitioners and their whole organizations to adapt to changes.



Author Information
Patrizio Paoletti, Patrizio Paoletti Foundation for Communication and Development, Italy
Salvatore Soresi, Patrizio Paoletti Foundation for Communication and Development, Italy
Ilaria Di Maggio, Patrizio Paoletti Foundation for Communication and Development, Italy
Tania di Giuseppe, Patrizio Paoletti Foundation for Communication and Development, Italy
Elena Perolfi, Patrizio Paoletti Foundation for Communication and Development, Italy

Paper Information
Conference: ECE2014
Stream: Challenges and transformation in times of change

This paper is part of the ECE2014 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon