Firstly, a great thank you to the initial team
Thanks to the very engaged team CDN has achieved a lot in the last 5 years.
We do have an online and well running Job & Eductional Database, have conducted our psychometric assessment over 1100 times in various places and for very different clients and received a very positive feedback every time. (see our annual report section for more details)
Despite all the success we have had in the last years and the great feedback we received from all clients we have served, we are still struggeling to become financially stable. Sales have not been as expected and the overhead costs to keep the whole project team have eaten up all reserves which we have made.
Therefore this summer has brought a huge change in the overall structure of Career Disha Nepal.
After much considerations and many board meetings and discussion with all team members, interns and volunteers we have made the hard decision to discontinue having a big team and rather continue with a slim core team, whic focusses on reaching out to more and new clients.
Old and New Roles
Hari, Inge and Saroj will continue in their role as board making strategic decisions for the organization.
Nabina Phaiju, office manager of VHS Bhaktapur, will strengthen the team in regard to administrative works.
Directly below the board Nabina - managing VHS Bhaktapur successfully since a few years - will take a lead for all the operational works like administration, finance, marketing and communication with the help of Saroj, Hari and Kabita.
The second department active in Nepal will be the counseling department. Hari will take a lead in that sectore and Susma will help him. The department will be responsible for developing counseling material, conducting counseling and workshop and train career helpers on our tools. Also they will take over updating our job & educational database to the minimum which is required.
IT and technical works will be reduced to a minimum and taken care by Inge, working for CDN from Austria.
Inge will take make sure to maintain the website from Austria and improve the search engine requirements of the website. If required we will reach out to Patrick to add new functions to our page.
Among others we have decided, that we will not entertain a paid position for data collection and the maintenance of the database anymore. While we are still dedicated to keep our database up and running we can not entertain a paid position for that purpose till we are financially stronger again. We will try to get projects funds to run focussed and financed projects for boosting new data for our website in future. So if you are interested in supporting that aspect, we appreciate if you get in touch with us.
Also in the past we have provided internship and trainee positions for the IT and design department. It has shown to be very difficult though to suprvise trainee positions from Austria and to make use of that overhead costs in an efficient manner, so that we have decided to reduce these positions for the time being as well. Some of the interns decided to continue on a voluntarily basis, some others have taken that change as a starting point for their further academic education.
Shifting to VHS Bhaktapur building
Since June 2019 our office is located inside VHS Bhaktapur building on the second floor.
As many rooms in VHS Bhaktapur are vacant over long period, we have decided to shift our office in the second floor of VHS building (and reach lunch faster 😉 )
During peak times we an use the class rooms which are empty during most of the day for volunteers and bigger team gatherings.
the bigger picture
We plan to establish an umbrella organization which will look after VHS and CDN both.
The board also this change also as a chance to bring both offices VHS Bhaktapur and Career Disha Nepal a bit closer together again.
We are planning to establish a new umbrella organization soon, which should be above both VHS and CDN. As a first step the above described administrative roles are taken care by VHS admin staff. In a next step we plan to have those central functions in the newly established umbrella organization. .
Outlook & hopes for the future
As initially described, we see that as a new start with a slimmer team. We hope to be able to establish long time client relations with many educational institutions in the next years so to reach a financially stable base income soon again and be able to slowly expand our team again.
By mid 2020 we hope to be break even in regard to the operative cost again and then slowly build up additional positions again.
If you would like to support us with a monthly contribution starting from USD 1 per month, we appreciate your contribution on our Patreon page.