Koinonia

Ups, it is the middle of the night and I just woke up on the couch. I did not intend to take that 3 hour 'nap'. The upside is that I feel more fresh now than when I came home a few hours ago.

No two days are the same at IMD, but today was more different than most! Like many other teams we met we the client for our International Consulting Project (ICP). Whereas the majority of the 18 ICP clients are large corporations our team will be working with Koinonia, a relatively small NGO that amongst others runs a number of homes for street children in Nairobi, Kenya.

In the MBA Diary on 21 November 2008 Asier Sinde [Basque] from last year's class was quoted for saying:
"Our visit to Kenya was an eye opening experience that has had a strong impact not only on our year at IMD but also on our individual lives. As a result, we have recently started an initiative to create a fund that will aim at rehabilitating deprived and abused children from the streets and sponsoring them into high school and college in Kenya. This initiative will be implemented through Koinonia, a local NGO which some of us met in Kenya and that is already operating in Nairobi."

The 2008 class decided to help Koinonia by funding a 2009 ICP project for them and today they took another step in fulfilling this promise as they came to hand over the torch to the 2009 class. We are both humbled and honored to be given this task and opportunity and we look forward to getting started. It will be our largest opportunity to date to make a difference in a lot of people's lives.

The 2008's were represented by Daniel Brosseau, Max Sorokin and Svetlana Korshunova. It was obvious from the stories they told that last year's discovery trip to Kenya had made a huge impression on the class collectively. Daniel has just returned from a six week trip to Kenya, where he has been working withKoinonia on preparing our ICP project. He has obviously collected A LOT of information where there was little information to get. This will undoubtedly prove invaluable to get us off to a running start.

The afternoon was a huge information download from Daniel, Max and Svetlana. I think this was what wore me out so badly. The last week have been full of thoughts about our final startup presentations and classes on Financial Derivatives, so it is quite a switch to suddenly start thinking about improving life in the slums of East Africa.

The birds have started singing outside. I think they are telling me to go to bed!



Hand-over from the 2008 class to the 2009 class!
From left: Stefano Giussani [Italian], Max Sorokin [Russian - 2008 class], Daniel Brosseau [Canada - 2008 class], Svetlana Korshunova [Russia - 2008 class], Thorsten Boeck [Denmark], Gerald Lo [Malaysia], Ruslana Zbagerska [Canada/Ukraine], Eva Hubsman [Israel/Romania].