INTRAC Newsletter May 2020

Like everyone, everywhere, these months have been dominated by responding to the upheavals caused by COVID-19. We’ve temporarily closed our office, made sure that consultants working on projects with us around the world firstly got home safely and were then able to continue their assignments from home, and we’ve built on our experience in online working to adapt.

Much of this newsletter therefore explores how we’ve been rethinking activities, and coping with the major changes in our personal lives and our work.

Our trustees are monitoring the implications of the pandemic for INTRAC, with regular reviews of staff welfare, finances, strategy and prospects. We are – for now – in a reasonably good position, delivering on existing initiatives and starting new ones in ways that continue to provide high quality support to civil society.

We are regularly connecting with colleagues and friends in many different countries. We’re exploring together the implications of the pandemic for organisations in our contexts, and considering how capacity strengthening consultants, researchers and trainers can ensure that civil society remains resilient, continues to hold those with political and economic power to account, and provides essential support to those in desperate need.

The picture looks pretty bleak right now as social fractures deepen and trust erodes, but as Bev Jones writes in the Guest Contribution, we have to fight for the radical shifts we want, hold tight to the many positives, and continue to reimagine a better world beyond this ‘critical juncture’.

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