International Partnership: A Model that Works

by Jen Peterson

When Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE) began its international program in 1988, we had almost 30 years of grassroots experience in providing women's health care. We started as a one room counseling and referral office and grew into an organization with 26 clinics serving three states and reaching over 50,000 people a year. We decided to share this experience with family planning professionals abroad.

Over the last eight years, we have developed a model of successful partnership based on collaboration and mutual respect. Our projects in Russia provide training and technical assistance to three groups focused on women's reproductive health. The Centre for the Formation of Sexual Culture (CFSC) uses peer educators to offer sex education to teenagers in Yaroslavl. Ariadna, an organization for women with disabilities in Novosibirsk, provides peer sexuality education. The Russian Family Planning Association (RFPA) works throughout the country to improve women's reproductive health, through outreach and training. All of these organizations are pioneers in a country where public discussion of sexuality has been taboo and contraception almost unavailable.

Despite different cultural backgrounds, we share common concerns about reproductive health care and women's lives. PPNNE's international trainers are clinic practitioners, managers, educators and trainers in the US, so they share the successes and challenges of their work with our Russian partners as peers.

Our trainers share what works for them, providing examples of the tools and systems PPNNE uses. Together we modify these tools that will work in Russian organizations and culture to meet our partners' needs. The RFPA, for example, is implementing a new organizational structure for their 50 affiliates, based on a regional structure similar to that of PPNNE. They have their own guiding vision, however, because they know what it takes to succeed in a country with little experience with a nongovernmental health sector.

We take a comprehensive approach to organizational development, encouraging our partners to examine and develop the systems that allow a reproductive health care organization to operate and grow. Our two-year project with the CFSC involved increasing their training and management capacity, and building community support for the Centre's work. PPNNE facilitated trainings for the CFSC teachers, managers and students and helped them develop marketing and fundraising campaigns. As a result, they are now sought by national and international groups to facilitate training workshops and are seeking funding to start their own professional training center.

In all our projects, our partners have applied what they learned to fields beyond the initial project's scope. When we began working with Ariadna, our goal was to give them skills to improve reproductive health services for women with disabilities. They soon discovered that the training and ideas we introduced could be used to have a broader impact in the disabled community. They have since received funding to present health care and disabilities seminars in other communities. This summer, they were part of a demonstration in the local Russian subway to protest the subway's inaccessibility for wheelchair riders!

Today, we sit next to CFSC staff at international meetings to develop sex education programs in Russia. At Russian women's leadership conferences, we facilitated advocacy workshops with Ariadna. RFPA staff came to Washington, DC to help us advocate international family planning issues to Congress. Our work together, and the skills and knowledge that we have exchanged, has strengthened our credentials as women's health care professionals.

Our projects reflect a local, community-based approach to problems that are often global. It is an approach that is not always supported in the field of international development, where a project's success is often measured by whether it has country-wide impact or influences a whole social system in a short period of time. The real measure of success comes when we can all reach greater numbers of teens and adults with new and improved services-this is what keeps us doing international work.

Jen Peterson is PPNNE's coordinator for international projects.