“How do you think to set up the workshop?”Guido asks me. “In the only effective way I know, the one that our Asvi Social Change lecturers have transmitted to us.” I never imagined that one day, I would be the one managing a workshop based on the Logical Framework and that a meeting could lead me to where I am now. At the beginning of 2015, I was at the end of Asvi Social Change Project Management Master for International Cooperation when I read an article from Blog4Change about the meeting of ArBio Perù and ArBio Italia, non-profit associations that work to promote sustainable development models in the Peru’s Amazon Rainforest. The instinct told me that I had to find out more about it: I discovered that ArBio Italia’s office is in Lecco, near to where I live, and that Guido Scaccabarozzi, the Director, in 2013 had attended the same Master that I was doing. The pieces of the puzzle came together; just a short talk with Guido was enough to fall in love with the energy of the project, the professionalism of the team of environmental engineers, researchers, educators, passionate about their job. It started then a collaboration that has taken me, today, to the role of Project Manager, responsible of the Project Area with Michel Saini- Co-founder of ArBio Perù. In less than one year, we took part to important cooperation tender notices and obtained good results – Comitato Lecchese per la Pace, WWF-US and Agropolis Fondation. The PMC Master gave me the opportunity to meet my travel mates, it gave structure to my creativity and desire to seek new and sustainable ways of cooperation and development, I now know that this is the right path, as I could never imagine myself doing something different. Every day is an exciting challenge…next one will be to leave for the first amazon monitoring-mission!
“Guido, tell me everything about your last month in Peru”. This is what Silvia asked me the first time that we met and it is a question that people often ask me. How do I answer? I tell that my annual mission in Madre de Dios region, is in order to talk with ArBio Perù managers and decide the future strategy, also with the managers of the Ecologic Agriculture Association that produces jams with agroforestry, to enter into the forest and discuss with the custodians on how to evolve the base camp, to analyze the plantations in the fields of the similar guest quarters (campi di foresteria analoga) and to visit other local entities that, like ArBio, work for the safeguard of the rainforest biodiversity. Generally, after this question the one that follows is “Why do you not stay in Peru, for a longer time?” My answer is that I would love to, but for the moment, here is where I am more beneficial. As Director of ArBio Italia, I have the duty of coordinating fundraising activities, creating partnership and divulgation. Every day, I develop strategies to allow the economic sustainability of ArBio project, for example, by helping Silvia in project writing, through the work of Life Cycle Assessment sector for the environmental compensation, with the support of the e-commerce that protects the forest or finally by coordinating the other 30 members of ArBio Italia that every day make their competences available.
Attending Asvi Social Change PMC master in 2013 gave me the necessary and essential skills to carry out this work. Like Silvia, I think that “I could never imagine myself doing something different” and above all that “Every day is an exciting challenge”.
#lovetherainforest
