Part V: Make It Last¶
A recovery project is not judged on the day it opens. It is judged a year later, when someone goes back to see whether the workshop is still running, whether the market has kept its vendors, whether the lender has been repaid. It is judged again three years later, when the club that launched it no longer puts money into it.
The first four parts took your club from assessment to funding: understanding what the disaster broke, making the shift at the right time without doing harm, choosing the levers, raising the money, and organizing the work with the district, the action groups, and the humanitarian actors. This last part deals with what allows a project to leave something behind.
It has three chapters. Chapter 13 shows how to monitor a project without wearing out the people it serves, and how to say honestly what it changed, no more and no less. Chapter 14 deals with the exit: preparing it from day one, choosing who to hand over to, and knowing what becomes of a local club when the project ends, since the club itself does not leave. Chapter 15 closes the loop of the trilogy: after one disaster comes the time before the next, and it is in calm times that an economy is prepared to hold up better.
The Rotary Foundation Code of Policies asks that a project include a measurement plan that confirms significant improvement, "ideally for three or more years." Three years: that is the horizon of this part. It adds the last three pieces to the recovery file: the monitoring plan, the exit plan, and the preparedness plan.