About Jayne Cravens |
    
|
|
About Jayne Cravens |
|
|
Jayne is an
internationally-recognized trainer,
researcher and consultant. Her work is focused on communications,
volunteer
involvement, community engagement, and management for
nonprofits, NGOs, and government initiatives. She has a decade
of international experience,
and extensive experience regarding community
and institutional development. Jayne is a pioneer regarding the research, promotion and practice of virtual volunteering, including virtual teams, microvolunteering and crowdsourcing, and she is a veteran manager of various local and international initiatives. Jayne became active online in 1993, and she created one of the first web sites focused on helping to build the capacity of nonprofits to use the Internet. She has been interviewed for and quoted in articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, as well as for reports by CNN, Deutsche Well, the BBC, and various local radio stations, TV stations and blogs. Resources from her web site, coyotecommunications.com, are frequently cited in reports and articles by a variety of organizations, online and in-print. Women's empowerment and women's full access to employment and education options remains a cross-cutting theme in all of her work. Jayne has worked extensively with multi-cultural audiences, corporate audiences, United Nations agencies, national and international agencies, international aid workers, low-income communities, and those who are traditionally socially-excluded. In all of her community and institutional development work, she has a demonstrated commitment to women's issues and mainstreaming gender considerations. She launched this web site in January 1996. She's been active on the Internet since 1993, when she first started researching how nonprofit organizations were using the Internet as a part of their work. Her CV, which fully details her professional experience and skills, and her references, are available upon request. You can also read about her core professional competencies and her capacity-building work specifically. She is constantly researching and engaging in activities to ensure that she is well-versed in best practices and emerging trends in her areas of expertise. Read "What's Interesting To Me These Days", a list of her current professional priorities -- issues that she's actively researching, reading and writing about. Jayne received her BA in Journalism from Western Kentucky University and her MSc in Development Management from Open University (U.K.). A native of Kentucky, she lived in the USA until February 2001, when she moved to Germany, where she stayed through April 2009, except for six months in 2007, when she lived in Afghanistan. She has traveled to more than 35 countries, many of them by motorcycle. Jayne is currently based in the USA, near Portland and Salem, Oregon (West Coast of USA/Pacific time zone), living with with her online volunteering but-not-at-all-virtual husband, Stefan, and their beloved Hungarian street dog, Albi. If you need a bio for Jayne, please see this page with various biographies you can feel free to use. Jayne is always willing to travel. She is available for
You can also view her public calendar to see her availability. |
The Jayne
Blog, updated regularly provides
notices on when this site is updated, as well as
announcements and new resources. The RSS
feed address for the Jayne Blog: Or, click on the RSS
reader icon you use:
|
|
|
Independent
Consultant & Researcher Jayne has supported numerous organizations as an independent consultant regarding communications, community/volunteer involvement, staff capacity-building, organizational management and fund-raising. Most of her consulting is through speaking, training, strategy-development, writing and editing. Recent consultations:
After many years of further research, she is finishing a newly revised Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, to be published in early 2012 by Energize Inc. On an ongoing basis, she researches and authors materials regarding how rumor and myth can derail development or relief efforts, and ways to address such. She authored, and continually updates, Basic Fund-Raising for Small NGOs in the Developing World, co-written in 2006 with various online volunteers with the Aid Workers Network, and then updated by her at least once a year.
|
 
|
United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) National Area-Based Development Programme (NABDP) From March 1 through most of August 2007, Jayne was in Kabul, Afghanistan to serve as Communication and Reporting Advisor for the National Area-Based Development Programme (NABDP), a program administered by UNDP that supports the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) in Afghanistan. "I was happy to return to my former employer, UNDP, but I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to work in a country in which I have been interested since the 1990s." Among her many communications responsibilities was updating the MRRD/NABDP web site and creating an NABDP Flickr account, with most photos provided by various ministry staff members. She also developed a presentation/training for staff on taking photos.
|
|
United
Nations Volunteers Programme (UNV)/ United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) From February 2001 - February 2004, Jayne was the Online Volunteering Specialist at UNV, part of UNDP, in Bonn, Germany, helping to build the capacity of staff and UN Volunteers to involve online volunteers, revamping and directing the UNV-managed Online Volunteering service (formerly at NetAid; here is what the site looked like when I directed the service), and assisting UNV in using the Internet to effectively manage onsite UN Volunteers and to build community among former UN volunteers. She was also part of UNITeS, the United Nations Information Technology Service, an initiative of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that promotes volunteerism as fundamental to information and communications technologies for development (ICT4D). Contributions to UNITeS she is especially proud of: creating and maintaining the UNITeS Knowledge Base, including the publications Handheld computer technologies in community service/volunteering/advocacy and Volunteers: Essential to ICT projects in developing countries, as well as coordinating the profiling of all UN Volunteers engaged in ICT4D activities. Jayne advised UNV regarding volunteer management issues and volunteer center development in developing countries, and was responsible for the content and volunteer coordination for UNV's first-ever online events, including a live web cast featuring Tim Burners Lee.
|
 |
Virtual
Volunteering Project From December 1996 - January 2001, Jayne directed the internationally-recognized Virtual Volunteering Project, which encouraged and assisted agencies in the development and success of volunteer opportunities that can be completed via home or work computers and the Internet, and helped agencies use the Internet to manage all volunteers and connect with volunteer management resources. This included creating the most comprehensive information available, on or offline, regarding online mentoring programs and best practices, and engaging in the first ever research regarding online volunteering.
|
Community Engagement and Volunteerism Resources
for Texas K-12 Schools
Part of the Texas Education Network (TENET), this web portal is
for school administrators, teachers, parent/family volunteers, and
others who coordinate volunteer and community partnership
activities between schools and other organizations, including
businesses. It has become a nationally-recognized web site. To
view the site, cut and paste
http://www.serviceleader.org/old/schools/ into archive.org.
AmeriCorps
for Community Engagement and Education Program (ACEE)
VISTA School Volunteer Management Handbook
A resource guide for VISTAs in charge of managing school-based
volunteers for Sanchez Elementary School in Austin, Texas
through the ACEE program in 1998, and a good model for managing
school-based volunteers anywhere. AmeriCorps/VISTA is part of
the Corporation
of National and Community Service.
Music
in Schools
This web portal is for educators and others to
learn about and use music-in-schools resources, and to learn
how music-in-schools programs have a positive effect on
academics, including math and science. Includes curriculum
resources, and a list of groups and associations that
support music-in-schools programs, particularly those that
support music being used in the classroom to teach other
academic subjects. Originally developed for the Texas
Education Network (TENET dropped these resources in 2001
because of a change in its education resource priorities. I
would like these resources to find a home at an
education-focused or arts-focused nonprofit. If you
represent such and are interested in taking over hosting
these resources and continuing to update them, please
contact me).
Contextual
Learning to Teach the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills
(TEKS)
Included a section mapping "Science and Math
School-to-Careers Resources for Texas K-12 Educators."
Contact the Charles
A. Dana Center for more information.
|
|
|
Jayne is a frequent speaker at a variety of local, regional, national & international conferences, both in-person and online. She has also contributed frequently to graduate-level university classes regarding using the Internet to support volunteers and for greater community involvement and outreach. Her university work includes being a guest speaker for SOCW 6355: Advanced Use of Information Technology in Human Services and SOCW 6371: Community and Administrative Practice at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work, Feb. 2007, and Feb. & Nov. 2008; a graduate class at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004; and a graduate class studying Volunteer Program Planning and Evaluation at the University of North Texas, 2001, 2002 and 2004. She can develop university-level curriculum relating to her areas of expertise and deliver such online or onsite, and is currently developing a graduate-level university course for using the Internet to support volunteers, and to involve and build community. |
,
published by Lonely Planet; and The
Rough Guide To A Better World, published by the
Department for International Development (DFID) and the Rough
Guides; final report of the Subcommittee on Public Outreach
for USAID's Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA)
(my input was re: how to use various Internet tools for ACVFA
outreach), Oct. 2008; the 2004 document/proposal E-government
Implementation in Lithuania, published by the Kaunas
University of Technology Institute of Europe and the UN Online
Network in Public Administration and Finance (UNPAN); USAID's
Bureau for Global Health newsletter (January 2002); and World
Disasters Report 2001: Focus on Recovery by the
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Before joining UNV/UNDP (see below), her work was cited in the
UNDP Gender in Development Programme's Learning &
Information Pack: Information, Communication &
Knowledge-Sharing, published in 2000 (one of the first UNDP
documents addressing this topic). "Online Mentoring: Programs and Suggested Practices as of February 2001", in Technology-Assisted Delivery of School Based Mental Health Services: Defining School Social Work for the 21st Century, which was co-published simultaneously as the Journal of Technology in Human Services, Volume 21, Numbers 1/2 2003, by The Haworth Press
"Challenges of International Online Volunteering: Re-Learning Words, Transcending Boundaries", September 2004, in The Journal of Volunteer Administration, Volume 22, Number 3, published by the Association for Volunteer Administration (AVA).
"Factors for Success in Involving Online Volunteers," presented at "Volunteering Research: Frontiers and Horizons," November 2005, a conference by the Institute for Volunteering Research, in Birmingham, England, and published in The International Journal of Volunteer Administration (IJOVA).
pending publication: "More Than Performers: Factors for Success in Theater-for-Development Initiatives," an investigation completed in October 2005 of the elements needed for an organization to successfully use live, in-person performance as a tool for development, excluding performer training and theater techniques (also known as theater-for-development). Relevant theories of development management informed the investigation, with a specific focus on institutional development, inter-organizational collaboration, and trust-building.
Merrill Associates Topic of the Month for December, 2004: "Learning From The 'Not-So-Nice' Volunteers"
 |
In
November 2010, Jayne received a VERA (Volunteer
Excellence Recognition Award) from Business
Council for Peace (BPEACE), a USA-based
nonprofit that recruits business professionals to
help entrepreneurs in countries emerging from war,
like Rwanda and Afghanistan, to create and expand
businesses and employment (particularly for women).
"We annually search amongst our hard working
member/volunteers to identify those, among so many,
who deserve a particular call-out and
recognition..." She won the "Purple Heart VERA", for
helping to support a gentleman in Afghanistan who
wants to start a cleaning business. Jayne "bravely
delivered detailed technical advice... and urged him
to stretch to meet his goals of starting a
commercial cleaning business." Unfortunately, he
ultimately dropped out of the program. "And that has
to hurt." Yeah, it did a little, but Jayne then
turned her energies to helping the other BPEACE
advocates with their entrepreneurs and doing some
other volunteering with BPEACE -- all of it online.
|
In March 2003, Jayne, still officially a resident of Austin, Texas, was a co-winner of the Dewey Winburne Community Service Award, presented at a special ceremony in Austin, Texas, at the conclusion of the Texas Interactive Media (TIM) Awards Ceremony. Dewey Winburne served as one of the original co-founders of what is now known as the SXSW Interactive Festival (one of Jayne's favorite events), and the teaching of multimedia skills to teenagers, particularly teens of low-income and minority descent, was also a great passion in Dewey's life. The Award named in his honor "celebrates the vision that technology is society's most effective tool to level the playing field between the haves and the have nots." Jayne is beside herself at this recognition -- it is something all the more special because it came from the city she still considers her home.
 |
Jayne was named one of the Top 25 Women of the Web in 2001 by the San Francisco Women of the Web. She's still wondering when someone will send the "just kidding" e-mail. |
Jayne loves visiting or living in other countries and has visited, worked in or lived in more than 30 countries and more than 30 states in the USA. She is a believer in transire benefaciendo: to travel along while doing good, and in tourism as a sustainable tool for the development of communities all over the world. Her article "Doing Good On Vacation in a Developing Country," was the highest rated and most-popular volunteer-related article by far on the now-defunct Bluelist by Lonely Planet. The most popular page on her entire web site provides advice for those moving to Germany, and she also has a page of Advice for Women Aid Workers in Afghanistan, based on her own experience there. The travel section of her web site also provides Advice for Hotels, Hostels & Campgrounds in Transitional & Developing Countries: The Qualities of Great, Cheap Accommodations. The most-popular web page on her site for many years was Camping With Your Dog(s), which is still visited by thousands of people each month.
In October 2005, Jayne completed the requirements for a MSc in Development Management (how to start, manage and sustain human, community and institutional development initiatives) at Open University, with the submission of her final research project (which, shockingly enough was not on volunteerism but, rather, on theater as a tool for development). She received her diploma in December 2005. You can read about development topics of particular interest to her.
She received her B.A. in Journalism (with minors in both theater and history) from Western Kentucky University. In 2005, she passed the initial level exam in the Diplomas de Español como Lengua Extranjera (DELE) (certification for basic abilities in Spanish), and is currently studying for the next level. She completed the following classes that are part of the Professional Certificate for Nonprofit Management (in the first year it was offered), San José State University (California): Fund Raising, Board Governance & Leadership, Financial Management, Human Resources, and Strategic Planning & Needs Assessments. She has also been trained in planning and evaluation by Pacific Institute for Research & Evaluation (PIRE).
Jayne is or has been a
member of
|
|
my consulting
services | return
to home page |
contact me | linking
to or from these pages
