{"id":869,"date":"2014-07-25T16:55:14","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T23:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/?p=869"},"modified":"2014-07-25T17:20:39","modified_gmt":"2014-07-26T00:20:39","slug":"jayneukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2014\/07\/jayneukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"Jayne in Kiev, Ukraine for all August &#038; Sept."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For all of August and September, I will\u00a0be the SURGE Communications Officer in Kiev, Ukraine, and assist\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ua.undp.org\/content\/ukraine\/en\/home.html\">UNDP Ukraine<\/a>\u00a0and other <a href=\"http:\/\/www.un.org.ua\/files\/un_leaflet_en.pdf\">UN country teams<\/a> with the development and day-to-day implementation of communications and publication strategies. I&#8217;ll also\u00a0monitor progress of the UN country teams\u00a0response to the crises in Ukraine &#8220;with a view to influence the development agenda,&#8221; by helping with public and media outreach, to help people to understand the work and accomplishments of \u00a0UNDP in Ukraine. I&#8217;ll be helping to build the capacities of the staff to continue these communications activities long after I&#8217;ve gone.<\/p>\n<p>Supposedly, I&#8217;ll get to work with various communications managers, staff of other UN Agencies, government officials, international and local media, multi-lateral and bi-lateral donors and civil society. According to the job description,\u00a0I&#8217;ll be:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Planning and designing internal and external strategies for communications and outreach<\/li>\n<li>Supervising\u00a0the design and maintenance of the UNDP web site\u00a0and\u00a0intranets (and I hope other online activities as well)<\/li>\n<li>Facilitating knowledge building and knowledge sharing<\/li>\n<li>Etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s a tall order in two months, but I&#8217;m ready!\u00a0I love getting to work in my first love: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/development\/\">communications in development programs<\/a>. I love designing and carrying out communications plans, but I also love building the capacity of people to communicate, to deliver effective messages, to anticipate issues, to be responsive, etc. My favorite work in Afghanistan, the last time I worked for the UN, was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/outreach\/building_capacities.html\"><b>building public sector staff communications capacities in Afghanistan<\/b><\/a>, something I squeezed in amid my primary responsibilities of writing and editing reports for various institutions, and I continue to do that capacity-building work with Afghan colleagues to this day, as an online volunteer. I&#8217;m so looking forward to getting to do this kind of work again!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m excited, I&#8217;m nervous, I&#8217;m thrilled, I&#8217;m scared &#8211; not of the political situation in Ukraine but of meeting the expectations of this job!<\/p>\n<p>Of course, this has come at a cost: I was to present in Austin, Texas in September,\u00a0to do a volunteer management training for AmeriCorps members in Portland, Oregon, to do a training back in my hometown of Henderson, Kentucky, and lots of personal plans. There were people I haven&#8217;t seen in many, many years, and people I was to meet onsite, face-to-face, that I&#8217;ve known only online, all lined up for August and September. That&#8217;s the cost of doing this type of short-term work overseas &#8211; it never happens at a convenient time. And, of course, I&#8217;m missing the very best time to be in Oregon &#8211; and will be missing my husband terribly.<\/p>\n<p>The worst part, though, is Delta Airlines: I already have a roundtrip ticket booked with them for Germany, for a vacation with my husband. My Ukraine contract ends just three days before I was to arrive in Germany from the USA. You would think Delta would simply let me keep that ticket &#8211; already paid for &#8211; and then just not use the USA to Germany part, allowing me to simply buy a flight\u00a0from Kiev to Frankfurt, and then using just the return ticket &#8211; again, it&#8217;s all already paid for. And you would be WRONG. Unless I fly out from the USA to Germany, I would pay almost $5000 for the flight back from Germany to the USA! If I don&#8217;t show up for the outbound flight, they will cancel my return ticket! So I have to fly all the way back to the USA from Ukraine, stay TWO days, and get right back on a plane for Europe. Can you believe it?!? There is no logic for this. None. None whatsoever.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway,\u00a0I&#8217;ll post updates about my work here and via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/me\/jayneonline.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">my various online social network channels<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If you are or have been in Kiev, Ukraine, do drop me a line with any advice you have!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For all of August and September, I will\u00a0be the SURGE Communications Officer in Kiev, Ukraine, and assist\u00a0UNDP Ukraine\u00a0and other UN country teams with the development and day-to-day implementation of communications and publication strategies. I&#8217;ll also\u00a0monitor progress of the UN country teams\u00a0response to the crises in Ukraine &#8220;with a view to influence the development agenda,&#8221; by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,13],"tags":[150,833,244,832,831,507,670],"class_list":["post-869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-jayne","category-community-relationsoutreach","tag-development","tag-eastern-europe","tag-humanitarian","tag-kiev","tag-ukraine","tag-undp","tag-united-nations"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fFJB-e1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=869"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":872,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869\/revisions\/872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}