Life has a huge impact on people-centered organizations. Writers leave to start families. They finish their Ph.D. dissertation and move on to more stable jobs. Some tire of the constant travel and cut back on their consulting work. Governments and UN agencies love to hire our team members, because they know that ENBers can write well, work well in small teams and come with their own networks of policy makers. Month after month, we lose, on average, one of the ENB Team to babies and other international organizations. This, combined with our annual growth, means we need always need to seek new talent.
Each year, near the end of August, we send out an announcement to all of our subscribers, welcoming the application for new writers on the ENB Team. From our email lists, the recruitment message is forwarded to other lists and people forward it on to those colleagues who they think might be good members of our group. Eventually, like any good piece of electronic information it finds its appropriate receipients and we are flooded with applications.
This year was no different from previous years and our call for new "brainiacs" (as one of our Logistics Coordinators, Nancy Williams, calls them) ended up on the Rhodes Scholar email list, who applied by the dozen. All together we had more than 150 applicants, most of whom all met our minimum qualifications that they have a Ph.D. or be in a Ph.D. program, or have an LL.M. in international environmental law, or five years negotiating experience, plus speak two UN languages fluently and have published academic works in the areas that we follow.
Companies value themselves by totalling up all the capital assets they own, like buildings, equipment and land. An enterprise like our organization, IISD Reporting Services, has only one kind of asset: the intellectual capital of the people on our team. This last week, we trained a group of eleven new ENB writers and the organization received a massive influx of new intellectual capital.
From the back left, Anne Roemer-Mahler (UK - doing her Ph.D. at Oxford), Richard Sherman (South Africa - Manager of our African Regional Project and one of the trainers), Hal Kane (US - formerly at WorldWatch and now a consultant on sustainable development), Julia Yamineva (Russia - completing her Ph.D. at Cambridge), Chris Spence (New Zealand - Deputy Director of IISD Reporting Services and one of the trainers), Tomiola Akale (Nigeria, a lawyer with her LL.M. from Univ. College London, currently doing her Ph.D. at the University of Dundee), Douglas Bushey (US - completing his Ph.D. in energy resources at UC Berkeley), me. Kneeling, in the blue and white striped shirt, is Vicky Goodland, our project accountant. From the left bottom is Claudia ten Have Ph.D. (Germany and South Africa - has a Ph.D. in public administration and is currently doing post-doctoral work at the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies in Yokohama), Kate Neville (Canada - a Yalie doing her Ph.D. at UBC in political science), Marie-Annick Moreau (Canada - pursuing a Ph.D. in the Human Ecology Research Group at University College London, in the anthropology department), Claudio Chiarolla (Italy - recently with the UNU IAS in the Biodiplomacy Programme, now doing his Ph.D. at the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Institute at the University of London), Kelly Levin (US - doing her Ph.D. at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies), and Wangu Mwangi (Kenya - working at the UN University MERIT training program in the Netherlands.
For two and a half days,from 14-16 October, we held a training session in Montreal. These shots are from the big ENB Team dinner we held last Sunday night at the Goreé Restaurant (no relation.) We had 30 people for a great evening, with the new writers, trainers and members of the ENB team covering two meetings of the Convention on Biological Diversity being held in Montreal the week before and the week after.