Leadership Skills Development

GUI leadership goes beyond imbuing learners with administrative and managerial skills. Our program's main priority is to turn the learners into strategic thinkers and trainers, to ultimately become the entrepreneurial and community development leaders of today and tomorrow. Our program shapes the learner’s values, interests, work, voluntarism and personal life. The training provides these emerging leaders with the tools to enhance, integrate and deepen the leadership content of their skills repertoire.

Leadership Transformation

In order to transform your community successfully, you must FIRST transform yourself. Transforming yourself is a prerequisite for transforming your community or even your country. Leadership Transformation is a series of radical transformations in which you put at stake the success you have become for the power of making the impossible happen. It is an ontological journey. Ontology is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of reality and different ways of being. At the end, if you are committed, you will gain awareness of the fundamental links between your view of the world at any given moment and the ultimate scope of your achievements and failures.

"When it comes down to it, it is the people of our world who have to change our world, and we can only start with ourselves."

The power to make the impossible happen is a very sophisticated form of power. This advanced level of power is defined as the ability to take something that you believe could never come to pass, declare it possible, and then make that possibility into tangible reality. Mastering this power gives you the capacity to act without being constrained by the habitual ways of thinking from the past, your own past, the history of your community and even the heritage of your culture. It allows you to act without feeling dependent on circumstances, without having to wait for events to align in your favour. Power to make the impossible happen is the only infinite type of power. It cannot be removed or taken away from you, like the power of authority, competence, influence etc. In fact, this power increases over time.

Organisational Infrastructure Development

Non-Governmental Organisations and Civil Society Organisations in Africa remain heavily dependent on external financial foreign aid. The finance provided by international donors accounts for the largest single source of funding in the continent. This current donor mindset for project-based funding puts more focus on the activities of organisations rather than on sustaining the organizations themselves. In practice, institutional or organisational development remains a lower priority. Organisations are forced to "go where the funding is" regardless of whether the project priorities identified by a perspective funder suit the long-term strategic plans of the organisation itself. This approach has led organisations into an endless cycle of resource dependency.

Global Unification International is defining a completely new breed of "entrepreneur" to stimulate the creation of a larger, sustainable pool of resources for organisational initiatives. Transcending the traditional donor-grantee dependency relationships, we have created and are developing a new organisational "hybrid model"-nonprofit in purpose and for-profit in approach. Our new organisational infrastructure will develop unique strategies for creating sustainable funds for organisation activities by employing creative "self-financing" enterprises.

The GUI concept of "organisational infrastructure development" is gaining popularity.

Our organisation utilises skilled entrepreneurs to craft innovative responses to social problems. Entrepreneurs are particularly good at recognising opportunities, exploring innovative approaches, mobilizing resources, managing risks, and building viable enterprises. These skills are just as valuable in the social sector as they are in the commercial sector. Social entrepreneurship applies to both profit and non-profit organisations who have programs designed to create social value.

Information and Communication Technology for Community Development

The revolution in communication technology offers a new era of opportunities to empower lower-income communities to integrate with the Global Community.

"Individuals now have the historically unprecedented, technological capacity to improve the standard of living for all people on Earth."

When confronted with such issues as health care, education, public safety, job training, and neighbourhood economic development, community groups are now able to engage in a variety of communication activities that link their residents to the rest of society and to each other, thus, enhancing community economic net worth, whilst building grassroots sustainability.

Asset-Based Community Development

Global Unification International asset-based Community Development Program teaches its members how to discover and utilise their rich local resources to rejuvenate their economies, strengthen public and private investments in communities, and ultimately rebuild civil society. Statistical research has proven that when communities focus their attention on their assets rather than their needs they can create new business opportunities, improve local health and service delivery, revitalize their housing supply, strengthen their infrastructure, and incorporate marginalized citizens into productive community life. Simultaneously, these communities are able to increase their visibility and power within a larger continental contexts.

The GUI Asset-Based Community Development Program is an alternative approach, for it is clear that even the poorest neighborhood is a place where individuals and organisations represent resources upon which to rebuild. The key to neighborhood regeneration then, is to locate all of the available local assets, to begin connecting them with one another in ways that multiply their power and effectiveness, and to begin harnessing those local institutions that are not yet available for local development purposes. This entire process begins with the construction of a new "road map". Once this guide to capacities has replaced the old one containing only needs and deficiencies, the regenerating community can begin to assemble its strengths into new combinations, new structures of opportunity, new sources of income and control, and new possibilities for production.

Community Economic Development

Traditional planners consistently emphasize an economic approach to community development. Many economists have come to believe that economic growth will indirectly address the social and environmental concerns of a community. The majority of these economists have only been trained in an economic discipline, as a result, the social and environmental impacts of development become secondary to economic growth.

Community Economic Development is a process by which communities can initiate and generate their own solutions to their common economic problems and thereby build long-term community capacity and foster the integration of economic, social and environmental objectives.

Community Infrastructural Development

This program introduces the GUI members to the strategies of "Sustainable Community Transformation", which helps our members grasp the interconnection between and among the 12 infrastructure sectors. These are Safety, Water, Waste, Poverty, Housing, Health, Transport, Tourism, Culture and Heritage, Information and Communication Technology, Education, Environment and Aesthetics and Good Governance. The members develop skills utilising best practices in dealing with each of these sectors.

Online Business Solutions and E-Commerce

E-Commerce is defined as the buying and selling of goods and services on the Worldwide Web. It differs from traditional commerce in a number of ways. Learning the basics of E-Commerce will help you gain the knowledge necessary to make your business a part of the new Internet economy. Begin your E-Commerce initiative with an overview of how to buy and sell on the Internet. Explore the different kinds of electronic commerce, how to make your own commerce-enabled site a success and how to set-up a "virtual storefront."

While many of us have the impression we have been left behind by the Western World, the reality is we too have unlimited opportunities to explore. E-Commerce starts with being able to take a digital image of your product with the push of one button on a digital camera, and uploading it to Ebay.com where over one billion dollars will be exchanged by others doing the same simple auctioning tasks. Successful businesses have been created around selling tumbleweeds, home crafts, and other products which would never sell locally in enough volume to be profitable. Global niche markets are now accessible to all of us. With the GU E-Commerce Program, members will have working knowledge of E-Commerce solutions, as well as the skills to build, refine and develop new online opportunities.

Website Design

This program teaches you how to design websites with creative interfaces, strong graphic images, functional site organisation and logical navigation.

You will concentrate on the design of web pages rather than on programming, although technical issues will be discussed as they impact on design. You will be using online web-authoring software to create your web pages, with little need to program in HTML. Our goal is to link technical proficiency and creative comprehension. The objectives of this program are to learn about:

• the crucial role of design in developing websites
• the process of creating a well-designed website
• the principles of graphic design using electronic media and the technical aspects of working with the web and
• how your web authoring software works. Introduction to Basic Design for the Web, Design meets communication, Website Planning and Navigation, Web Page Design Principles, Text and Typography in Design.

Learning Outcomes/ Benefits

The program is designed to deliver the following new competencies:

• How to deal with innovation and the uncertainty of the E-Commerce environment.
• A comprehensive understanding of the capabilities and potential of E-Commerce
• Ability to scope and manage an E-Commerce project at a strategic level.
• An understanding of what constitutes effective learning and virtual teamworking.
• How to action plan for future E-Commerce development.
• How to network across industries and nationalities.

Multimedia Technology/Video Documentary Production

In this program you will learn how to integrate images, audio and text to create communication products for community development. These may include multi media documentaries, streaming broadcasts via community radios in local languages, podcasts, online video presentations etc.

You will learn how to actively combine local contact and global contact, local content and global content, with an unbroken continuum of information and communication between all members of a community, between local, national and international languages, between the spoken and the written word. This program is a hands-on approach. Topics include: Why Digital video? DV Cameras/Features, Capturing Video, Capturing Stills, Digital Camera, Capturing Audio, Firewire, Editing Video, Sharing Videos.

Newspaper/Magazine Pre-Press Layout

This program enables you to gain the pre-press layout skills required to produce a publication such as a newspaper or a magazine. This program gives you an understanding of the place of Desktop Publishing in Electronic Prepress (EPP) as a part of the modern publishing practice.

Upon completion of this program, you should be able to:

• Understand page layout design principles
• Work with multiple page documents
• Use Paragraph Rules and Next styles
• Use Frames and Layers Design with type
• Use production techniques for print and electronic documents

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