UBELONG Cusco Research Expedition: Intro

UBELONG co-founders and Expedition Leaders Cedric Hodgeman and Raul Roman led ten highly-qualified professionals through a rigorous research journey to understand the impact of international volunteers in the most popular volunteer destination in Latin America. Most of the footage from the field was taken by Raul Roman on a handheld video cam.

The team’s work was rooted in rigorous social science methods. The research design incorporated a variety of qualitative data collection tools, including structured and unstructured interviews and participant observation. With the support of Quimera, the team also used video ethnography to better understand stakeholder motivations, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors.

In addition to preparing UBELONG and the expedition team to use video in their research process Quimera worked with UBELONG to develop a “video report”, parallel in structure to the text-based report, documenting the research expedition as well as presenting key findings.

The video report, entitled “People to People” is divided into five chapters, this being the first.

UBELONG Cusco Research Expedition: Volunteering Environment

Chapter 2 of UBELONG’s video report “People to People”.

UBELONG Cusco Research Expedition: Impact on Volunteers

Chapter 4 of UBELONG’s video report “People to People”.

Practical Research Methods in International Development @ SAIS

Professor Raul Roman invited me to his class at SAIS (School for Advanced International Studies), Johns Hopkins University, to present and discuss our work with video in research and evaluation.

The in-class assignment consisted of a case-study about Build Change, an NGO that focuses on earthquake resistant construction, about to launch in Haiti. Students needed to develop a research and evaluation plan that integrated video.

Professor and Students… quite impressive. And we had a lot of fun.

Beneficiary Accountability

This is a section from an M&E pilot we did with Red Cross Tsunami Recovery Program in southern Thailand. One of the purposes of the pilot was to deploy, explore and refine methods for integrating video and participatory-video into a monitoring and evaluation process, including beneficiaries as partners in the process.

Red Cross and I were selected to present the piece at the 2010 Chicago Ethnography Conference, Ethnography Going Public.

I was later invited by American Red Cross International Services onto one of their panels at the 2011 World Conference on Humanitarian Studies, Innovations Track, focusing on evidence-based program design. Someone at the Conference later blogged about the presentation and the potential for participatory video in disaster risk reduction.