New Year / New Resolutions

One important skill for organizations and individual alike is getting in the habit of setting goals -- and following through in achieving them. Toward this end, Jumpstart’s vocational toy project has been setting ambitious objectives for 2009 and encouraging all participants to do the same. The odds that the project and all of its members will follow-through on each and every thing listed are remote. Yet hopefully the combination of dreaming up different aspirations, along with drafting out detailed plans to pursue them, will prove a useful habit that will leave us all farther along, both during and after the project. A Happy New Year from all in Amman!

Investing Beyond Next Week

JumpStart International’s recycling partners in Jordan have been doing a commendable job developing supply networks to provide our vocational recycling business with a necessary base of raw materials to ensure our upcoming training and manufacturing efforts are as seamless as possible. Yet to ensure that our project achieves a critical mass in the short-term, JumpStart has collaborated with its partners to invest in a collection truck to help support reliable, effective collection of recyclables at several of our cornerstone garbage suppliers in Amman. With this foothold, the project now looks forward to scaling-up its collection efforts in the short-term, and focusing increasingly on the vocational training of 40 participants. With a core group of participants as well as informally partnering with countless Iraqis working to recycle trash, the project will provide premium access to fair market prices for all scavenged commodities. JumpStart is eager to push forward in this under-developed industry and achieve outsized results together with those who are so often neglected any such opportunities.

The new truck