As a child being raised in a small town that did not offer a lot of entertainment options, and playgrounds, whenever I wanted something extra that my parents could not afford I would say to myself “ I don’t really need it, I just want it”, so that I would not be upset for not having it. The Merriam dictionary explains the word “need” as something “to be necessary”, something “ones have strong desire for” meanwhile a need is “obligation” to have.
The topic of need was present also in the Research in entrepreneurship class. We had a guest speaker, Adam, who talked about his volunteering activities, and how his research focuses on volunteering in whatever is needed in the community. According to him, the most important part of volunteering is fulfilling a need in community.
Personally, as an active volunteer, I always find pleasure on volunteering and helping to fulfill community needs. However, as an NGO leader of a local organization for women’s empowerment called “Për njëra-tjetren”, sometimes it’s hard to create a balance between what you observe to be a need in community and what community members claim to be the need. In order to find out the difference, we organized three different types of activities in a short period of time:
1) An educational activity with a guest speaker,
2) A social gathering and free discussion about any women’s concerns
3) A sports activity.
As N.G.O, based on the researches done in community, meetings, talking to women in community, we identified that women needed more educational activities which they could learn from, and encourage them to learn more and play an active role in society.
However, surprisingly after having the feedback from all three activities, the women stated that their favorite activity to encourage them to be more active in society was the sports activity! Why? Do they need sports to make a change in community? - Not necessarily. Do they want to have sports to be part of their life, so that they can feel they are being active part of society? – Probably.
Based on the examples above, which the N.G.O “Për njëra-tjetren” tried out with women in a small town in Kosovo, I could see that sometimes what we want to happen to us is such a strong feeling that we end up considering it a need. Even though, deep down we realize that fulfilling that particular want, will not make any impact in the ultimate goal of improvement.
Our dilemma now as an NGO is to be able to make the difference between what the women in community want versus what they need. Our mission is shifted towards trying to combine these two notions together in order to reach the final goal, which is the involvement of women in community, and have them play an active role in decision making, for the betterment of society. That effects my research agenda as well, since it is tied up with N.G.O activities. I want to keep the N.G.O activities ongoing, meanwhile I focus separately in three main areas of the research: the type of the N.G.Os’ impact in local communities, the leadership style and its effects in the development of the N.G.O, and the impact of N.G.O's in local communities in countries in transition.
Need. (n.d.) In Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/need
Want. (n.d.) In Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/want
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