Blog
Behind every project on our Projects page — every water point installed, every youth cohort trained, every medical camp held — is a team of staff, elected leadership, and volunteers who make that work possible. While individual team member profiles are available on our About page, this piece looks at how our team and structure fit together as a whole.
Elected Leadership and Governance
As a registered community-based organisation, One Vision CBO operates under a governance structure with elected leadership positions, accountable to our constitution and, ultimately, to the community members we serve. This structure sets overall strategic direction, ensures financial accountability, and represents the organisation formally in partnerships and dealings with local government and other institutions.
Programme Coordinators and Day-to-Day Operations
Each core programme area — clean water, youth training, health outreach, women's economic empowerment, environmental sustainability — is coordinated by team members who manage the day-to-day planning, community engagement, and logistics that keep that specific programme running smoothly, from scheduling a medical camp to coordinating a tree-planting day's logistics.
The Volunteer Network That Multiplies Our Capacity
As a relatively young organisation, our formal paid team is small, which means volunteers do a large share of the actual work that reaches residents directly — mentoring youth trainees, staffing medical camps, facilitating table banking group meetings, and showing up for every Monthly Community Clean-Up. This volunteer network is, functionally, as central to our team as any formally employed staff member.
Community Members as Extended Team
In a real sense, our team extends beyond anyone formally affiliated with the organisation at all. Water user committee members who maintain a community tap, table banking group leaders who manage their group's records, and residents who flag a problem before it becomes serious — all of them are, functionally, part of what makes our work sustainable in Mwiki.
How We Recruit and Train New Team Members
As our programmes have grown, so has the need for additional coordinators and support staff, and our approach to recruitment has consistently prioritised candidates already rooted in Mwiki or with a demonstrated track record of community involvement, over candidates with more formal credentials but no local connection or context. This isn't a rejection of qualification, but a recognition that trust and local knowledge are difficult to substitute for in this kind of work.
New team members typically begin with a period of close mentorship from existing coordinators, shadowing programme activities directly before taking on independent responsibility, which we've found produces far more confident, contextually grounded team members than a purely classroom-based induction would achieve alone.
Why We Keep Our Team Structure Relatively Flat
As we've grown, we've deliberately resisted building an overly hierarchical staff structure with many layers between community-facing coordinators and overall leadership. A flatter structure keeps decision-making closer to the people directly engaging with residents day to day, and reduces the risk of community feedback getting diluted or delayed as it moves up through multiple management layers before reaching anyone able to act on it.
This approach has real limits as an organisation continues to grow — at some point, additional structure becomes necessary for effective coordination — but for our current size, staying close to the ground has served us better than early over-formalisation would have.
An Open Door for Future Team Members
As our programmes continue to grow, so will our need for dedicated coordinators, volunteers, and eventually additional staff. If you're a Mwiki resident interested in a more formal role with the organisation over time, starting as an engaged volunteer is generally the clearest path toward a future team position as opportunities arise.
Whether you interact with a formally employed coordinator, a long-standing volunteer, or a water user committee member you've never thought of as part of our 'team' in a formal sense, we hope it's clear that One Vision CBO's actual capacity to serve Mwiki rests on all of these contributions together, not on any single office or job title.
As we plan for the year ahead, growing our team thoughtfully — adding capacity where our programmes genuinely need it, without over-expanding beyond what our current funding and community relationships can sustainably support — remains a careful balancing act we take seriously, always weighing the value of additional formal capacity against our commitment to staying closely, directly connected to the residents we serve.
Interested in joining our team as a volunteer, or learning more about our leadership structure? Visit our About page for full team profiles, or reach out to info@onevisioncbo.site. We're proud of every person, formally titled or not, who makes One Vision CBO's work in Mwiki possible, and we look forward to introducing more of them as our team and volunteer network continue to grow. Thank you to every member of this extended team, named and unnamed here, for the part you play in making our work in Mwiki possible every single day.