WIAL Caribbean Goes Global

November 1, 2015 - On Thursday 29 October 2015, an announcement made at a plenary session of the Global Conference of the Institute in Arlington, Virginia, USA recognized WIAL Caribbean as an official Affiliate of the World Institute for Action Learning (WIAL). At WIAL's governance meetings held prior to the conference, Director of WIAL Caribbean, Verieux Mourillon was nominated to serve on WIAL's (Global) Board for 2016.

This year's Global Conference, hosted by WIAL-USA, has been a resounding success based on all accounts, with many participants claiming that it had been one of the better conferences they had attended in years. One salient feature of the conference was that though there was great diversity among attendees, they were singular in purpose. They all demonstrated a strong desire to explore and develop better ways to lead people, to develop leaders, to build teams, to solve problems and to generate innovation than those methods commonly used by many organizations.

Other highlights of the 2015 WIAL Global Conference include special awards in different categories made to individuals and organizations. The award in the category of Government for promoting the use of Action Learning was presented to the Canadian-funded Caribbean Leadership Project (CLP). The CLP aims to transform the public sector in the participating countries of the Caribbean through a carefully designed leadership development program administered to 250 senior leaders of the region's public sector over a period of seven years. Action Learning is a key mechanism used in the program for developing these leaders. Accepting the award on behalf of the Caribbean Leadership Project was Verieux Mourillon, Director of WIAL Caribbean.

The Global Conference was also used as an opportunity to promote the WIAL Better World Fund. Of the over 6 million South Africans who have HIV/AIDS, 360,000 are children. The first project of the WIAL Better World Fund is in support of Camp Sizanani (Global Camps Africa) which aims to change the lives of affected children so that they gain in confidence in their ability to make choices to help them survive and thrive in the face of the ravages of this epidemic. In promoting the organization's thrust, , WIAL's President Michael Marquardt remarked, "Action Learning has the unique power of solving problems related to HIV/AIDS while simultaneously developing lifelong leadership skills for the children as well as the parents and camp counsellors."

WIAL Caribbean expects to have an even stronger presence at next year's Global Conference to be hosted by WIAL Poland and has succeeded in its bid to host the 2021 WIAL Global Conference.