Civic Advocacy, CASP, and Silva

Silva Boghossian
Toronto, Canada

My first day as a volunteer at Civic Advocacy Support Program (CASP) a division of Counterpart International Armenia, a co-worker of mine showed me to my desk and gave me a tall pile of documents to read in order for me to understand what CASP was all about. After reading through the pile of documents I still didn’t quite understand what CASP was so I asked my co-workers. My co-workers explained to me that the goal of CASP is to strengthen advocacy NGOs and in order to achieve this they help local organization build on their advocacy skills, organizational development and want partners to have the proper skills to lobby issues and cooperate with the government. CASP also works on public awareness campaigns, elections, CIVICUS and many more projects. I have worked for CASP for the last 3 months and while I have been here I was given a few projects. The one project that got me to truly understand and learn the names of Armenia’s cities and villages was when I was mapping out the impact Counterpart’s funding gave to these communities and how far it reached out in Armenia. I can truly say that I believe in this organization and they have done a lot of good work for Armenia.