Innovative Restructuring Creates New Possibilities The year 2005 may well be looked back upon as a major milestone in the history of the Population Council. Last year, Council trustees and staff took stock of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses, reaffirming the Council’s mission of improving the well-being and reproductive health of the world’s most impoverished individuals and assessing policy directions to make the Council more effective in carrying out its mission. A staff task force collected and analyzed information from the Council’s global staff of more than 500, from Council trustees, colleagues in other organizations, supporters, and even some critics. More than 320 staff members, in 18 offices, attended workshops and presentations, some of which Peter J. Donaldson, the Council’s president, conducted in Africa and Asia. Senior staff members analyzed responses and presented their findings to the trustees, officers, and staff. Having gained the imprimatur of the Board of Trustees, the strategic plan is now being implemented. The new Council structure is organized around three overarching themes: HIV and AIDS; Poverty, Gender, and Youth; and Reproductive Health. The three programs will embrace a mixture of disciplines from the Council’s rich pool of expertise, with laboratory scientists, social scientists, and policy researchers each bringing different perspectives and tools to the work, following research “from lab bench to bedside,” as Donaldson characterizes it. Resources are being more closely aligned with the three focal programs; disciplinary lines are being bridged; and opportunities are opening up to spur innovation, staff collaboration, and research synthesis, and to promote use of the results. “Merging biomedical, social science, and public health research on HIV and AIDS or reproductive health, for instance, allows us to integrate our work, increasing its quality and relevance,” Donaldson says. “It’s like going from a physics department to the space program. Researchers will use their skills and knowledge in a larger context.” Sajeda Amin, a senior associate in policy research, participated in one of the five working groups that helped develop the strategic plan. “The basic idea,” she says, “is that instead of separating people into divisions according to their expertise—program-based versus science-based, bench science versus social science—we are organizing around themes. So your strength may be policy research on poverty, but you are on a team that together is doing much more applied work, to which your research on poverty is relevant. You are rubbing elbows with people who are doing very different things—on-the-ground programs, policy development, basic research, and so on.” Elof Johansson, vice president of the Council’s Center for Biomedical Research, concurs: “In the HIV program, there are people who have been doing really cutting-edge work in all three of the Council’s old divisions, and now they will be supporting and challenging each other’s points of view.” The Poverty, Gender, and Youth program adds poverty research to areas in which the Council has long shown leadership: gender and family dynamics, and adolescence. The poverty component “gives us a lens,” says Amin, “that we can focus on a specific intervention or use as a strategic approach to gender and youth studies.” A search is now under way to find directors for each of the three programs. Descriptions of any still-open positions, which illustrate the breadth of each area, can be found via the “Employment” link at http://www.popcouncil.org. (Return to issue contents)
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