Reflections on reform with Jackie Edmond

Jackie Edmond

Chief Executive of New Zealand Family Planning

Hi, I am Jackie Edmond, Chief Executive of New Zealand Family Planning and I’ve been the Chief Executive for 12 years.  In Spain it’s really going back a few months for IPPF and I’ve been really watching with great interest to see the conversations and developments over the last few months. 

It seems, reading back through the surveys and the information that is coming out, that it’s time for change and that we do need to look at doing things differently.  There are a number of positives but there is lots that could be improved on around our governance structure and around our finance allocations so it is pretty exciting going through this time but I know it’s going to be challenging for us to be facing different ways of doing things and it’s really important for us to be engaged so here in family planning we are taking a really strong interest.  So, from our perspective we really appreciated the documents that have come out around the governance documents and the finance allocation and are really grateful for all the work that has been done around them.  I am only going to comment particularly around governance because we earn every penny, we aren’t a grant receiver so we feel that people who are grant receiving should have the greatest say in that conversation.

From the governance feedback there are lots of interesting proposals.  I guess over all we, or I believe, I won’t say we, I think, as a membership organisation, I think there should be at least 50% membership representational governance, that there are different ways of doing this than how we do it currently.  That we have lots of incredibly able and good people in the Federation that could contribute to governance in a really positive way and we could do this differently than we do now by regional and variations that actually anyone could put their name forward and there could be a voting process to try and make that happen.

So 50%, at least, for membership. Whilst we completely support youth representation there are some questions around that because currently some young people are chosen by their peers and from our perspective we wouldn’t see them as a membership representation so it would have to be discussed as to how those numbers would work and there a number of other core groups that the organisation serves that it would also be good to have a think about, so I am interested in exploring some of that further.

Overall the proposals look great but I guess the biggest issue we would have is not having at least 50% membership representation and we would really welcome more information and conversation and we are really interested to hear other peoples’ perspective on that.  So really looking forward to Delhi and having some really tough, challenging but constructive conversations that will help IPPF into the future, to be the powerhouse that we should be.  There’s lots of work to be done for women and people across the world around sexual reproduction and health and rights, so we need to pull together to make that happen.

If you would like to share a video relating to the reform proposals, please get in touch with the reform team: ippfreform@ippf.org