Vision day September the 16th 2006.
By: Helga Halck Højsager, DLN- Chairperson

It was a very successful day, well guided and inspired by the consultant from Projektrådgivningen (PR), Troels Hovgaard.
After a brief introduction to the PR, there was a brainstorm on the present status of DLN. This exercise led to these short statements:
• Bad conscience
• Taking over responsibilities that Danish Association for International Cooperation (MS) left.
• Fellowship/ adventure
• Choice of projects seems coincidental
• Need for criteria for choice of partners and projects
• There are a risk of getting to look like a fundraising organisation and a donor at one and the same time.

As a natural consequence, our goal where scrutinised.

1) To support in Lesotho, initiatives for improved living conditions and promotion of development in the country.
2) To promote contact and exchange between people of Lesotho and Denmark.

With the goals in mind, two groups where organised to give a feedback on the following:
• How would we like to see DLN in five to ten years time?
• Is or ought DLN be a development organisation?

There was a lot of good suggestions to these questions.

In a common forum it was agreed that DLN has to be a development organisation based on volunteer work, but with the possibility of consulting professionals, if this is necessary and possible.
We will continue to work with our goals, but not only focus on the project part as now.
This leads to focusing on the contact and exchange between people of Lesotho and Denmark and work on a development part and an intercultural part.

Development:
• In general we will try to have two partner organisations
• We will try to run two or three projects
• Our focal areas will be "From soil to table"
• Supporting civic society.

This will result in strategies and activities. Here we will utilise our visits to Lesotho and Hans Peter Dejgaards analysis of civic society in Lesotho. We will contact students from Roskilde University (RUC) or Aalborg University.
We must develop a DLN profile and have a line of thinking in our choice of partner organisations.

Contact and exchange between people of Lesotho and Denmark
• Travel activities
• Work practise stays in Lesotho

The meeting formed a think tank to produce ideas for essence of organised journeys to Lesotho and how we insure that they live up to the DLN goals (Karina Ruby and John D. Knudsen).
Anders Hedegaard and Karen Steffensen will seek out possible counterparts under their trip to Lesotho in November.
Work practise stays will require that we facilitate contact between Danish students and possible work places in Lesotho.

To realise all we agreed on, we decided to utilise the knowledge of our members better. We will submit an application to the Danish lotto comity to obtain funding for a better web site, to create an open forum.

After the days work, we had supper together. The spirit was high and there was an optimism amongst the participants.