Otra Cosa was originally started in September 2004 by the Dutch couple Peter den Hond and Janneke Smeulders. Starting from their vegetarian restaurant, they developed a small low cost volunteering agency providing volunteers to a few, mainly local projects.
Peter and Janneke developed this over the next two and a half years, but by April 2007 they had decided that they would go back to the Netherlands to live to pursue developing their fairtrade photography project.
They looked for people who shared their philosophy and had a vision to continue, grow and develop the Otra Cosa Volunteer Agency that they had founded. Peter and Juany Murphy, who lived in Huanchaco and had already been working with them on a voluntary basis, agreed to take it over and became owner/managers in April 2007.
Peter is an English man who has lived and worked in Brazil, Germany and Peru as well as the U.K. Originally a mathematician and an accountant, he took an MBA and became Business Planning Manager and Financial Controller at Land Rover. After 29 years working in the automotive industry, in 2005 he came to live with Juany and their three boys here in Huanchaco. He helped run the local OCN operations before moving back to England as Director of OCN.
Juany holds a BA in Sociology and a MA in Human Rights, She was a part time University lecturer in Sociology. She has been involved in community and human rights issues for the last fifteen years. Passionate about social movements and helping others to make this a more just world. Mother of three boys.
From April 2007 to September 2009, Peter and Juany ran Otra Cosa alone, but grew and developed it adding many more partner projects and attracting many more volunteers to help out at these projects.
In 2009, Peter and Juany in turn decided to return to England with their 3 boys to live. Sad to be leaving Huanchaco, but convinced it was best for their boys’ education. However, they couldn’t bring themselves to leave Otra Cosa Network (OCN). So, they came up with a plan. By recruiting a full-time Operations Manager and part-time Assistant Manager based in Peru, but continuing to support OCN from the UK – after all e-mails and web-site updates can be done from anywhere – they could continue to be fully involved in guiding and helping OCN while handing over local operations management to a locally based Manager. So that’s what they did.
Out of over 70 candidates from all around the world Najin Kim from South Korea was finally selected and came to Peru to join us in September 2009. We also recruited a part-time local Assistant Manager to join the team.
Najin is responsible for the management of Otra Cosa Network’s operations in Peru. Born and raised in Korea, she calls many places in the world ‘home’, after spending significant parts of her life in Asia, South/Central/North America, Oceania, Middle East, Europe and in Africa for work, travel and study. She did her MA in Development Studies in Holland, and also holds BA in Political Science and International Relations from Korea. As the title of her MA specialization - Politics of Alternative Development - implies, she has been trying many ‘alternative’ aspects of development practices and also life in general, including ‘Otra Cosa’!
OCN has continued to successfully grow and develop in scope and scale over this time.
In June 2011, recognizing our growth and increased workload we restructured to make the Assistant Manager position full time to strengthen our local Operations team and put more resources into our ‘front line’, particularly to help keep volunteers and our partner projects fully satisfied as we continue to grow. So we welcomed Dale Novotny from the USA to our OCN team as Assistant Manager. We also welcomed Emily Skinner from Florida into a new position as Project Manager, to help develop, strengthen and co-ordinate particularly our many and diverse English Language Teaching projects.
That brings you up to 2011. Let see how far we can grow, develop and continue improving from here.
