As agreed at Grand Council in 2021, our International Strategy has guided our progress as an international family over the past two years. As the members of our Grand Council meet in New Zealand this week, we are keen to reflect on our over-arching mission and the approaches we are taking to achieve our collective goal.
St John is an international family of charities whose mission is to lead globally in First Aid and medical responses to community healthcare needs. Our 44 establishments around the world, are independent entities, each operating for their local communities, in their local communities, with the support and expertise of local people. As a collective family, we aim to continuously improve the quality and scale of training and care that St John provides around the world; to ensure that St John can claim to represent the “gold standard” in everything we do. As we unite the St John family around this ambitious common future, to make St John known amongst international technical partners and the public as a global leader in the field of first aid and community health resilience, we want to share knowledge and approaches across St John establishments, enabling us to build resilient communities everywhere that St John operates.
The International Office, based in London UK, plays a big role in sharing this knowledge and variety of approaches: we look after the central coordination of the Honours, Awards, and Order Roll; we oversee the legal use of the brand; we develop the picture and profile of what St John achieves on a global scale (our global brand); we provide the means through which collaboration can take place; we provide a central repository for information, and we manage the collection of data on a global scale.
What is Regionalisation?
Regionalisation focuses on building a peer group of organisations with the aim of improvement. It should offer all St John establishments access to operational expertise in other organisations – A region is not another level of authority or bureaucracy, but a space to build cohesion and shared direction amongst establishments within a geographical area. As each Region will focus on the issues of most importance in their regional context, it embeds our operations as a local service for local communities by local people, not just into the delivery of our services, but into our own leadership.
Whilst our initial progress was hindered by COVID, we are delighted that Regionalisation is powering ahead, led by the regions themselves. We look forward to hearing more from each of our Regions; The Americas, Asia-Pacific and EMEA through our discussions this week.
