TPP grantees always connect youth to the programs, projects and visions they hold for a better world. In order for change to last, we must provide alternative perspectives and resources to youth who will grow up believing in themselves, their communities and their dreams.
TPP grantees are filled with courage that allows them to see a version of themselves that they won’t give up on. When youth witness leaders in their community share inspiration, fight for change and focus on the sun rather than the clouds, it encourages them to follow their life purpose. We all have lived or are currently going through a painful situation that feels defeating.
However, if we choose to see how these situations are serving us, we can use them to uplift and empower ourselves and those around us. TPP grantees help youth and members in their community walk towards their potential rather than their problems.
Nzayisenga Emmanuel – Youth Mindfulness – Rwanda
Youth Mindfulness – Rwanda is an initiative led by Nzayisenga Emmanuel, aiming to provide youth with the skills and techniques to support their personal development and the practice of mindfulness. They provide services that focus on the future, bolstering permanent and long-term change in the lives and livelihoods of their beneficiaries and transform them into independent and self-reliant individual citizens for prosperity.
Although a lot of progress has been registered in various spheres, Rwanda is still recovering from the mass genocide that deeply shattered the people. From being lone survivors in their entire families and witnessing brutal murders of loved ones, to hiding in dark places for over 3 months and looking at the blood that was flowing their streets, many Rwandans were left with wounds and psychological trauma that left them with permanent mental distress.
Hinged on such consequences, the effect appears to be affecting the younger generation, most of whom never even witnessed the genocide, but who have been affected by intergenerational trauma and various social issues, like gender-based violence and drug abuse, among other issues. Additionally, the unemployment rate in Rwanda is very high, resulting in young people not knowing how to occupy their time in a healthy and productive way. This makes it quite clear that there is a great need for a mindfulness program for youth, leading to a healthy and bright future of the country.
Nzayisenga Emmanuel and his team are devoted to deliver mindfulness programs for children, adolescents, and young adults. “We believe that all young people have within themselves the capacity to be peaceful, kind, resilient and mindful, and that with the practice of mindfulness, yoga, and meditation, these strengths can be awaken.”
Community Stray Animal Welfare Program
Having been raised in the neighborhood of Indiranagar in Bangalore, the main impetus for starting the Community Stray Animal Welfare Program was to bring people to be patient and tolerant towards stray animals and see them as in transit rather than a permanent problem. As part of the initiative, the Community Stray Animal Welfare Program has organized Animal Birth Control (ABC) and Anti-Rabies Vaccination (ARV) drives. We also provide for any emergent medical care that is needed for the animals.
The team believes that the most important facet of their work is engaging with community residents to raise awareness about the laws that govern stray animal welfare in the country. Since the inception of the program in 2013, the neighborhood stray dog population has been under check and there is less human-animal conflict.
Hayden Lilien & Lily Strong, Co-Founders – Clean Earth Diaper Project
Clean Earth Diaper Project is an initiative created by Co-Founders Hayden Lilien and Lily Strong to provide families living in poverty with compostable diapers and a service that turns them to dirt in just 12 weeks. Families use on average 300 diapers a month. Those diapers sit in our landfills for between 200 to 500 years.
This project aims to change the culture from disposable to compostable diapers by diverting millions of diapers out of our landfills. We make sure that families have enough diapers to adequately care for their children while spreading awareness about the importance of sustainability.
Wake-Up Cameroon – AGROPHAN – Agriculture For Orphanages
Wake-Up Cameroon’s AGROPHAN project is an acronym for “Agriculture for Orphans”. Taking place in the southwest region of the country, the project aims to establish urban vegetable gardens in local orphanage homes, which will grow supplemental food crops for healthy and nutritious meals, helping to solve the problem of food security, malnutrition, and unemployment to unskilled youths in orphanage homes. Due to the occasional donations in our part of the world, homes are forced to choose between feeding their children a well-balanced diet, supporting their education, or employing a sufficient number of caretakers.
As a result, children in orphanage homes, especially on the African continent, feed on starch-based diets with little access to protein and other micronutrients, which lead to higher rates of malnutrition than the rest of their community. AGROPHAN wants to look beyond occasional donations and ensure self-sustainable food production in local homes, which will help transform their diets and reduce their dependence on foreign donations.
Teenpreneurs Hub – STEM Club
Designed by Teenpreneurs Hub, a community innovation center, and Soji Megbowon, an inspirational teacher and award winner in Nigeria, STEM Club is a program aimed at training secondary students in skills of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. By working with both public and private schools, this project will serve all communities with the hopes of becoming social innovators and problem solvers ready to address what the future holds.
Ben Abah – Youth Empowerment
In Nigeria, the unemployment rate amongst youth is on the rise. To help curb this and engage young people, Eneojoh Benjamin Abah started the Youth Empowerment initiative where young individuals in the Dukpa and Abuja communities are trained on hair dressing, a tangible skill that translates into economic opportunity, and stability. Abah is inspired by seeing the youth actively engaged. With funds from The Pollination Project, he will be able to acquire the materials to facilitate hands on trainings – including hair dryers, dressing kits, and a place to deliver these workshops.
OAK Stories – OAK Academy
The goal of the OAK Academy, designed by the team at OAK Stories, is to train the new generations of storytellers, so that they can acquire the tools and knowledge necessary to go out into the world and tell human stories. Our main objective is to generate a positive impact on society, through the education of young journalists, photographers, and filmmakers.
In a world where a lot of junk news is consumed, they want to highlight and share with others the value of the work they do as documentarists, clearly investing on in-depth journalism, and long-term projects. The world itself needs to start investing in rigorous, ethical and quality journalism. Fake news, misinformation, and lack of culture are some of the great problems that humanity faces in the 21st century.
“We hope that through our workshops, these visual storytellers become interested in documenting and denouncing diverse sociological problems, as well as violations of human rights around the world.”
Lamek Odero And Leah Adhiambo – Reading For Success
Across Kenya, literacy rates in primary schools are significantly lower than expected despite increased access and enrollment. The Kenyan education system is seeking to improve learning outcomes by installing better instructional practices, expanding resources for teacher training, and developing learning materials that support multilingual literacy. Reading For Success addresses this challenge by working with volunteers to provide extra-literacy classes to struggling early grade readers in under-resourced public schools in Kisumu County. It is a long-term project that provides students with the proven, individualized reading support they need to read at grade level by fourth grade.
The project works in partnership school teachers and engages volunteer reading tutors to work one-on-one with students in grades 1 through 4 to complement what is going on in the classroom and help these students increase their reading speed, comprehension, and reading attention span in English and Kiswahili. The objective of the project is that by the end of six months, the students will have at least doubled their reading speed and will have improved their reading skills by one to two grade levels.
Girls2women Initiatives – Menstrual Hygiene Management Sensitization
Located in Ilorin, Nigeria, Girls2women initiatives was founded by Tawakalitu Omolara Alabi, a 2017 Young African Leaders Initiative fellow. Her passion for change inspired her to start the Menstrual Hygiene Management Sensitization initiative. She began to notice many women and girls could not afford the high cost of reusable sanitary pads so they opted for rags, newspapers, and cotton wool wrapped in nylon, all harmful to their health and resulting in absenteeism from school.
This project will focus on training 20 young girls how to make reusable sanitary pads using accessible and hygienic products, which will help them in having a safer and healthier menstrual flow along with job creation and a sense of self-empowerment. The seed grant will help Omolara in acquiring basic instruments and materials needed for the training, including hand machines and cotton fabrics. This project will welcome 20 female entrepreneurs in the Ilorin community!
Savannah Dodd – Photography Ethics Centre
Savannah Dodd founded the Photography Ethics Centre in order to raise awareness about ethics and increase ethical literacy across the photography industry. Photographs shape how we view the world, and when we take and share photographs we are shaping how others view the world. In order to meet this enormous responsibility, the world needs photographers who are ethically literate. The concept of ethical literacy pushes beyond traditional conceptions of ethics as guidelines toward a more critical approach that takes the photographer’s subjective viewpoint and contextual factors into consideration.
The Photography Ethics Centre creates educational content and facilitates workshops to give photographers practice at responding to ethical dilemmas so that they are better prepared to face ethical dilemmas when they occur.
Walters Marlene Anagho – Women Sport Center In Buea, Cameroon
Women Sport Center in Buea, Cameroon is a project to help women in the region have a motivating avenue to regularly assemble to do physical exercise for a healthier and happier life. As a sportswoman, Walters Marlene knows the role that sports have in a human body. This is her motivation to help the community.
The grant from The Pollination Project will greatly help to cover the cost to rent the hall, provide the finance to acquire locally made sports equipment, and coordinate a professional sports instructor to facilitate the workshops.
Savara Indigenous Community – Support For Nutritional Gardens In Indigenous Schools
Thelakatt Joseph Paul is the founder of Society for Community Development, a non-profit organization working among the indigenous community in India to improve the livelihoods of others. His Support for Nutritional Gardens in Indigenous Schools project aims to educate the school going children, teachers, committee members, and community stakeholders of Srikakulam on the importance of developing nutritional gardens. The project will ensure to contribute an additional supply of nutritional intake with their school meals, supplied by the government.
This project is needed because it not only creates awareness among the school children and community on the importance of organic farming, but it also provides an additional food supply to the children. In most government schools, the use of land and water is not properly used. Coupled with malnutrition among indigenous children, it inspired Joseph and his team to start a nutritional program.
The main activities include building awareness on organic farming and nutrition, improving soil fertility, planting seasonal vegetables, collecting and preserving indigenous seeds, and collaborating with governmental departments for accessing technical and financial support.
Tarne Glashose – Fine Furniture For All (3FA) Project
The Find Furniture For All (3FA) project is located in the Bafanji community of Northwest Cameroon. Founded by Tarne Glashose, the 3FA projects trains youth on carpentry skills for a one year time period. Beginning with community involvement and talks with interested individuals, the project concludes with hand-ons trainings and the participants receiving small start-up grants to start their own shop.
This project will help reduce the high level of unemployment in the community and country as a whole as it will provide skills to over a thousand youth in the next five to six years. Funds from The Pollination Project will enable Tarne acquire all the necessary equipment and raw materials needed for the trainings.
