Happy Friday, blog readers!
I'm so excited to tell you all about Serve 2 Lead (S2L), a leadership development program that I've been a part of for the past 9 months or so. I talked about it a bit in my last post entitled "Time Flies", but I'll give a quick recap here in case you missed the last post.
In November last year, a team of fellow PCVs and I met with many local stakeholders, including representatives from local schools, the Ministry of Gender, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, and the Vocational Training Center. Together, we brainstormed areas where youth in our region are lacking skills. Two of the largest needs that we came up with were leadership skills and entrepreneurship/creative thinking skills.
After this meeting, my good friend and fellow PCV Mandeep came up with two program ideas targeting this need. He reached out to the PCV community in our region to see if anyone was interested in developing the programs. I jumped on the opportunity, along with 2 other PCVs, and began helping to make Mandeep's idea come to life. The four of us (Mandeep, Anna, Lena, and me) brainstormed even futher off of Mandeep's original idea and decided to call our project Serve 2 Lead. Here's what we came up with:
1) Keep this year's program small, as it's a pilot. Have only our host institutions participate this year. 2) Use the Peace Corps Global Life Skills manual-- leadership section-- as our curriculum. Adapt it a bit, but let's not reinvent the wheel with curriculum.
3) Have 3 weeks worth of instruction take place after school. Instruction will be all by Namibian colleagues, as the best way for Namibian youth to learn about leadership is from a Namibian leader. (This way, our project is sustainable and in future can be implemented region-wide at schools, regardless of whether they have a PCV or not.)
4) Have all participants and facilitators come together for a weekend leadership bootcamp where the final 3 sessions about leadership can be presented. Invite a social worker from the Ministry of Health to introduce social issues which are prevalent in our region and teach the participants how to use different community intervention models.
5) Have participants put their skills to the test and create projects within their own communities targeting social change.
Now that you've got the backstory, I want to tell you how it all went/is going! Instruction at the schools went great. My colleague Bergitta is our S2L facilitator at Oshikulufitu and she knocked it out of the park. She has been extremely dedicated to the project and its mission and spent more than three hours per week teaching our kids. I'm so grateful to work with such a compassionate, hard-working, and consistent person. Thank you, Bergitta, for all that you've done so far and continue to do.
Our weekend S2L bootcamp was a couple of weekends ago and I'm still reveling in its success. The kids participating are absolute rockstars. They learned a bunch and were so excited to have this opportunity. Anytime we had breaks in our schedule, the kids would spend them writing notes and double checking that they had all the information correct. Impressive, right? More like astonishing.
We had 39 participants from our four different organizations and (theoretically) four colleagues, one from each of our organizations (two ended up showing up), as well as Elizabeth Shiluomunhu (social worker), and five PCVs who led the kitchen. We were a great team that came together for the weekend. Everyone volunteered their time and energy and we were able to pull off the entire venture with only a N$4,000 (US$300) budget! A big thank you to all who helped. And another big thank you to Onawa Secondary School for allowing us to use the hostels, kitchen, and classrooms-- free of charge! Together we can.
Now, the kids are hard at work on their community service projects. Elizabeth did a great job preparing them on the social work side and our fantastic Namibian facilitators and PCVs did a great job preparing them with project management skills. There are two teams at each school; the two at our school are targeting Alcohol Abuse Among Learners and High School Dropout Rate. From what I've heard so far, the kids are planning to start up clubs at our school relating to these topics and/or have an assembly day where they invite Elizabeth to come and speak on these issues and prepare their own speeches and skits to supplement. They have already made a speech at the parents' meeting this past week informing the parents on what they're busy doing and that they'll be out in the community conducting research in the coming weeks. The drive and passion that the kids at our school are showing is so beautiful. I have been so pleasantly surprised by their hard work! It seems that all these kids needed was a little bit of training, a nudge in the right direction, and-- most importantly-- a platform for them to step up to and start working!
I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to co-develop this project. It's been a lot of work, but it's so rewarding to see the fruits of our labor. The kids were acting like it was the night before Christmas at the bootcamp and couldn't even sleep because they were so excited by what they had learned and spending time with new friends from the other schools. Seeing the joy, passion, and energy in their eyes has in turn reciprocated those same feelings back to me. What a gift.
Additionally, part of the reason that I'm so excited about S2L is that it was my first time taking on such a large-scale project. As Mandeep thoughtfully reflected while we were on a bus together, "we're entrepreneurs!" It's been so cool to see what o
nce was just our simple idea between four PCVs transform into such a beautiful project. Here's to hoping that its same success continues next year!
I'm so excited to tell you all about Serve 2 Lead (S2L), a leadership development program that I've been a part of for the past 9 months or so. I talked about it a bit in my last post entitled "Time Flies", but I'll give a quick recap here in case you missed the last post.
In November last year, a team of fellow PCVs and I met with many local stakeholders, including representatives from local schools, the Ministry of Gender, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, and the Vocational Training Center. Together, we brainstormed areas where youth in our region are lacking skills. Two of the largest needs that we came up with were leadership skills and entrepreneurship/creative thinking skills.
After this meeting, my good friend and fellow PCV Mandeep came up with two program ideas targeting this need. He reached out to the PCV community in our region to see if anyone was interested in developing the programs. I jumped on the opportunity, along with 2 other PCVs, and began helping to make Mandeep's idea come to life. The four of us (Mandeep, Anna, Lena, and me) brainstormed even futher off of Mandeep's original idea and decided to call our project Serve 2 Lead. Here's what we came up with:
1) Keep this year's program small, as it's a pilot. Have only our host institutions participate this year. 2) Use the Peace Corps Global Life Skills manual-- leadership section-- as our curriculum. Adapt it a bit, but let's not reinvent the wheel with curriculum.
3) Have 3 weeks worth of instruction take place after school. Instruction will be all by Namibian colleagues, as the best way for Namibian youth to learn about leadership is from a Namibian leader. (This way, our project is sustainable and in future can be implemented region-wide at schools, regardless of whether they have a PCV or not.)
4) Have all participants and facilitators come together for a weekend leadership bootcamp where the final 3 sessions about leadership can be presented. Invite a social worker from the Ministry of Health to introduce social issues which are prevalent in our region and teach the participants how to use different community intervention models.
5) Have participants put their skills to the test and create projects within their own communities targeting social change.
Now that you've got the backstory, I want to tell you how it all went/is going! Instruction at the schools went great. My colleague Bergitta is our S2L facilitator at Oshikulufitu and she knocked it out of the park. She has been extremely dedicated to the project and its mission and spent more than three hours per week teaching our kids. I'm so grateful to work with such a compassionate, hard-working, and consistent person. Thank you, Bergitta, for all that you've done so far and continue to do.
 |
| The beautiful Bergitta |
Our weekend S2L bootcamp was a couple of weekends ago and I'm still reveling in its success. The kids participating are absolute rockstars. They learned a bunch and were so excited to have this opportunity. Anytime we had breaks in our schedule, the kids would spend them writing notes and double checking that they had all the information correct. Impressive, right? More like astonishing.
 |
| Some of leaders, hard at work! |
We had 39 participants from our four different organizations and (theoretically) four colleagues, one from each of our organizations (two ended up showing up), as well as Elizabeth Shiluomunhu (social worker), and five PCVs who led the kitchen. We were a great team that came together for the weekend. Everyone volunteered their time and energy and we were able to pull off the entire venture with only a N$4,000 (US$300) budget! A big thank you to all who helped. And another big thank you to Onawa Secondary School for allowing us to use the hostels, kitchen, and classrooms-- free of charge! Together we can.
 |
| The S2L Crew |
 |
| Elizabeth facilitating her sessions on social issues while under the Baobab tree |
Now, the kids are hard at work on their community service projects. Elizabeth did a great job preparing them on the social work side and our fantastic Namibian facilitators and PCVs did a great job preparing them with project management skills. There are two teams at each school; the two at our school are targeting Alcohol Abuse Among Learners and High School Dropout Rate. From what I've heard so far, the kids are planning to start up clubs at our school relating to these topics and/or have an assembly day where they invite Elizabeth to come and speak on these issues and prepare their own speeches and skits to supplement. They have already made a speech at the parents' meeting this past week informing the parents on what they're busy doing and that they'll be out in the community conducting research in the coming weeks. The drive and passion that the kids at our school are showing is so beautiful. I have been so pleasantly surprised by their hard work! It seems that all these kids needed was a little bit of training, a nudge in the right direction, and-- most importantly-- a platform for them to step up to and start working!
 |
| The Oshikulufitu S2L Crew |
I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to co-develop this project. It's been a lot of work, but it's so rewarding to see the fruits of our labor. The kids were acting like it was the night before Christmas at the bootcamp and couldn't even sleep because they were so excited by what they had learned and spending time with new friends from the other schools. Seeing the joy, passion, and energy in their eyes has in turn reciprocated those same feelings back to me. What a gift.
Additionally, part of the reason that I'm so excited about S2L is that it was my first time taking on such a large-scale project. As Mandeep thoughtfully reflected while we were on a bus together, "we're entrepreneurs!" It's been so cool to see what o
nce was just our simple idea between four PCVs transform into such a beautiful project. Here's to hoping that its same success continues next year!
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