Programmes

PROGRAMMES

WELCOME

All our programmes have emerged from needs expressed by the youth we work with and build on each other to provide pathways for youth to become active leaders in their schools and communities.

Our methodologies

We specifically work with high school age youth because we find that teenagers have a very strong passion and drive to create change in their surroundings but are often overlooked and considered ‘too young’ to be leaders and active members of their communities. We are convinced that changing that negative perspective of youth is key to promoting the emergence of more young leaders in the country.

We strongly believe that leadership and civic education need to be fun and feel personal and authentic to young people to be impactful. All our programmes and engagements with youth are therefore guided by the methodologies of transformational training, experiential learning and co-intentional education, which means that all programme contents are experienced in the four dimensions of: feeling, watching, thinking and doing. It also means that we intentionally foster a peer-learning environment, where everyone in the room learns from each other and we build on the existing knowledge in participants.

Our programmes have been developed in a collective effort by teaching professionals from the University of Oxford (UK), Windesheim University (Netherlands), University of Johannesburg and IIEMSA in collaboration with experienced local youth facilitators and are reviewed and updated regularly based on the feedback of our facilitators, participants, teachers, parents and schools.

The selection, recruitment and training of our facilitators is key to us. We specifically select facilitators in their early 20ies who come from the communities we serve and therefore have a good understanding of the context and the ability to create a youthful learning space. We dedicate much time to training and mentoring our facilitators in the above methodologies and have ongoing feedback processes that allow us to support the facilitators as they accompany the participants through a journey of personal discovery and development of their leadership and civic agency.