*Leticia is Project Manager of Endeleza, the organization that hosted the group project of the #YCL2018immersion. Below is her testimonial about our partnership in Kenya.
Endeleza is a Brazilian non-profit organization with an international presence and our goal is to promote human and community development. We are working towards this investing in three foundations: education, empowerment, and sustainability. These foundations are always present in our projects and we believe that through them we can do more than just provide immediate solutions to the communities’ problems. Through them, we focus on developing human potential, capacitating the individuals first, so they can have their own initiatives and transform their realities through everlasting solutions. We started working in Kenya in 2012 and currently we impact directly the life of about 300 people from the communities of Meru County, in Central Kenya.
Our main project is the Sustainable Primary School (SPS), currently taking place at Mugae Primary School, where we impact 225 children by guaranteeing their access to education and nutrition. Our SPS model aims to empower vulnerable communities, so its members will gradually gain ownership over their own development process. We are trying to create a replicable model which catalyzes multidimensional development to be implemented throughout schools all over Africa.
We crossed paths with YCL in March of 2018 and, at first, it was hard to picture how our work could be directly linked to climate change. On this regard, it was amazing how they managed to make such a complex topic tangible for our organization and for the people involved in our projects (teachers, community members and school children).
With young and engaged participants from all over the world, they put together a group of people with a huge richness of ideas due to the different backgrounds and areas of expertise of each one of them. They came with the goal of helping us improve our model while aligning our goals to climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, they ended up doing so much more than that! With fresh eyes and a systemic way of tackling problems, the group not only helped us building proposals for solutions to challenges we knew we had, but they also did a great job diagnosing some problems that haven’t even came to our attention yet.
Having received the YCL 2018 Immersion will always be a mark in the history of our organization, as it was the beginning of a journey towards making our SPS model broader and more globalized. It also represented the beginning of a path of increasing our presence and visibility outside Brazil and Kenya. To summarize, the YCL Program has brought to Meru a leadership spirit that awakened other leadership movements within our organization and the communities we work with.
