Young Leaders Fund: Rebuilding Communities

Fundación El Origen works to reduce school dropouts in indigenous communities across LATAM by designing education programs and working personally with teachers and students in rural schools. Due to COVID-19, they have developed the first offline learning app called O-lab, adapted for indigenous students who have the lowest education levels worldwide.

Fundación El Origen in partnership with the La Guajira government has supplied under-resourced students with tablets installed with the O-lab application. The organisation has used the support from One Young World to translate the content into the Wayuunaiki language to ensure its accessibility for the most marginalised in the community. Additionally, the team has run awareness sessions and training for community leaders to help implement the initiative sustainably.

The organisation is training local teachers and working with corporations and employees to create interactive tailor-made content on STEAM, employment and entrepreneurship so its beneficiaries can develop projects and become leaders for the SDGs in their own communities. This funding would support the foundation to scale up projects in Mexico, Peru, and the USA, impacting over 15,000 beneficiaries.

Nitiya founded Seeds of Fortune (SoF), a scholarship and EdTech platform to help teen girls of colour obtain an affordable college education. This is in response to the disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic communities arising from the struggle to access affordable college and financial education information.

SoF supplies strategic college preparation and career resources digitally as well as personal finance techniques for young women of colour to increase the financial security in minority communities. It is accomplished through a 2-6 year intensive curriculum that helps them receive college funding, professional opportunities, and financial tools to make informed financial decisions. SoF leverages its own digital EdTech platform to enable students with limited or no wifi connection to obtain career and college financial information via desktop, mobile site/app with/without wifi connection.

The organisation will invest in its Scholars programme, run in partnership with Yale Women in Economics. This initiative identifies 30 young women of colour across the USA to participate in a 10-month programme that provides financial education and college preparation through the lens of racial justice. The students’ exploration of economics helps them take control of their financial future and increases the financial security of students from minority communities. The programme’s curriculum is delivered in multi-media formats allowing Seeds of Fortune to represent economics in a new, engaging, bold way that reimagines the economy as a system that works for people who have been systemically marginalised.

Inès is a diversity specialist by profession and founded the NGO, GHETT’UP in Paris.GHETT’UP accelerates social justice and social innovation in the “banlieues” by leveraging youth empowerment and leadership, creating powerful partnerships, and pushing counter-narratives.

In the low-income neighbourhoods in which GHETT’UP operates, young people are particularly impacted by a lack of resources and opportunities and the persistence of stereotypes and racism. Within this group, young women and women of colour suffer from additional barriers including structural sexism and self-limitation.

Learning from this, the organisation has updated its core youth leadership programs and dedicated a flagship programme to empowering young women to take control over their trajectories, and become role models and agents of change. "Ma Soeur" is an innovative and comprehensive 6-month program for disadvantaged young women offering skills development (digital literacy, public speaking), mentorship, professional opportunities within its network, and mental health coaching. This grant will help secure the recruitment of an experienced program manager coordinating 20 mentees/mentors and 200 young women participating in the programme's open events.

Victor co-founded Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative (MANI) with a group of friends in 2016 to combat the stigma around mental health in Nigeria. Victor has first-hand experience with this situation and was able to access psychiatric services when he needed them, but he noticed that many of his friends and peers at medical school could not.

MANI has worked to simplify discussions and build an image and structure that is designed for young people. It has delivered more than 108,000 free counselling sessions, impacting 40,000 people. During the End SARS campaign against police brutality, MANI had counsellors active at protest sites providing guidance and panic attack cards. Every month it shares a toolkit on a particular mental health condition with insights on risk factors and support in five languages. It also runs conversation cafes in 18 Nigerian states, training over 35,000 people on mental health awareness.

As part of scaling up online counselling services, MANI has developed a digital adaptation called Itunu, which will be delivered over four different platforms. This includes a stream for beneficiaries on WhatsApp, that will allow people with limited access to the internet to directly contact and connect with counsellors via their phones. It is also training 90 counsellors to use the WHO developed intervention app called Project Management Plus, which offers individual psychological help for adults impaired by distress in communities exposed to adversity. MANI is also creating a landing page of mental health resources and analysed data to be used in policy advocacy.

Salmine co-founded She Starts Africa in 2018 in response to the socio-economic discrimination that women experience in Tunisia, which poses an obstacle to their prospective entrepreneurship journey. She began by offering incubation workshops to female university students workshops for free. Using the data and feedback they gathered during this initial outreach, She Starts Africa was able to develop a programme to build women’s capacity in entrepreneurship.

She Starts Africa has managed to simultaneously develop programmes for women entrepreneurs who are only just beginning their entrepreneurial journey, and those who have experience with entrepreneurship but want to learn more about scaling their businesses and utilising digital tools to make that happen. She Starts Africa has expanded across the continent and is now active through university clubs in six countries.

She Starts Africa is currently working on creating the SheStarts.Tech platform that will serve female founders in all stages of development from all industries. This grant will allow them to create this platform, develop the digital content from scratch, and launch the “Female Founders” Acceleration program cohort. The Female Founders Program targets female-led SMEs to help them re-invent their business model, enhance their business capabilities, use no-code platforms as the first step in digital transformation, and start the business growth process. It will also help to provide micro-grant support for the female founders, all contributing to increasing the success rate of female founders.

Romy is a psychotherapist, who has been practising in the field of trauma since qualifying in 2015. After graduating, she moved to Cyprus where Romy established a free trauma therapy programme for asylum seekers who reached the island. Upon returning to the UK, Romy started work as a consultant therapist for Amna (formerly the Refugee Trauma Initiative).

She started free online therapeutic groups for male refugees in camps in Greece during the pandemic-enforced lockdown. Since then, she has developed a training booklet and trained Amna therapists to provide online therapeutic groups as part of the Afghanistan response. She does this alongside her position as Senior ED Psychotherapist for Orri, a Specialist Eating Disorder Treatment service.

Romy hopes to launch a new pilot programme in the form of her work at Amna, in response to the financial crisis in Lebanon and following the consequences of the Beirut port blast in 2020. She will run online therapy groups for Lebanese people, collaborating with other Lebanese therapists in diaspora communities. She will train and supervise local therapists to conduct sessions on the ground to provide employment opportunities in local communities. The programme will distribute psychoeducation material on trauma to help people in Lebanon understand how trauma lives on in their bodies – equipping them with tools for regulation. Local therapists will receive income from the fund, and it will also cover the hire of venues for in-person therapeutic groups.

Growing up as a refugee in Norway, he was able to take advantage of educational opportunities inaccessible to most Afghans. In response, he co-founded Brighter Tomorrow with his brother, when he was only 19 years old to promote the right to quality education for children in Afghanistan.

The team has developed the first offline-based education platform that teaches students to read and write in both Pashto and Dari through unsupervised game learning. The application provides high-quality education but focuses also on creating a safe space for their mental wellbeing, empowering females and providing an escape for Afghan children from the surrounding conflict.

The fund will allow Brighter Tomorrow to increase the scope of its offline game-based literacy platform. The organisation will also establish 3 provincial hot spot centres that distribute our applications so girls can develop literacy within their homes through informal learning. It will finance the acquisition of 200 solar-powered tablets, installed with the software. These will provide access to 600 Afghan girls per day, and the lifespan of the tablets and software are estimated to last between 3-5 years.

Nozipho is committed to tackling South Africa’s youth unemployment crisis since 2015 when she began to help young people prepare their CVs to access the job market. However, she soon realised that intervention was not enough, and in 2018 she went to the roots of the issue by providing better quality education to give young people a platform from which to launch their careers.

The Academy, co-founded by Nozipho, aims to build the skill-set of its students so that they can better succeed in the current economic climate of South Africa. The organisation ran its first 5-day boot camp in 2019 but since the pandemic, the Academy moved boot camps online. The Academy also hosts an interactive e-learning platform after noticing interest from parents in a more adult-focused programme. The Academy uses business funding to sponsor students from low-income backgrounds, ensuring that there is a diverse demographic of students in the alumni network and guaranteeing the education is accessible.

Building Blocks will use the grant from Brandtech Group to offer employment & entrepreneurship training through entrepreneurship skills training that builds solution-orientated businesses through an 8-module entrepreneurship Bootcamp, incubating young entrepreneurs from ideation to market. It will also finance a digital skills Bootcamp enabling online scaling through understanding the fundamentals of e-commerce, social media, data privacy & online safety. Finally, it will assist with financial recovery skills for rebuilding enterprises through funding, debit, credit, and budgeting.

At 13, Meg was diagnosed with a variety of mental illnesses including anorexia, anxiety and depression, and struggled to manage her symptoms alongside her schoolwork. From her own experience, Meg was driven to address the lack of government support for young people despite the fact over 75% of adults with a diagnosed mental illness first experienced symptoms before the age of 25.

She founded MindMapper UK. This youth-led innovation hub connects 16-25-year-olds with resources, services and content to help them live mentally healthier lives. They work in schools, colleges, universities and youth groups in the UK to enable young people to take their first steps into the world of mental wellbeing and support them with navigating life's everyday challenges. MindMapper delivers relevant and interactive mental well-being education designed by young people and leading experts.

MindMapper hopes to invest in hiring and upskilling new youth coaches and facilitators and expanding its wellbeing curriculum into 20 secondary schools and 15 colleges in the UK. The programme would be delivered over 6 free interactive workshops, teaching young people various skills: mindfulness, emotional regulation, cognitive health, healthy studying, and time management. The programme would help students navigate life with more confidence and it would allow the organisation to teach over 1,000 students during this project. Additionally, the organisation aims to establish a partnership with local organisations to offer a handful of free counselling sessions to a selected group of young people who need it the most.

Despite the high participation of women in agriculture in St. Lucia, it remains a male-dominated industry. In 2016, Keithlin began the Helen's Daughters campaign to support rural women with the use of adaptive agricultural techniques, capacity-building and improved market access. What began as a campaign became a social enterprise in 2018, with the launch of their Rural Women's Academy.

The organisation runs workshops that train rural women in innovative agricultural techniques and business capacity building. They also facilitate collaborations between the women in the form of supportive unions. The Academy's goal is to transform informal, female farmers into entrepreneurs.

In 2021, Helen’s Daughters conducted a 5-country study, that uncovered some of the root causes of the lack of market access of women and youth farmers: access to finance, land and specialized agricultural training. It has created additional support mechanisms to provide assistance to the women in order to gain entry into agricultural markets. The organisation have already established a Rural Women’s Ag-cademy that has trained over 1,000 women in 3 countries in sustainable agriculture and agri-business and is in the process of partnering with a local credit union to provide interest-free loans to its members. However, it wants to drastically change the landscape of women in agriculture by bringing these elements together to create the first-ever agriculture-incubator in St. Lucia for women and youth farmers, which would provide more frequent specialised training, access to finance and access to a training space for experimentation and upskilling in agriculture.

Since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine has caused extensive damage, displacement, and death among the population. Veteran Hub, for which Ivona is Head of the Board, is an innovative non-profit that provides holistic support to veterans of this war and their families.

It has operated community centres in Kyiv and Vinnytsia, where many veterans reside. These centres have provided legal, social, psychological, and employment support to veterans, and offer fellow civil organizations free office space, facilities, and networking opportunities. They have provided thousands of services to veterans, the military and their family members since November 2018. Since the invasion in 2022, Ivona has scaled up the work with the increased urgency for their intervention.

Veteran Hub would ensure quality mental health support services to spouses and children of both active service members, and veterans, who were often forced to relocate and take on huge responsibilities since the beginning of the full-scale war by Russia. Through its active trust line, families report heightened levels of anxiety due to the active type of war activity, trouble sleeping, uncertainty in the future and loneliness, due to the sudden and prolonged separation from their loved ones. The organisation’s work is grounded in the well-being approach, meaning it aims to cover a holistic set of needs, ranging from mental health to employment opportunities and legal support.

Aravinth is a devoted social entrepreneur empowering underserved communities in war-affected regions of Sri Lanka. At the age of 14, he escaped the country in fear of becoming a child soldier, for ten years exiled as a refugee and returned to his motherland when the war ended almost after three decades. His craving to uphold those who went through the same life experiences propelled him to co-found DreamSpace Academy.

DreamSpace Academy is a non-profit social enterprise tackling local socio-economic and environmental challenges through challenge-based learning, grassroots innovation and impact venture building. DreamSpace Academy's mission is to achieve sustainable development goals in Sri Lanka by empowering underserved communities, protecting environmental ecosystems, facilitating peacebuilding and fostering sustainable startups.

DreamSpace will use the grant to fund the interdisciplinary education of underserved young people in war-torn regions in Sri Lanka through the DreamSpace Lifecycle. This helps them to develop grassroots innovations for socio-economic and environmental challenges. It enters them into a network including international experts. This programme turns these ideas into impact ventures, transforming young people into entrepreneurs. One specific use of the grant will be to build an off-grid electricity generation and storage solution, as DreamSpace faces 12+ hour daily power cuts resulting from a national shortage of energy, fuel, food, and medicine. Without electricity, the team struggles to continue with empowerment work and even to provide fundamental human needs for the young people it supports.