Educate! alumni take Educate! course to the community

Educate! as an organization exists to change lives and transform communities. We do this by equipping students we directly impact with leadership and social entrepreneurship knowledge and skills. However, these skills are also needed by unprivileged community members who are struggling to make ends meet. In a bid to reach out to these communities, Educate! through the Alumni Program designed a short course for the Alumni to exponentially empower their communities. As a result, 26 Educate! Alumni from Hoima, Mbale and Kampala regions were selected and trained to interactively teach the short course in their various communities.

The short course is a condensed version of the Educate! curriculum and captures all the key lessons from the Educate! Social Entrepreneurship and Leadership Course. 10 lessons have been singled out and tailored to meet the needs and standards of the community. It also includes interactive teaching methods known to increase learners’ retention and make the class FUN!!  The course is intended to eventually prepare community members to become socially responsible leaders and social entrepreneurs ready to transform communities.

The 26 Alumni were tasked to go back to their communities as junior mentors and recruited 15 to 30 local community members from schools, Associations, and local youth groups to be part of their classes. The junior Mentors took them through a series of lessons ranging from Personal and Visionary Leadership, Resourcefulness, opportunity Identification to Business planning and Implementation. The final part of the course required the junior Mentors to establish Change Makers Associations in a bid to create opportunities for the trained community members to demonstrate, and practice community leadership through creating and running group projects, and later use that experience to start individual projects to bring about transformation.  So far, Daniel Okurut, now a Junior Mentor is running the short course for a group of police officers from the Uganda Police Force who reside in Nakawa Police barracks, a suburbs of Kampala.

Solomon Kayiwa Mugambe, the Educate! Alumni Program Coordinator is positive that through the 26 Junior Mentors, Educate! will be able to reach out to over 400 community members from across the country who will eventually be skilled to take Uganda to another level. With more people transferring life transforming knowledge and skills, local communities in Uganda will gradually get exponentially empowered; a lot like striking little matches to set big fires of change in the different parts of Uganda.