(SJRK) August 22, 2019 Partners Meeting

Present:

  • Bahati
  • Dana
  • Gregor
  • Liam
  • Michelle
  • Tata

Discussion:

TIG - Liam

  • Liam will send info about possible DEEP participant who has been involved with TIG and SJRK and Dana to clear with Iris about travel budget
  • Liam on holiday last week and again next week
    • Will be doing some writing work while on holiday!

IDRC

Tata - Karisma:

  • Tata is in Milton en route to London to start grad work at Western!
  • Finished all activities in schools in Colombia, and Hector will continue the remaining work (have almost finished all activities)
  • Has started writing final conclusions in a report
  • visited schools in Fresno and Tobia
  • Have a second round of videos from Fresno - students already finished - about their learning process
  • Other videos - tutorials - already finished:
  • Everything going/went well in Fresno
  • The “recipe” and “ingredients” from Fresno didn’t work - completely different experience in Tobia!
    • The process was not the same as in Fresno
    • They didn’t make videos, they didn’t want to be seen
    • “I hate Facebook”
    • They feel shame - about their image
    • Planned to work with students in Grade 10, 11, but they weren't interested - but younger students said they want to participate:
      • They were interested in local network, want to make photos
      • Started taking pictures of nature in Tobia 
      • Made a Podcast - using local network downtown - library
    • Can’t share photographs - a problem to put name of student - they didn’t want to give names - collecting all the photos now and putting on local network
    • Podcast is not ready - maybe in 2 weeks - will share with us
    • Juliana - has written up year one conclusions, Tata is writing 2nd year conclusions - will be finished by October
    • Hector is wrapping up details - adding names to photos, podcast uploading, 
  • Tata not sure of schedule but would like to come to Toronto to visit IDRC
    • Not sure if she can join meeting in October - will confirm next week once she starts school and knows her schedule

Bahati - UWEZO:

  • New partner - Segal Foundation in New Jersey - will be there in September Sept 20th 4 days
  • Will look into visa application to attend DEEP if possible
    • Dana to send invitation letter this week
  • Young people didn’t understand the results of the report 
  • Met with a group of young people from Musanze - one of districts where research was conducted
  • Exchanged data with them - what they should know, what is expected for training
  • What else do they think we can propose to government
  • UWEZO working with different partners
    • 2 focus groups - Musanze (10 youth with learning diff, more casual jobs here, selling scratch cards on the streets, running some services, also those who have been to school/university - quite a diverse group)
  • Other group this Saturday - 10 participants - go through same agenda
  • They had lots of requests for UWEZO
    • Having a space for them to express their feelings
    • Creating access to platforms like the National Youth Council
    • Lately many young people aren’t taking part
    • More practical skills that will help them to participate in the storytelling exercise
    • Want direct contribution in storytelling - by providing some training in storytelling, photography, sound editing
    • We will collect the stories, but the young people want to be a part of the process
  • Have scheduled 5 days of training for young people for storytelling and photography
    • Facilitated by two people they have hired to be facilitators for this storytelling
    • The workshops will take place between the 2nd and 6th of September
    • The findings of the stories, the pictures that will be taken by the young people will be fine tuned by the facilitators and then will be shared
  • Sept 12 Kigali - training for youth - inclusive design toolkit and also presenting the voices/aspirations/wishes and desires of young people through stories, audio, pictures
    • Will use lots of social media platforms during the training to share with those who aren’t present
  • Doesn’t make much sense to just capture a story - want to promote and inspire young people
  • Storytelling toolkit - how we can incorporate storytelling tool?
    • As well as taking into account individual needs of the students there (subtitles, etc.)
    • Possibility of gathering the content offline and IDRC putting it into the storytelling tool afterwards
    • They will try to add the stories themselves, and if the effort doesn’t work or they run into issues (bandwidth, accessibility), they can reach out to the IDRC folk to add the stories on their behalf
    • First step would be to translate the interface?
    • Send a version of the tool to Bahati and let him try it out and provide translations of the text content
    • It will all depend on whether the young people will find it helpful - try it out in English first, translate to Kinyarwanda only if needed
    • Would be good to have the tool ready to try out during the training from Sept 2nd to 6th
    • The version we can share now - stories get removed every night: http://staging-stories.floeproject.org/
    • The “real” version where we have gathered stories in workshops - they live here permanently and we can unlock this one as needed, or create a different version of the tool for your context https://stories.floeproject.org/
    • If you want the stories to be stored - we can send a different version
  • UWEZO should have all activities completed by the end of the contract