Building Relationships – How Community Engagement Can Work #1

In 2013 Betty Nyahoga joined our first Social Innovation Management class in Kenya to strengthen her ability to steer Gatoto Primary School to a more sustainable future. What started as individual capacity building then developed into a deeper relationship that affected many layers of our communities:

Added value through Amani Fellows doing their apprenticeship in the school:

Increasing Staff Capacity

Community projects – learning by doing

What could have easily been an one-off developed into a continued community engagement process that saw Amani Fellows bring the Oasis Game from Brazil to Kenya in 2014, including a project that taught Gatoto students how to use video to make their own documentary. Read about this experience here. Lucila Marquis from Kenya class 3 continued the tradition of Aman Fellows creating additional projects with the school and ran a Journalism course that resulted in a Newspaper made by the students in 2015.

Sharing Learning Processes:
In 2016 Kenya class 5 did their Design Thinking Class on-site at the school, seeing both, Amani Fellows as well as Gatoto students benefit of Nasreen Dhanji‘s expertise in value innovation.

Lesson learned: Impact through layers
If we look at how our relationship with Gatoto has panned out over the years it becomes clear that the different layers of interactions have added up to a broader impact than just capacity training or a single project could have achieved. Students at Gatoto have seen a continued engagement with our community but also witnessed how their own elders/teachers have engaged in learning processes, showing them that learning is a continued and mutual process of growth.

by Geraldine Hepp