In October of 2015 Resonate was awarded nonprofit status by the IRS, a designation that recognizes the work we have done to date, and marks a turning point in our growth as an organization. We have been working hard to build the programmatic infrastructure necessary to take our program to the next level and reach even more women and girls with our transformational leadership training.
This has been possible thanks to support from Global Grassroots as our fiscal sponsor, and we are closing our Global Giving project to take full ownership of our work moving forward. Through our four program areas – Storytelling for Leadership, Action Leadership, Professional Development, and Training of Facilitators – we have reached more than 1,000 participants.
One of those 1,000 participants, Immaculee, told us how her life had changed just a month after our training. During an interview she said,
“I can’t find a way to describe how much your training has changed my life. I have been experiencing violence in my marriage and I failed to stand up for my rights for many years. I am married and have eight children…my husband refused to take responsibilities of sending them to school and I kept quiet...After your training, the only child who managed to study up to primary six, he got high enough marks to continue with his education and my husband refused to help pay school fees. Thanks to your training, for the first time, I talked to our cell leader. They invited my husband for a meeting and requested him to get the money ($30USD) and send our child to school. I am happy that I advocated for my son and I wish I could have done the same for my other children.”
Immaculee’s self-confidence and willingness to stand up for herself will have a lasting impact on her and her children. Even though we are closing our GlobalGiving page, you can continue to have an impact on Immaculee and thousands of others like her by visiting our website: http://resonateworkshops.org
Links:
Resonate is at a great stage of growth and well equipped to reach out to many girls and women. We have set an ambitious goal of serving 10,000 women over the next three years and this first term has provided us with the confidence to look at it as an achievable goal. Resonate’s product is well defined and we are clear on the value that our work is contributing to our partners and beneficiaries
During this first quarter we completed revision of our curriculum. Resonate team has been working with an independent consultant to standardize our curriculum and improve the content. This is one of the biggest achievements and we believe that it is going to play a big role in accelerating our impact. Our next focus is looking for opportunities to work with organizations that may integrate our curriculum into their existing program to ensure the sustainability and impact for more women around East Africa.
We have managed to revise our monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system and are piloting new survey questions that will help us more accurately measure our impact and as we roll out this new M&E system we expect to improve our communication regarding our impact.
We are still at the beginning of a year and look forward to success. We have initiated a search to hire a trainer who will complement our effort in achieving our goals. Given our current outreach push and anticipated spike in training requests as a result, we believe that it is the right moment to expand the team and hope to get the best fit for the organization.
Impact Story:
Godeberte is a graduate from Cornerstone Development high school. Last year, she went through our Storytelling training with 20 of her classmates. At the end of a two-day workshop, they set and wrote down their leadership goals. Recently, when we did our follow up with them, Godeberte was excited to share with us the progress she has made towards her goals.
“Your training helped me to not only believe in myself but also to set a goal,” says Godeberte. Her main goal was to be able to earn income that can help her to continue her studies without depending on anyone’s support. Together with her sister, they managed to open a small shop in Musanze, the income of which is helping support her as she starts her University in August. Godeberte also gives a tutoring class to 40 students in Math and Chemistry. “I also wanted to help my fellow sisters and brothers in my community, especially helping them to love and perform well in science. I value education and feel proud to help these students to perform well in their studies, she says.”
Here at Resonate we have had a great few months to wrap up an incredible year. We are proud of what we have accomplished, and even more excited for what we have upcoming in 2016. We are so grateful for the support and hard work of all those involved in our successes and want to take a moment to reflect and celebrate.
To date, Resonate has trained:
We have seen an increase among those that we’ve trained in self-confidence, comfort speaking publicly, and willingness to take on a leadership role in a team, group, or project. The best gifts that we got this year were stories: an sms message from a past participant letting us know she’d confidently passed an interview process and gotten a job; a visit with two women from our program who ran for (and won!) elected seats on their village council; a new Resonate Certified Trainer who told us that she feels like her work with Resonate is in fact an extension of her life mission
These stories and many others help sum up why we do this work. We truly believe that self-confident women leaders are the voice and the engine of the future, and we are grateful to you for your role in helping to fuel progress. We’ve made a video about our work that we think captures the strength of East Africa’s women, the story behind our work, and the spirit that we work to cultivate in all those we serve. We hope you will take a few minutes to watch it at resonateworkshops.org
Thank you for helping us support women leading change.
Happy Holidays!
- Resonate Team
Links:
Over the summer, our Co-founder and CEO attended The Unreasonable Institute to take part in their 5-week intensive global fellowship. During the program we had the opportunity to work on our strategy for growth, and plan for how our program can impact the lives of women and girls.
We are now working to revise and professionalize our curriculum so that it will be easier to pass on to beneficiaries, partner organizations, and new trainers. We have also developed and begun using a graphic curriculum that will either supplement or replace our written curriculum when used in communities with low literacy rates.
We have continued our training in Uganda, and have built a new partnership with Kate Spade’s Corporate Social Responsibility production facility to conduct leadership training with their staff and artisans. Finally, we have taken a critical step toward our ability to scale by selecting and training 8 of our strongest past participants to become Resonate coaches. This will allow them to assist us during workshops and provide additional guidance and support to our beneficiaries. They will be invited to continue in the training process over the next few months to become certified Resonate trainers.
This summer has been a summer of growth and expansion for the Resonate team. We have had the pleasure of welcoming three summer interns to help with our monitoring and evaluation and communications strategies, and we have hired a full time Operations Manager to streamline and run our organizational systems and processes. As a result, we have had the capacity to develop new curriculum and even expand to another country!
We partnered with Global Grassroots to deliver our core Storytelling for Leadership training to a group of young social entrepreneurs in Rwanda, and also to a group in Uganda – our first ever workshop in Uganda. These young women are learning to run their own social ventures, and so knowing how to present themselves and their work to their communities will play an integral role in their success.
We also partnered with The Imbuto Foundation to deliver training to 60 leaders of Rwandan organizations focused on youth development and empowerment. Each of these groups is an ally in our work to inspire young leaders to become change makers, and we hope that this first connection will spark many more opportunities to support Rwanda’s youth.
Project Reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you will get an e-mail when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports via e-mail without donating.
We'll only email you new reports and updates about this project.
