It’s exciting and maybe even a little frightening… 2023 is already here, and we are almost a month into the new year!
You know what this means: we are all attempting to set goals to achieve this year, or better known as our New Year's Resolutions. Two key points that may help you in achieving your goals are to make them measurable and realistic.
Most importantly, one must always celebrate their success! Staying positive and looking back at what you have accomplished can really go a long way.
As for our team here at Global Changemakers, we would like to personally share our gratitude for your continuous support throughout the years. Your support changes the lives of many and encourages the spread of positivity for a brighter future.
It is worth highlighting that we closed 2022 with our big and exciting project: The Annual Report. A dedicated report to look back and see how much we accomplished in just a year. Some highlights from our year are listed below:
January: Global webinar in collaboration with UNESCO
February: Cycle 7 of the Mentorship Programme
April: Virtual Youth Summit, Latin America
May: Launch of the call for applications for the North American Grants in collaboration with the Shawn Mendes Foundation
June: Awareness and resources campaign celebrating PRIDE
August: International Youth Day Twitter Chat and the release of Season 4 of the podcast
September: Youth Engagement workshop for Price Waterhouse Cooper Zurich
November: Global Launch of our FREE Ecology for Changemakers Course at the 17th UNFCCC Conference of the Youth Workshop in collaboration with YouthLead
December: Giving Season Fundraising campaign
In 2022, we were able to fund 25 youth-led projects that have positively impacted over 100,000 people in over 190 countries.
Anyways, we don’t want to simply make a copy of the report in this February update, so why don’t you get a cup of coffee and take some minutes to check the annual report by yourself? Click here to access it.
Despite the hardships endured through the pandemic, our global impact has only been made possible through our collaborators, contributors, and volunteers.
Again, we humbly thank you for your support and wish you the best luck in 2023.
Sincerely,
Global Changemakers Team
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Dear Donor,
Throughout this year, you have received different updates on what we have been up to at Global Changemakers and key results from our different programs. Today, as we set foot on the last quarter of the year, we want to show appreciation for your continuous support and update you on recent plans that will keep adding value to the changemakers we serve.
In a recent report, we explained how our strategy has always centered around providing youth with the right tools and resources so they can create more fair, inclusive, and sustainable communities. The mission in itself has a broad room, but years of experience working for and by youth has shown us an impressive amount of opportunities where others might perceive gaps.
In the last couple of years, working to support youth in that mission has quickly evolved and adapted to the realities we face. We went from providing on-site to off-site training, delivering countless networking and connection spaces, mentoring, and even financially supporting projects, resulting in ripple effects. The reality is: societal problems keep evolving, and so does the unstoppable desire of younger generations to act and do something about them.
With such context in mind, we are about to wrap up the year with important announcements:
After launching our Changemakers School in 2020 with courses on Facilitation, Project Management, and Menstruation, Sexual and Reproductive Health, we have supported 33 youth-led initiatives created by our students, adding up to the over 400 youth-led projects that Global Changemakers has supported since its inception in 2007, which have collectively reached out to over 15 million people worldwide.
However, we have decided to keep expanding our portfolio with a new course focused on Ecology, motivated by changemakers' interest in the topic and the alarming trends presented by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2021. Our future depends on the choices that humanity makes today, and in our experience, young people are on the front line of making the positive changes we need.
We are currently on a countdown to officially launch this comprehensive and intersectional course, which aims to teach at least one thousand young changemakers about applying an ecological perspective to their individual lifestyle and activism. What’s more impressive is that the course's curriculum was designed by 20 Global Changemakers alumni from diverse backgrounds with relevant experience leading ecological projects. Yes, this is why I keep bragging about our impact being unique. We give them the knowledge, they triple it and do awesome things.
We believe that to think and do activism ecologically is to be grounded in the connections that sustain life. It is to be attentive to the reality that our well-being is interdependent with the well-being of the living planet around us.
As I finish this update report, I am thinking about the enormous privilege of having faithful supporters like you, who opened up their hearts and decided to give back to a very important cause. Please rest assured that your donation has and continues to impact people’s lives worldwide.
We will keep you posted as we officially launch this free course on November 2nd with the hopes that you could share it with your extended networks.
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It is that time of the year again when we reflect on what the first half of 2022 looked like. Against all odds, our organization has been a true catalyst for youth empowerment and change. Over the last couple of months, we have been able to witness how young people not only ask for sustainable development but are at the forefront of building it. With strong energy, passion, creativity, and the ability to innovate, they are all advocating for a fair, sustainable, and equitable world.
Take a look at how we have been able to maximize our reach and get to new communities of changemakers in the last six months:
1. Virtual Youth Summit
Throughout the years, Global Changemakers has organized 11 in-person Global Youth summits, 4 regional, and many other pieces of training worldwide. However, as the pandemic evolved, we quickly adapted this model and transitioned that programming to a virtual space, which allowed us to get to communities we did not do before.
After 3 successful online Youth Summits, the organization started to work on localizing content to the Latin American community, a region where the demand for local resources to help social entrepreneurs thrive is strongly needed.
After some consultations with changemakers from our community, the team put up together the first Virtual Youth Summit for Latin America this April 2022. With the theme, “Connecting to transform,” the conference centered around the potential of Latin American youth to build an inclusive and sustainable region. It was a space where young people had the chance to network and heard from high-level speakers and young changemakers working towards social impact projects.
2. Changemakers School
We used the Latin American Summit as a space to launch our Changemakers School in Spanish and Portuguese. The courses offered, such as Project Management and Facilitation for Changemakers, have been co-created with the Global Changemakers community, a massive network of people from all over the world that came together, and combined efforts, work, and knowledge to teach other young people how to become changemakers and elevate the impact of their projects.
What's Next
As we look forward to the following months, we are highly focused on increasing our fundraising efforts to make our programs sustainable and accessible to a broader network of young people worldwide.
We sincerely thank you for being part of our community of supporters. We look forward to sharing our plans and impact as we evolve and bringing onboard donors like you who are as passionate as we are to empowering a generation that is hungry for change.
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Creating real change takes effort and commitment. Thanks to supporters like you and our community of young changemakers who remain hopeful about creating lasting change, 2021 was a wonderful and exciting year!
“It brought us the opportunity to collaborate with many organizations to promote youth’s participation and highlight their amazing work. As the second year of the pandemic continued to affect the way we work and interact with each other, we worked hard to increase our online engagement with the youth we worked with and for.” Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors in 2021, we supported 32% more projects, which had an extensive reach of +5 million people globally.
Take a look at our Annual Report to see our impact in 2021.
This year, we will continue to work in our mission to support youth to create positive change towards more inclusive, fair, and sustainable communities. Here is what we have been working on in the last couple of months:
This year is filled with optimism fueled by watching our community of changemakers benefit their communities. We trust there are a lot of supporters like you who will keep on driving our mission and actions further, and we can’t wait to share the impact these projects will bring to the communities they serve.
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One of the most powerful gifts youth can have is a support system that believes in their work, accepts them as they are, and takes them on a journey of change.
In 2021, we achieved incredible milestones at the Online School and kept our mission of ‘supporting youth to create change towards more inclusive, fair, and sustainable communities’, stronger than ever.
Compared to 2020, there was a 298% increase in the total number of students in our Online School this year. One thousand one hundred eleven students up-skilled their activism with Project Management, Facilitation or Menstruation, Sexual and Reproductive health courses.
Thanks to a generous grant from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, 1,100 young people from Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi benefited from a full scholarship. This number represents a 25% increase in enrollment from the previous year.
The support provided by the Lotte & Adolf Hotz Sprenger Foundation has allowed 800 students to learn about and become advocates for accurate and science-based Menstruation, Sexual and Reproductive Health education.
YOU have also made a difference in 2021.
The Global Changemakers team is so grateful for the impact you are making in the lives of the young people we serve. So many of these young students would not have had a chance to access online learning opportunities without your support.
We have witnessed how systemic our approach is. One young person trained always translates to community change. We have been lucky to reach students from 127 countries and provided 20 seed grants for project implementation. From providing access to clean water to whole communities in Papua New Guinea to promoting Sexual and Reproductive Health in El Salvador, installing solar panels in remote school villages in Malawi, or leveraging the use of technology to teach underserved children in Nigeria, our young Changemakers are building a more sustainable and equitable world.
We have just selected a new round of grantees to support. Nine Changemakers will be launching their projects in Nigeria, Brazil, Colombia, and Botswana to bridge the gap between underserved students in higher education, tackle menstrual poverty, inspire African girls to pursue careers in STEM, and promote LGBTQIA rights and access to employment.
As we reflect on how far our belief in youth has brought us, we also reflect on how far it will take us. Our dedication to providing better opportunities and resources to youth around the world remains at our core. It drives us to work harder, improve our programming and even deepen our reach to new languages and regions.
We look forward to your continued support and help - or that of your extended networks- to amplify our work.
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