Train 1,000 Zimbabwean Students On Leadership

Compliments of the New Year!

The last quarter of 2014 was well spent on preparations for the 2015 cycle which promises to be exciting!

At the end of the programs cycle in July 2014, the Lead Us Today administrative team held a staff retreat for a strategic planning session.  The strategic planning process assisted us in identifying key areas to work on and set targets for our work going forward.

We’ve made significant changes to our program and we cannot wait to register higher impact in the New Year. Below are details on some of the changes we’ve made:

The new programs cycle

Since our inception in 2010, our program has run from August to July. Starting in 2015, we will run our program from January to August, which coincides with the Zimbabwean academic year which runs from January to December. This change will enable us to have ample time with students to engage in our program without disrupting them during examination time at the end of the year.

In addition to adjusting the start of our program, we have revised our curriculum to suit the eight month period.  We have included new, exciting project management concepts such as problem identification using the problem tree analysis and understanding the project cycle. We have given our student workbook a new look in the lay-out and design.

Facilitator – Gap Year Program

In the year 2012/13 we had our first cohort of facilitators, who were called mentors at the time. From the past two groups of facilitators we have enrolled, we have learned that our top performing and most committed facilitators are recent high school graduates.

With this in mind, we have adapted our facilitator program to be a gap year program in which recent high school graduates can learn, give back to the community and discover themselves while gaining critical skills to thrive in the country’s dire economic situation before they proceed to higher learning opportunities like university.

Throughout October and November, we called for ‘A’ level students to apply for the facilitator program and had a very high response. In the first week of December we held interviews and finally selected fifty facilitators who will deliver our training program and guide our students through project design and implementation in 2015.

Expansion to fifty schools

Starting January 2015, we will expand our program from twenty schools in three provinces to fifty schools in half of Zimbabwe. We have been engaging in the expansion process and have currently secured forty six schools. Lead Us Today will have a presence in the following provinces:

i)                   Bulawayo Metropolitan Province

ii)                 Matabeleland North Province

iii)               Midlands Province

iv)               Mashonaland East

v)                 Mashonaland West

vi)               Mashonaland South

vii)             Manicaland Province

For a long time, you have continuously supported us in developing young leaders in Zimbabwe and we greatly appreciate it. Through your contribution, we have trained close to 1, 500 students who have worked on 28 projects.

As we broaden our reach, we need your assistance to generate higher impact. If you would like to donate, please do so using the following link: http://bit.ly/SupportLUT2014