Voices of Our Future

We are happy to share that on September 10th we kick off our new Intro to Digital Empowerment Training! This 3-week online training is designed to provide women with the technical skills in using digital communication to increase personal impact in their communities. This training is the result of listening to our community members, and what they are asking for so that they can have greater impact in their local communities as well as globally. We anticipate that 500 women from around the world will join together for this training.

We are also gearing up to start our 2015 Voices of Our Future signature training in late October. Voices of Our Future is an opportunity for women to learn and work together in a more intimate environment to catalyze their vision and leadership. We will be selecting 30 women from across the globe for this incredible opportunity, and can’t wait to share their stories with you.

We are excited to announce that a cohort of young women in Nigeria has joined our community through our partnership of the Women and the Web Alliance. These young women are attending digital literacy training, and bringing us their passion, their visions for change, and their excitement to connect with other women globally. Each of them is able to connect with our top leaders and to access personalized training to support her on her journey. More than 100 women joined our network in August, and we anticipate this number to grow exponentially over the course of the next year. 

Thank you for reading this report and for your dedicated support to our work and the thousands of women leaders in the World Pulse community. 

We are pleased to report that in May we completed a very successful Online Mobilization Workshop with a group of twelve of our online community leaders. The workshop included training on topics such as how to write a strong editorial story, online and offline facilitation and resource mobilization.  The feedback from this workshop was overwhelmingly positive. Participants noted that “every voice was part of the discussion” and that “I loved the way women were willing to share their stories and solutions with much trust of the group even though they never meet face to face. This proves that with technology, distance is no longer a problem as far as communication is concerned”. World Pulse is determined now more than ever to promote and deliver online training that is personal, engaging, and facilitates real connections across the globe. 

In July, World Pulse will kick off an online training lab for new community members joining us from Kenya and Nigeria, as part of our partnership with the Women and the Web Alliance. This training lab will give new members a chance to learn and practice new digital skills.

As we have shared earlier, we are also making some adjustments to our digital empowerment training program, Voices of Our Future, based on feedback from our community over the past year. This includes offering the program multiple times a year to reach more women (starting in 2016), as well as shortening the training time from six to two months. We’ve also shifted the training program away from a sole focus on citizen journalism to a focus on digital mobilization—giving women the tools they need to create and sustain movements on the issues that matter to them. We’ll be launching the updated program in October of this year.  

Last but not least, we are excited to be offering more training resources from our partners on World Pulse for leaders globally. Through our networks we are able to cultivate opportunities for our community to find and access key training opportunities in their area of interest, and we will just keep expanding over time! We’d love to hear from you if you know of any training opportunities you’d like to share with others. 

Thank you for reading this report and for your dedicated support to our work and the thousands of grassroots women leaders in the World Pulse community.