Youth Venture

HIV Education, Child Sponsorship, Income Generation, Resource Sharing

Working To Empower (WTE) works with community based organizations, facilitating the training of youth HIV educators, mostly in displaced and refugee communities. Working To Empower believe that all people are equal, but structural, legal, and economic differences are such that we are given varied opportunity in life.
WTE is a Canadian registered association that had no paid staff, no offices, no vehicles, and as such basically no administrative costs. Although only created in 2005, WTE has on-going projects in five African nations: Benin, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Working To Empower is a youth-run and youth-focused organization. Youth account for nearly 50% of the global HIV infections each year. Plain education is simply not enough, WTE trains youth to become educators in their own community, taking an advocacy role – not only changing their own behaviors but also their communities.
WTE was founded by Logan Cochrane while he was completing his undergraduate degree in Anthropology, at twenty-one years of age he was leading HIV educational efforts as a focal educator and project manager in DR Congo, Uganda, and Tanzania. The choice to work in the humanitarian section didn’t surprise many as Logan had started early efforts and volunteered with other organizations previously. Working To Empower emerged because, “it was do something or walk away,” Logan says. He was working with another organization when several locally based organizations pleaded their cases and requested HIV educational work, after receiving letter or rejection or no letters at all Logan felt like he could not just walk away from such a simple request. That was the beginning of WTE and Logan was twenty years old. While finishing his degree he designed a culturally focused method for HIV education, wrote a booklet on HIV education in the classroom, and fundraised $20,000 to make those requested projects a reality. A matter of weeks after writing his last exam he was in Ethiopia.
The origin of all the projects was a locally created proposal that resulted in a community based project, which not only aimed to increase knowledge levels at the community level, but to build the capacity of local organizations. Peer education teams are created via an interactive seminar covering as many hours as a typical university course. Participants then continue teaching in the long-term on a monthly incentive based program, making the entire work sustainable. Local requests, such as those for resource centers, are filled by WTE who run their entire organization on a shoe-string budget. Quickly WTE expanded the scope of projects, adding sponsorship for orphans (Emebet Education Program) and income generating projects to its repertoire. “The HIV pandemic is not just about lacking information, medicine, and health care but about socio-economics, poverty, and gender inequalities” Logan says.
The AIDS pandemic is responsible for the deaths of over twenty-five million people, with over forty-million currently living with HIV/AIDS. Broken down onto a daily basis, 8000 people die daily while 14,000 are newly infected – mostly youth. Logan explains that, “talking with the seminar participants and peer educators they realize that prevention is the key. They learn that medicine have been around for decades but has yet to reach them, as such they decide to take the project of prevention and in many cases they have done extraordinary work. One peer education team of only five people in a Tanzanian refugee camp held projects that interacted with over twenty-six thousand people in just six-months – that is amazing.”
Working To Empower is attempting to provide trained peer educators for the purpose of sustainable, locally driven and community-requested projects. Founded by an Anthropologist, WTE aims to be culturally appropriate and socially acceptable in all of its actions while working in partnership with community based organizations.
Working To Empower is about to enter into its third year of world, however new initiatives have created a organization affecting the globe. WTE’s resource sharing program was started in late 2006, a simple idea of sharing the resources with additional community based organizations that WTE could not have direct partnerships with. Currently over forty resources are available with twenty-one languages in translation. Over one-hundred and fifty organizations have signed up to receive materials on a weekly basis in over thirty countries.
To find out more about Working To Empower please visit:
www.workingtoempower.org