Steve Heyes, a colleague and founder of LearnAsOne, has just embarked on a great journey to Zambia and you’re invited!
Steve and 3 self-funded volunteers (found for free via Google Grants!) are headed to Zambia to document a community who doesn’t have a school, in as close to real-time as possible. They plan to ask the community what they need and give them a platform to share their story with the world. They will tweet constantly and upload their photo-led blog stories every day between May 11-22. You can ask members of the community questions via blog posts, @replies on Twitter and via email (zambia@learnasone.org).
Before they head home, they will train the local community and the NGO partner how to use a Flip video and digital camera so update can continue. Longer-term, the plan is to become similar to Kiva.org, but for schools.
Follow along and connect with the community!
- Follow LearnAsOne on Twitter
- Follow the blog updates or the Flickr photo stream
- Email the Zambia LearnAsOne team
Learn more about LearnAsOne:
What is LearnAsOne?
LearnAsOne is a charity that works with local partners and communities in Africa to fund schools and support their running costs.What do you need?
This is the key question we will continually ask to every community we meet.No imposing western ideas. No impractical solutions. Just listening to the communities real educational needs and helping to provide the funds and training so they can meet them themselves.
It could be teacher training, classrooms, a feeding programme, sanitation and clean water, books, school fees or teacher’s accommodation. Whatever the need we’ll give the community a way to tell you. Plus we’ll provide a breakdown of the costs of every project in the form of a simple shopping list.
What I am most interested in with LearnAsOne’s trip and engagement in Zambia is testing the idea in practice of helping answer the needs of a community without directing or dictating the response. This will certainly be an interesting project to follow! What do you think? Will you be following along or asking any questions via the methods above? What would you ask?
Oops! Left my comment on the wrong post… Would be interested in your answer. J
Amy,
I think this is a great project. Thanks for sharing. The question I have already is how did these 4 folks raise the capital to undertake this project?
Jocelyn
@Amy. Thank you for the article!
@Jocelyn. A small amount of money was raised to fund my trip using traditional fundraising methods (cake sales, running event etc.)
All the volunteers on the trip (photographer, TV producer, journalist) are 100% self-funded. Two have paid out of their own pocket. The other did a 250 mile bike ride across Wales so raise the funds. The website was built by volunteers.
Steve – Thanks so much for providing information for Jocelyn and other readers. It’s such an amazing trip – I am enjoying watching the updates via Twitter!
Hey Jocelyn- Steve also commented to share an answer to your question.
It certainly is a great project – as always, I’m happy to share!