Project Detail.

Community Driven Systems Change For Youth Resiliency and Belonging, is an approach to development and social transformation that emphasizes the insight, leadership, and ownership of the people who are living and experiencing issues at the community level, and their work to create lasting change in the systems and root causes that underlie the critical issues they seek to address.

Firelight’s Theory of Change

Firelight’s goal is to strengthen community agency, analysis, and action to create long-term systemic change for children, youth, and their families. We do this by supporting the role and capacities of CBOs as community leaders and mobilizers, catalysts for social change, and locally-rooted long-term civil society organizations that offer stability, energy, facilitation, and support to local communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Our theory of change is that:

• Firelight provides funding, capacity, and support for community-driven systems change to CBOs who are rooted in and responsive to their communities and working on issues facing children, youth, and their families;

• These CBOs are better equipped to mobilize and strengthen community agency, systems and root cause analysis, and action for systems change relating to children, youth, and their families;

• This strengthened community agency, analysis, and action leads to contextually-relevant and community-driven action (including action driven by children, youth, and families themselves) to address systems and root causes underlying priority issues facing children, youth, and their families in the community;

• Meaningful change in systems and root causes results in better environments, experiences, opportunities, agency, and outcomes for children, youth, and their families;

Oldonyo Orok’s dream is to create a society where youth are sober, resilient, independent, vibrant, aggressive, and have a sense of ownership and belonging. Their focus areas are in economic/livelihood improvement for youth and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Their key activities for the upcoming two years include:

1. Establishing youth activities– creating a football tournament program for youth to reduce idleness, promote talent development, and create a platform for sensitizations

2. Establishing mentorship programs to advocate against drugs and substance abuse – engaging mentor volunteers to develop a mentorship strategy and plan to advocate against youth abuse of drugs and substances

3. Mentorship and advocacy programs – creating a program focusing on importance of education, academic performance, career guidance, and counselling for youth

4. Establishing partnerships for vocational and entrepreneurial training – building relationships with vocational institutions to offer training for youth; partnering with local experts to provide entrepreneurial training to youth; providing career linkages and seed funding for start-up businesses

5. Engaging youth in climate change mitigation and adaptation – establishing a tree nursery and tree planting campaigns; facilitating workshops for youth on ways to mitigate and adapt to climate change, as well as building more community climate resiliency (in infrastructure, water, conservation, agriculture, livestock keeping)

https://www.firelightfoundation.org/communitydriven-systems-change-kenya

https://www.imaginablefutures.com/learnings/meet-firelight-foundations-cbo-partners/