CAPs Friday 11/12/09

Friday, 11 December 2009 | posted by Sara_BC

Elsabe from Namibia presents his CAP, Fire-Hearts 200:

Global Changemakers Multiplied…

Essentially we do not belong to a group or a club, and we know that. Global Changemakers is, after all, a MOVEMENT. And that is what my CAP is about.

The Fire-Hearts 200 group is a movement in Namibia where more Changemakers are brought in touch with the Global Community.

We figured that if one Changemaker who attended the Guildford forum came back to Namibia and taught the skills she learned in Guildford to10 new Changemakers, and those 10 taught the skills to 20 new Changemakers...then we might just get the snowball effect!!!

 To be honest, it’s not that easy. We hosted our first workshop in April 2009 and got 14 new members on board. 14 young people who needed support and who had a lot of questions. We knew that they were focused on their Community Programs and it was basically irrational to expect them to train a new generation of Changemakers at the same time.

 
We reviewed the situation and decided to draw up a team of 10 “facilitators” in 10 different areas and allow them to focus ONLY on training new Changemakers.

Each of the new Changemakers go through a one day brainstorming crash-course and are encouraged to come up with their own Community Programs. We also help them to get in touch with young people in Germany, Canada and Australia among others, in case they would like to form a partnership with one of the exiting Caps. So if you are building a team and you need more people on board…here is where you will find them.

The numbers hit. In 2 months we had a network of 70 Changemakers, we were happy.

And then Bono came…no kidding.

Our Admin crashed!!!

This was solely our own fault. Our admin team consisted of two people and both of them were due for Matric exams in a few months. On top of that they were really busy people and we never guessed they needed more support and goodness a better system!

We called halt at 70 Changemakers and decided to reconstruct our team a bit. One of our biggest problems is that only 7% of our new Changemakers had e-mail and access to a computer and internet on a weekly basis. (The sweet rewards of living in a 3rd world country.)

Cell-phones, sms, mms and calls happened to be the main contact we had with our fellow activists. But expecting one person to contact 70 people at the glorious speed of our Namibian networks was a little dull.

We had to distribute the numbers between us and each of us was to take the responsibility of keeping contact with 7 or 8 Changemakers. So, our story continued. We cannot guarantee that all 70 of them are running their CAPs at full speed already, but we are committed to them and we have faith in them as much as their projects!
We realised that the program sorts itself between schools and we have specific schools that are HUGE fans. We hardly succeeded in getting new Changemakers outside the city and once you start talking other regions our ears go death.

Well, the dream still remains: We want the entire country represented and young people from all the different regions.
I guess the dangerous thing with the small CAPs that we as Changemakers have is that it has a BIG dream behind each CAP and before you know it, your once small idea leaped forward into a massive project!!!

Here are some of the new faces to the community; I hope you meet them personally soon.

Elsabe

Nangula, Takatu, Selma, Charles, Bruno
Dupe, Finna and Ida