shofco 2012 final progress report - diningforwomen.org · final&progress&report&!...
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Final Progress Report Final Report Content
1. Please provide the following information:
a. Organization Name Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO) b. Program Title SHOFCO Kibera School for Girls & Economic Empowerment Initiatives c. Grant Amount $36,263.79 d. Contact Person Lexi Hensley, Director of Community & Outreach e. Address 175 Varick Street 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014
2. Recap briefly what outcomes the program was designed to achieve.
In 2011, Shining Hope for Communities received funding from Dining For Women for the Kibera School for Girls, the first free school for girls in the Kibera Slum of Nairobi, and our economic empowerment initiatives for the Kibera community. By the completion of 2012, we had achieved several milestones within both projects, including an expansion of the Kibera School for Girls and a redesign of our economic empowerment programs to help more women become economically secure.
3. What was accomplished in connection with this project? Please address each stated objective. If any project objectives were changed, please also explain the circumstances leading to the modification of the objective(s). *(See answers to questions 5 & 6) By the end of 2012, the Kibera School for Girls provided a superior education to 100 girls from pre-‐K through third grade. It also built the capacity to add one grade level (40 girls per grade) each year through the eighth grade. We were able to use funding from Dining for Women to fully support our school operations including teacher salaries, health care and meals for our students, school supplies, uniforms, operate the library and IT services, and run our parent programs. This funding has also allowed us to allocate outside funding for important expansion and improvement projects at the school, including a new school building and new curriculum additions.
• In January 2012, SHOFCO opened a new school building for the Kibera School for Girls that doubled the number of new students we enroll each year, from 20 to 40. The new school building includes a computer lab, theater and art rooms, an assembly hall, and a
rooftop playground. These facilities, paired with our innovative curriculum, ensure our students receive a well-‐rounded, comprehensive education that give them the tools to forge paths out of poverty.
• At the Kibera School for Girls, we also implemented curricular additions that made significant improvements on our previous curriculum and are far ahead of the traditional rote-‐learning system used in most Kenyan schools. For example, we incorporated an interactive science curriculum (Delta) that engages students with their environment, and a new math curriculum (Math in Focus) based off of the Singapore system, which is widely lauded as being the best in the world.
• In addition, we have improved our after-‐school and music programs. These curriculum improvements enable us to offer a world-‐class physical and arts education to some of the most disadvantaged girls in the slum, which will empower them to lead creative change for themselves and their community. Music classes are held every Wednesday and we paved the way for a state of the art rooftop playground.
Additionally in 2012, with support from Dining for Women, our economic empowerment programs were expanded and re-‐designed to enable more women in Kibera achieve social and financial independence. 78% of SHOFCO women involved in our Economic Empowerment programs have their own source of income according to our community baseline thanks to SWEP, our group savings and loans, business training, and social support networks.
• Shining Hope’s Women’s Empowerment Project (SWEP) is a collective of HIV positive women living in Kibera that makes beaded jewelry, yoga bags, aprons, tablet cases, purses and more from traditional Kenyan textiles. In addition to learning how to make crafts, they also participate in weekly support group meetings, design and business workshops, and take part in our group savings and loans program. In 2012, SWEP also found success beyond local markets to the United States and Singapore. SHOFCO purchased more sewing machines so that we could keep up with the growing demand for SWEP crafts.
• Like SWEP, our other economic empowerment programs are also designed for groups with common interests and challenges. These groups include parents of our students, youth, and new mothers. Each group participates in regular support group meetings, saves together, and makes investment decisions together with their collected funds. In addition, they participate in professionalism, accounting, and entrepreneurship workshops that help them find employment and/or start small businesses ventures of their own. Our economic empowerment programs were redesigned and bolstered in February of 2012. Funds from Dining for Women have been used to support groups that are for women, such as new mothers, SWEP, and pregnant HIV+ women.
4. What challenges did you face in connection with this project? How did you address these challenges? Our primary challenges in the implementation of our economic empowerment programs were that the Gardens for Growth and the Project Poultry did not adequately address the needs of our participants. Therefore, we redesigned our programs to include aspects that made SWEP a successful program. At its core, the redesign embraced the social support system inherent in SWEP, based around the common interests and challenges of the participants. We also allowed our participants to take advantage of small business opportunities in the local markets (see questions 5 & 6).
5. Is your organization or program situation different than presented in the approved proposal? For example, new executive director, significant program staffing changes or NGO affiliation, loss of large funding, or other significant changes? &
6. What were the most important lessons learned? SHOFCO did not experience staffing, structural organizational changes, or losses in funding. However, we did experience a lesson in flexibility. We strongly believe flexibility to be a key tenant of our operations as a grassroots organization. SHOFCO believes in providing the programing and resources that are urgently needed by the community. Concurrently, it was a practiced lesson to maintain this character when reporting to a grant-‐giving institution. As discussed in the interim report, our original program objectives of educating the most disadvantaged and vulnerable girls of Kibera and helping community members gain economic security did not change. The specific program components, however, were modified and enhanced based on the needs of our community. Our economic empowerment programs were redesigned in February 2012: after monitoring our three proposed programs, SWEP had the most clear potential for success, largely due to participants’ strong connections over common challenges as low-‐income women living with HIV. Thus, we redesigned our other economic empowerment programs to include similar social networks for our participants to be able to form strong social bonds that would help them reach economic stability. We placed more emphasis on growing our group savings and loans programs, and piloting additional skills and literacy trainings within those preexisting groups. Based upon profit margin research, SHOFCO decided to provide diversified business and entrepreneurship training to our economic empowerment participants so that they could apply acquired skills to a variety of fields, depending on the state of the local economy and their own creativity. Our economic empowerment programs are now more flexible, robust, and provide more social support for our participants. We are confident that our redesigned project enables more women to achieve economic security and overcome institutional challenges to their wellbeing as slum residents in Kenya.
7. What has changed within your organization as a result of this project? &
8. Describe the unexpected events and outcomes, including unexpected benefits. SHOFCO is even more readily able to adapt our programming to community needs than in the past, and we have launched several new initiatives from which we expect great success. SHOFCO’s new “Innovator’s Platform”, targets our most vulnerable and entrepreneurial beneficiaries, particularly women and youth ages 18 to 35, in an effort to provide them opportunities to launch their small businesses. Through business mentorship and other skills training, the platform grows emerging entrepreneurs’ small business ideas to sustainable realities. Once participants satisfy training requirements, they become eligible for loans in order to start their business.
9. Did you change your strategy as a result of obstacles your encountered? How will you address these challenges in the future? Please see the answers to questions to 4-‐8. We will continue to employ flexibility and used needs-‐based assessment of the communities in which we work and with whom we work in close concert. Employing community members in the design of our annual work plans is a valued hallmark of our program design.
10. Approximately how many lives have been touched, both directly and indirectly, by the program? In 2012, SHOFCO had 27 participants in our SWEP group, benefitting HIV positive women. We had a total of 91 participants in 4 group savings and loans circles, 86 of whom were women. We served 100 students in our Kibera School for Girls, from Pre-‐kindergarten though the 3rd grade. Through increased capacity, much in part through the support of Dining for Women, we will eventually serve up 400 students through the 8th grade at the Kibera School for Girls. In 2012, SHOFCO estimates that it reached approximately 17,000 direct beneficiaries and 30,000 indirect beneficiaries through our programming across the education, economic empowerment, and health sectors.
11. What are the measurements used to monitor success and how was this information measured (e.g., surveys, observation)? Be specific and include measurable results. SHOFCO is dedicated to the robust monitoring and evaluation of our programs and the inclusion of the community in this process.
The community identifies the focus of SHOFCO’s services through annual random surveys assisted by GPS technology. Since 2010, SHOFCO has annually recorded responses from 1,200 households in Kibera regarding program utilization and a wide range of indicators including attitudes on gender and family roles, health care access, economic indicators, and education attainment. The research serves two primary purposes: it establishes a representative community “baseline” or random control-‐group against which to measure our program
outcomes and it functions as a community needs-‐assessment, helping to inform program development. We conduct similar annual surveys of SHOFCO members.
Additionally, SHOFCO provides every beneficiary with a unique ID card, allowing us to document every program use through barcode scanning. Bolstered by robust data through this technology, we then develop services in partnership with community stakeholders. Each program has an annual work plan developed by our local program managers that provides a road map for achieving the established program outcomes and annual beneficiary goals.
12. If the program is ongoing, provide plans and expected results, including projected timeframe. The timeline for these programs remains unchanged. SHOFCO plans to operate our education and economic empowerment programming for as long as there is an express need in our community for these services.
13. Provide a detailed list of all expenses incurred during the grant cycle which have been paid for with the Dining for Women grant. (Next page, please.)
KSG Kindergarten Class 1 2012 Description Expense Teacher Salary $2,400.00 Teacher Assistant Salary $1,100.00 Curriculum Materials $1,341.67 Health Care for Students $1,000.00 School Supplies $563.50 Feeding Program $1,758.00 Supplemental Education Fund (start up costs for new-‐preschool) $1,000.00 Maintenance/Improvements $590.33 Employee Benefits $268.33 Teacher Training $1,073.33 Field Trip Program $402.50 Uniforms $1,341.67 Parent Programs $211.00 Total Kindergarten Expense $13,050.33 DFW DVD Production $800.00 KSG Kindergarten Class 2 2012 Description Expense Teacher Salary $2,400.00 Teacher Assistant Salary $1,100.00 Curriculum Materials $1,341.67 Health Care for Students $1,000.00 School Supplies $563.50 Feeding Program $1,758.00 Field Trip Program $402.50 Total Additional Kindergarten Expense $8,565.67 Total Education Expense $22,416.00 SWEP Description Expense Sewing Instructor $1,500.00 Program Coordinator $2,300.00 Materials and Supplies $2,500.00 Total SWEP Expense $6,300.00 Women's Empowerment -‐ GS&L / Skills Trainings Description Expense Program Coordinator $2,300.00 Literacy Instructor (1.5) $2,250.00
Enterprise/Job Skill Trainer (2) $3,000.00 Total Other Women's Empowerment Expense $7,550.00
TOTAL EXPENSES $36,266.00
14. Did this grant and relationship with DFW assist your organization in obtaining other funding, partnerships with other organizations, or public recognition in some capacity. Over the past two years, we have been fortunate to receive additional funding for our organization as a whole. We have used this additional funding and influx of new partnerships to both deepen infrastructure in Kibera and begin to build out our model in the neighboring slum of Mathare. We are deeply indebted to Dining for Women for being one of Shining Hope for Communities’ preeminent and earliest champions, enabling our work to be the shining and growing beacon of hope that it is today.
Thank you for your incredible support.
Appendix Messages -‐ Spotlights -‐ Photos
Spotlight on: Vanessa, Grade 4
Vanessa’s Tribute to her Mother for Mother's Day
Spotlight on: Mary, Pre-‐Kindergarten Aileen is a student in Teacher Rita’s Pre-‐K class. She is very responsible and has assumed the role of “student-‐teacher.” Whenever the teachers are out of the classroom, Aileen will stand at the front of the class and instruct the other students to read the wall charts. She assigns who will read first and distributes the reading evenly, following the example of her teachers. She loves helping in the classroom. Every week, a different student is assigned class prefect and Aileen is always begging to take on this role. Because she cannot be the prefect every week, she names herself the “prefect-‐helper” and aids in the prefect’s responsibilities. She always wants to know more, is constantly asking questions, and assigns herself extra work. Last week, the students were told to write 5 words that begin with the letter ‘R.’ Aileen wrote 10. The other girls in the class respect her and look to her as a role model and the teachers appreciate her help. At the end of the term, Aileen was awarded the “Most Responsible” title for the Pre-‐K class.
Evelyn’s Story
Evelyn and her four children were widowed after her husband refused life-‐saving antiretroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS. With few options, she joined the SHOFCO Women’s Economic Empowerment Project (SWEP), an initiative specifically designed to benefit HIV+ women, where she sews beautiful yoga bags and ipad cases as a means to support her family. But Evelyn didn’t stop there. She joined our Group Savings & Loans Program, and through the start-‐up capital from collective savings, launched a peanut butter business. Now, her business is booming—and she’s proud of it! Today, Evelyn and her children are thriving. There are thousands of Evelyns in Kibera; strong, smart, passionate women reinvesting in their communities.
Evelyn Showcases her peanut butter product cultivated through our GS&L Program