About

Key Information

  1. Young people are dynamic, have the capacity for resilience, and people know what they want and need, having the vision and a desired aspiration for their loves, families, and communities.

  2. Ideas of change and movement can only be led by the ‘young people’ themselves if they become active actors. The idea of the passive beneficiary creates warped power dynamics between people and resources. The power relations hinder the development of relationships, creativity and problem-solving by the people most affected by the problem.

  3. There are powerful stories and storytellers in every community and locale, these stories may be the root to lead us new perspectives and alternative ways of looking at those communities seen as lacking in value.

  4. Every community has forgotten, unrecognised assets; leadership, the ways money and resources are made, generated, and shared and stories, experiences and knowledge bases.

  5. Development and change are a complex process where one can isolate or look at a singular factor as causal. It is important to be able to measure impact and development in different terms. Not only do people know what they want, have a sense of what they would do given a chance, but they can speak for themselves. In this process the foundation allows people to speak for themselves in accounting for the impact of the process and projects

  6. The idea or understanding of data is crucial to this paradigm. The idea is to create data with a face, name, and story.To move beyond the spreadsheets of faceless numbers to an output that allows people to show their communities, narrate their histories, show the unseen treasures. Through these outputs, we can trace the impact of work done through the foundation, with the communities we choose to work with.

Critical success factors

The Youth Cafe has identified the following factors that are key to its success and sustainability in the short term and long term.

  • A strong and sound advocacy programme: A strong and sound advocacy programme that combines storytelling and research insights to create legitimacy and trust for activist philanthropy in communities while simultaneously building a credible platform to forge positive partnerships.

  • Community-led programmes: Community-led programmes that are adequately capacitated and supported through a mixture of financial and non-financial interventions to augment the efficacy of outcomes.

  • Alignment with strategic facilitators: Alignment with strategic facilitators who conduct advocacy workshops in the communities to ensure that the critical aspects and tenets of the model of change are consistently communicated and incorporated into community programmes.

  • Alignment with strategic partners: Alignment with strategic partners who support the vision of the Foundation and CBO/Is in the implementation of the community programmes to generate sustainable community impact, develop replicable social innovation, and make a positive contribution to the policy agenda.

  • Funding of CBO: Funding of CBO/Is in partnership with strategic partners e.g., other foundations to support the achievement of social change in communities.

  • Partnership support: Partnership support to ensure stringent monitoring and evaluation. This is also essential for knowledge management and sustaining trust throughout the implementation process.

 
 

It all started when…

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