IWORDS Grassroots

Restoring hope

My name is Victor Odhiambo. I am the Co-founder of Garden of Hope Foundation. Garden of Hope Foundation is a community organisation that supports youth, women, children and girls through leadership, entrepreneurship, and mentorship. So, the support given by IWORDS Global was: One, IWORDS helped us develop our feasibility statement. This is a one-piece statement that can help Garden of Hope Foundation to send for a potential sponsor or potential supporter. The other thing that IWORDS did for us was to help us through the process of developing our strategic plan for 2020-2021. And then, they helped us in actually developing physical procedures and policies that would help us to look into our financial systems. The other support IWORDS gave us was basically to help us have systems in place in terms of budgeting, in terms of developing the budgets that we had, and also the process of basically assuring that our team can be able to follow this budget. Additionally, IWORDS also helped us develop our communications plan, both online and internal communication. Internal communication and external communication. The experience that we had was very good. The IWORDS team was very responsive in their feedback. They were very objective as well, which actually helped us improve on the things that we actually wanted to improve on. They were also very friendly during the process of engaging with them. They also, in a way, were able to link us with potential networks, and so, additionally, the team was always ready to respond to some of the things that were found challenging during the process of engagement. And the most important thing, we were able to engage all of our team members. The team members really understood what it is that we are doing with IWORDS, and they were very forthcoming in their response. IWORDS’ support has had so much impact on the work that we are doing. One is that through the things we developed, we are able to get additional funding for the organisation. Two is that we increased our visibility to potential partners and supporters. Actually, visibility increased both online and offline. And then the other impact that this support has had on us is that we can now be able to support and mentor other organisations. And this has put us from a place where we have set processes to basically looking into organisations that we can also continue supporting and mentoring. To similar organisations, I’d like to recommend that, one, be intentional about what you actually want to achieve and; number two, involve your team, do not just do things alone; and then, lastly, please implement what you have learned, implement what you’re being taught, the support you are given. Go ahead and actually implement that work. So those are my recommendations. For Garden of Hope Foundation, what is next for us is, one, we want to implement what we’ve learned from IWORDS; and number two, we want to continue making an impact in our community by basically mentoring other likeminded organisations; number three, if possible, we would like to ask IWORDS to refer some organisations that we can actually support as Garden of Hope, even to basically, as we are in this system, just continue supporting other organisations. And then the other thing for us to continue building the capacity of our team to ensure that we are able to implement our 2020-2024 strategic plan. Thank you.

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