(SJRK) January 9, 2018 Partners Meeting Notes

Owned by Dana Ayotte
Last updated: Jan 22, 2018
4 min read

Present:

  • Alan

  • Catalina

  • Colin

  • Dana

  • Gregor

  • James

  • Juliana

  • Liam

  • Michelle

Updates

Catalina

  • A number of new organisations have joined

  • Doing a workshop on interactive comic book decision-making - physical and digital

  • Make up a story, then related to their learning journey

  • Foldable comic books, then digitize them, make them interactive

  • Start with themselves then out to 4 different positions

  • Narrate their daily life

  • Piloted it last semester with high school students

  • Narrative is usually linear, but here they have the option to be non-linear, and become more honest about their experience

  • Starting next week with first organisation

  • Will be in Spanish, but mainly drawings, then can translate when digitized

  • Can take turns and follow parallel paths, to understand the context better

  • On paper, easy to share, just grab a pencil, it’s fun

  • Then can edit digitally

  • Similar to Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories


James

  • 20 young people with learning differences, out of school and some orgs

  • Transforming info into data

  • Is writing up a report

  • Young people often working as bus conductors in bus parks, or starting small businesses where they sell one item, e.g. water

  • Transit is going digital - using cards, so there are fewer jobs

  • Access to services, e.g. sexual and reproductive health for deaf women, is lacking

  • No formal sign language training available

  • Sign-language interpreters are Jehovah’s Witnesses, so there are questions re the motivations of the interpreters

  • Some of the youth have been meeting with ‘professional’ interpreters and people in guidance roles to try to help them determine what they’d like to do in their lives. So they’re formulating a sort of business plan, how to be organised how to mobilize resources

  • More of a focus on cooperative groups rather than NGOs

  • Youth cooperatives of people who have been gathered based on similar skill sets, they are helped by the Rwanda Cooperative Agency

  • Mismatch between education and economy/job market - so many young people end up in informal jobs, informal sector e.g. tailoring, bus parks, etc.

  • Because of the political situation in Rwanda and other reasons, there are few youth-led youth organizations, but there are organizations with youth involved in them

  • Working with Human Rights Rwanda and designing programs and SDGs to be inclusive

  • A gap was noted between what was supposed to be happening on paper and what was happening on the ground

  • Most of the young people are using WhatsApp groups for communication, but not everyone has a phone

  • The teachers for those in the deaf community are not always able to fully sign more complicated subjects or concepts, and there are many youth who, as a result, fail their courses

  • James has a presentation slide deck which he’ll share with the Sojustrepairit mailing list


Juliana

  • Just back from the holidays! :)

  • Will be meeting next week with a group in Fresno (three groups, 19, 17 and 27 people)

  • Will maybe be using an exchange of stories using the radio, recording and talking should help organize.

  • Going to put a list of sounds in her cell phone, people will listen to the sounds and then share a story inspired by the sound.

  • WhatsApp will be a primary means to stay in contact with people

  • She will also be working in Medellín with a group of 15 girls

  • She'll be working with Julietta, one of the organizers of the festival "Motivating the Gyal" (gyal = slang for girl). The festival is about Technology, Body, Self-care, Ancestral knowledge, led by young women.


Liam

  • Proposal about CSE - comprehensive sexuality education to be delivered tomorrow by noon - elements of this proposal involve engaging with out of school and vulnerable youth.

  • TIG has moved forward and expanded with a project around digital literacy and new media training across Indigenous communities. Drones being sent to various First Nations communities and project lead from SK will be in town next week to onboard and plan more robustly (I will also ping him again about the existing video to be uploaded - may end up getting it from him via a usb due to poor internet connectivity and upload speeds)

  • SDG toolkit - more capacity available as of Wednesday at 12:01- also desire to determine who on the TIG team is best suited to contribute to this in collaboration with Liam, and where (across the existing commitments and deliverables TIG has) we can produce value for other projects to organize more inclusively.

  • A series of mini-grants - Youth Service Initiative - we may align and synergize outputs for organizing local community projects through inclusive design principles

  • Government initiative - overlap with James’ work - Opportunity to extend collaboration and impact through Accessible technology call for applications -  and build on existing project Unlocking Culture with Deaf Culture centre - to be discussed and explored w James next week.


SDGs Action Guide

We also looked at starting from goal 17 and working backwards through them - so Jame's presentation will help to inform some of that

IDRC

  • Have been working on the digital storytelling tool

  • Grants people from Oak may come to visit at some point this year, perhaps around DEEP 2018