Throughout my journey I've been sharing about Professional Mentorship, Cultural Mentorship and Impact Coaching,
Impact Coaching is where each country comes up with an Impact Project that they would implement when they go back to their countries. So, week four was the peak of the project from Ideation phase as all countries were preparing to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges, in line to win seed grants to start off their projects.
As the South African Team we reflected on the challenges facing our country and identified an area where we believe we could add value. We decided on a self-expression and regulation project targeting kids between the ages of 6 and 11 to help them identify, understand and regulate their emotions, which we called 'Know to Grow'. We chose this as we feel that teaching kids these techniques would be a preventative measure to the prevalent mental health challenges facing youth, ages 12 - 19.
Listening to challenges facing other countries was so touching, most of them were relatable to many of us. This part of the program brings a lot of emotions, as we learn more about each other as teams and realise how passionate we are about our countries. It's also a time where we become aware that every country has its challenges. It's also a time where each country gets an opportunity to learn about how to leverage on solutions implemented in other countries without reinventing the wheel.
Upon pitching, all countries had come up with solid solutions to the problems they had identified. Seven out of twenty-one countries received seed grants to implement their solutions. We celebrate those who won and we know each country has a winning solution.
I believe we should all implement our solutions in our respective countries. I also believe that our countries will rally around to support us to implement our Impact Projects.
This process gave us an opportunity to learn from each other and identify areas where we could collaborate not compete.
Again, I always go back to the reality that we are all human with dreams and aspirations for the planet regardless of race, colour, gender, religion and denomination.
This is just one component of the program that TechWomen stretches the Emerging Leaders to work as teams and reflect on what they can do to help the environments they live in, an opportunity for us to learn and drive development of women in STEM in our respective countries and WE WILL BECAUSE WE CAN.
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