The Power of Storytelling: Insights from SINA’s Workshop in Uganda

Last week, Blaise Amani and Melkizedek Mirasi – our founder and digital manager respectively – attended a 5-day workshop organized by Social Innovation Academy (SINA) in Jinja, Uganda. The organizer is one of our partners that empowers marginalized youth and refugees in Africa to become social entrepreneurs by providing them with self-organized learning environment focused on addressing unemployment and education challenges.

The theme of the 5-day workshop was “Storytelling for Fundraising and Monitoring and Evaluation” and it was meant to assist SINA communities to explore innovative approaches that can empower them to confidently craft their narratives and share them for fundraising and M&E purposes through visual storytelling.

16 participants, mostly refugees from SINA communities, engaged in interactive and insightful sessions on how to harness visual storytelling for fundraising. Self-sustainability, as we have experienced, is vital for the perpetual existence of organizations. As a result, fundraising is a crucial method for acquiring funds that can be directed toward enhancing the self-sustainability of organizations like SINA communities.

During the workshop, our team (Blaise and Melkizedek) gained valuable knowledge and skills that they are going to apply to improve our fundraising efforts. As part of the workshop, they created a video project that explains our core programs (Community Network, Education, Community Building, and Youth Empowerment and Entrepreneurship) while at the same time fundraising for the latter program. The finished version of the video will be shared on our YouTube and social media channels.

Thanks to the facilitator, John Sadiki, the sessions were well-planned and delivered, starting from the introduction to storytelling to parts of a story, the participants were taken through an informative journey that eventually led them to recording fundraising videos. The journey to recording a fundraising video involved ideating for a story, conducting research for facts and other necessary data, scripting, storyboarding, filming, publishing and monitoring the progress of the fundraising campaigns.

In addition, as Global Innovation Valley, we are grateful to SINA for donating content creation gadgets (smartphones and headsets) that we have started using to implement the knowledge and skills that we gained from the workshop to create our fundraising campaigns and better tell our success stories to our supporters.

Our team also networked with other like-minded people, providing them with a knowledge and resource exchange platform. As a result, they acquired new knowledge and exchanged various resources that can be applied to benefit our organization.