IMPACT-ing East Africa

Background

The IMPACT youth model was developed by Dana Bates and his team beginning in 2002 in the Appalachia of Romania, the Jiu coal mining valley, an extremely challenging region at the time due to the corruption and learned helplessness that Communism engendered. The model started as one club meeting in the living room of their communist bloc apartment, and has since grown all over the world, in up to 50 countries and is core youth programming for World Vision, among others.

To give but one example of the scope of this, in Sri Lanka alone:
In 2022-2023, World Vision Sri Lanka trained 1,463 IMPACT+ club leaders and opened over 1,356 clubs, mostly in schools, reaching 28,695 adolescent club members. These clubs implemented almost 2,000 service-learning projects in their communities, including awareness raising on violence against children, climate action such as tree planting and waste management, community safety projects, and caring for marginalized community members.

The Project: IMPACT-ing East Africa

This IMPACT-ing East Africa project aims to replicate our IMPACT model all over East Africa through the Orthodox Church, starting in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi. It is important that East African Countries, having escaped colonial rule, face similar challenges as post-communist cultures: “cultures of disempowerment” (Wangari Maathi’s term), learned-helplessness, as well as rampant corruption. This overlap in development challenges is but one reason why we believe IMPACT will be effective in East Africa as well!
IMPACT is on fire in many parts of the world, and we want to light this fire in East African society through the Church. We have dedicated teams of youth leaders already paving the way in Kenya and Uganda, and the full support of the hierarchy. So things are moving! But we need your support to see this vision into reality due to the great poverty in these contexts.

IMPACT is sought after because it is not only a spiritual formation model (see more below), it also develops all sorts of employability and life-skills such as project-management, leadership, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, communication—all of these through youth being agents of change in their community, living out their faith—in other words practicing the Liturgy after the Liturgy.

And there is considerable evidence that IMPACT is effective in developing positive assets in youth.