A Long Overdue Update
This time 2 years ago, I posted a write-up that shared my thoughts on doing more to help others- especially when we find ourselves in privileged circumstances.
This was at a time when my personal goals had just changed, and I related the message to my own context. Shortly after, and driven by that desire, my University of Toronto classmates from Africa helped launch the African Impact Initiative. Our mission was very simple; to enable impact in our African communities through the youth. It wasn’t an easy task to execute our initial projects and juggle school work, all along with job searching (we were all rounding up in a year or two). I’m sure a lot of recent grads and current students can relate to this. Thankfully from supporting African students in Canada, we were recognized by U of T just before I graduated.
As nice as it felt to get that, it didn’t feel like we had done what we truly created the organization for. I really wanted to focus on doing things back home on the continent, but it was hard to do that while in school. After our graduation, we decided to keep the organization functional with a student chapter in U of T (there’s an awesome team of students building on the work we started) since we had built a strong African community there. The U of T student team is currently planning for their next conference, and it looks like it’ll be even better than last year’s.
We also went ahead to incorporate African Impact Initiative as a non-profit organization in September 2018. This has been helpful with putting the structure in place, to operate on a larger scale. After that, I started working with some passionate members of the organization (who are also recent grads) to plan our first project back home. We currently face a new challenge of combining this with our different jobs/post graduate programs. Thankfully everyone involved has been supportive, and God has still been kind. We will be launching this project in partnership with a community hospital in Southern Nigeria (Akwa-Ibom state) over the Christmas break. It is a health care project, and I’m really excited to learn from it as we try to make an impact in their community. We also intend on using it to highlight some of the bigger issues faced back home.
As we can see, I’m very bad with updates, so it’ll be better if you follow us on social media to stay informed on what we do. We will be sharing details on the next conference and the health care project very soon!
Please follow us on Instagram, Twitter , LinkedIn and Facebook to stay updated. You can also reach out at efosa@africanimpactinitiative.com
