October 2022 Newsletter

Dear Friends,       

From the moment a child arrives at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village (ASYV), I want them to know that they count. And by the time they graduate, I want them to be able to succeed at the same level as my own biological children, who have had people advocating for them their whole lives. I am proud to report that our new strategic plan, Fostering Healing, Self-Sufficiency, and Sustainability, will guide the Village in all we do for the next three years, moving us closer to this goal. 

We started the process of creating this plan by engaging staff members, alumni, board members, donors, and other friends of the Village, with a specific focus on Rwandan voices. Our goal was to identify how our program needed to respond to the ways Rwanda, our students, and ASYV’s own capacity have evolved. I invite you all to learn more about the plan below; thank you for the insights that made its creation possible.

Warmly,

Jean-Claude Nkulikiyimfura

Executive Director, Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village 

Building Passion and Practical Skills

A Q&A with Violette Ukundwanase

From sports to the sciences to the arts, ASYV’s extracurricular LEAP activities help students heal, find passions, and build self-confidence. For many of our kids, LEAP provides their first opportunity to explore their talents and share them with a community. These activities are also important in helping students acquire the practical skills they need to build fulfilling futures. A key priority of our strategic plan is ensuring all our kids can secure stable employment after graduation, and we plan to make LEAP an integral part of reaching that goal. Violette Ukundwanase, a third-year student in the Village, sat down with us to chat about how the media club has helped her find a passion that can become a career.

Could you tell us a little about how ASYV has impacted you?

Growing up, I didn't get a chance to live in a family. My mother left when I was three months old. I didn't have a home or a place to live, so I was moving around all the time. At the time I thought, I can't go anywhere, I can't say anything because I have nothing. I was living like there was no tomorrow.

But after coming to Agahozo-Shalom, I started planning again and thinking about the future. I had not picked up a camera before I came to ASYV, but I had dreamed of becoming a photographer, so I joined the media club as a first-year student. Now I am running for president of the media club, and this summer I did an internship at a multimedia studio.

What projects have you worked on in media club?

Before I came here, I had no time to think about ways to heal myself. But here, I was able to heal. Before, I was serious all the time. Now I can laugh. I even sing. And I started thinking about how to prevent other children from finding themselves in a situation like I had been in. That is why I created My Voice, a video series that will feature children from broken homes talking about what we are thinking and how the actions of our parents are affecting us. I have spoken to many other children. Nobody was listening to them. I want to be the voice for these voiceless. 

What’s next for My Voice? 

I want to post the videos on social media. I have connected with people at RTV, Rwanda's national TV service, because someday I want to air my videos there. I am also reaching out to YouTubers with big Rwandan followings. 

What are your plans after graduating from ASYV?

My dream is to become the best photographer in East Africa. My internship this past summer helped me discover myself creatively. I was doing photography shoots for families: graduations, pregnancies, babies. My bosses challenged me, giving me feedback and pointing out the things I needed to improve. Working with the clients was difficult because every person wants a different thing.

It was really hard, but I am a much better photographer now, and it gave me courage. When I graduate, I want to manage my own studio. I want to combine media with My Voice by visiting children, orphans, and single mothers and capturing their stories. 

Resilience and Recruitment

How We're Ensuring Every Kid Can Thrive

Each year, the ASYV recruitment team visits vulnerable kids throughout Rwanda to find the approximately 125 new students who will join our Village family. "These are kids whose achievements are low, not because of themselves but because of the challenges they have faced,” says ASYV staff mama Immaculee Ruzibiza, who serves on our recruitment team. In our early years, all of our students had been orphaned by the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. As those students aged out of our program, we began welcoming other vulnerable Rwandan youth and refugees from neighboring Burundi and Democratic Republic of the Congo.

As our student population continues to evolve with the country’s, a strategic priority is building a system to ensure we recruit kids with the resilience and critical-thinking skills to embrace our program. “A resilient kid will use all the opportunities we give them in the Village and profit from them to reach higher,” says Mama Ruzibiza. 

Among the many new students demonstrating resilience that Mama Ruzibiza met with this year is Nicole Petite Umuhire. “Mama Immaculee and another mama came to interview me at my school. They asked me many questions about my family and my life. I felt comfortable with them,” says Nicole. Nicole reports that she loves music and LEAP, and recently invited Mama Ruzibiza to watch her rap during a Friday night Village Time, our weekly talent show. “She told me, ‘it will be fire’,” says Mama Ruzibiza. “Then she told me, ‘ASYV will change my life.’”

A Transformative Moment

Our Exciting Partnership with Tulane University

One of our strategic priorities undergirds each of the four pillars of our new strategic plan: improving our data and evidence-based decision-making. We are excited to share that this September, we began a new partnership with faculty and students at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine that will enable us to analyze how and why our model impacts our kids and then use that data to amplify our impact on each student who passes through our gates. 

“We will build the capacity of our staff to perform their own analysis and boost the use of data in the planning and implementation of our students' care,” says Jean Willy Uliho, ASYV’s new Monitoring and Evaluations Officer, who is collaborating closely with the Tulane team. The partnership will also enable us to reach a transformative new moment as an organization. Within five years, we will begin training communities and organizations from around the world in how to use our model to heal young people recovering from societal trauma.

Join Us for Village Time

Honoring Bank of Kigali

Join us as we celebrate ASYV’s foundation and future at Village Time.

Tuesday, November 1, 2022 at 6 p.m. ET.

Honoring:

Bank of Kigali

With a Special Tribute to Ed & Vivian Merrin

Thank you to all of our generous event sponsors.