What happened before?
In 2018, one of the young people we mentor at Faces Up Uganda did not attend school for nearly a year because his parents were going through a difficult time and were not in a position to cater for his school fees. Fortunately, they provided everything else that he needed. During this time, he spent most of his days at our community centre drawing and playing. However, his peers were in school. At first, everything seemed okay to him and he was able to receive more mentorship. However, his availability started becoming concerning, and we began asking ourselves whether we were doing enough for him?
Shortly, we started identifying some of the creative drawings he made during the time he spent at our centre and asked ourselves how these works can bring monetary value to help him return to school? We thought of an idea to turn these drawings into postcards and then market them on his behalf so that people could purchase, and the money could generate school fees to help pay his tuition. We were excited to embark on this new challenge and rushed into production. With time, we realized that the quality of the paper and prints lacked. Then we saw that the postcards would not generate enough revenue in the shortest time possible since we had to sell 3750 cards to raise the money he needed for the entire year. So, we began to explore tote bags and saw we needed to sell only nine of them to raise enough funds to cater for three of his school terms.
From that time onwards, we have never looked back, and we scaled our support from one young person to now over 87 of them and the number grows every day with more sales.
At first, our focus was supporting those in primary schools but since 2019, we extended to the secondary level.
We are excited to offer even more support in the future. We believe that when people like you continue to make purposeful purchases, together, we are going to enable many more children to attend school, follow their dreams, and not least, hone their artistic skills.
Will you make a purposeful purchase today to help continue sharing our story?
