A Citizen Conversation with… Frederick Ouko Alucheli
by Matt Homer, Asst. News Editor on April 15, 2009 in Citizen Conversation with..., News
This year’s student-organized Bridge Builders Conference brought social pioneers from 10 countries together to participate in workshops and panel discussions on social justice. The Citizen caught up with one of these Bridge Builders, Frederick Ouko Alucheli, who is the founder of two NGOs in Kenya that work with youth.
Q: You’ve started two organizations, the first being the Kibera Community Youth Programme (KCYP), which advances the wellbeing of youth in one of the poorest slums in Nairobi. After the first, why did you decide to start your second, the Kenya Disabled Action Network?
A: My view of it is that I had done enough [for KCYP] and I didn’t really want to maintain the status quo where the organization became my name. Because when you stay so long in an organization people will refer to this as “Frederick’s organization. That isn’t good because the organization was formed for the sole purpose of helping young people in the community.
A lot of people had discussed with me – because I had done fairly well with organizing young people in Kibera and being that I was the director and a disabled person – that if I could do an effective job in non-disability work, why not put that effort into helping young people with disabilities? They didn’t have an organization of their own that was championing their rights and there was still so much marginalization within young people. So I thought and made a decision that I was going to resign and really concentrate on working up an organization that will also represent issues for young people with disabilities.
Q: What were some of the major concerns related to disabled people in Kenya that you were trying to address?
A: The greatest concern was that young people with disabilities didn’t have a transition opportunity. We’re having a lot of them who are not getting an opportunity to go to school and get an education – and that was hindering their progression in life. We had to check and see how in a small way we can set a system to help young people get an opportunity through education, and also economic opportunities.
I formed the organization so that we have this set of prejudices against people with disabilities reduced a little bit, and for them to be accommodated in the mainstream society. Most often people with disabilities will not go past high school and they wouldn’t get someone to support them. The majority of them come from poor families. I didn’t have a university education myself so I know how it hard it was. And I had a fair amount of information, so what happens to someone who doesn’t have an idea about where to go and seek assistance? This motivated me.
We are now looking into how we support young people to go college. We’re actually building up a scholarship fund to support that. We are working with those who are graduates and cannot find employment on account of their disabilities and talking with the policy makers and also employers to try and convince them to see the other side of the coin. That then enables these employers to hire some young people as interns and then afterwards those who have proven to be effective are definitely getting employment. And we intend now to open up a web portal which has information on people who are jobless but have qualifications.
Q: What advice do you have for students who also want to start social organizations?
A: They really have to come to terms with exactly what type of change they want to make. And in that framework, try to pursue creative ways in which to achieve that. It will do a good service if they can clue up on what is already going on in the grassroots, as opposed to what they want to do for their dissertations or projects they want to do with huge organizations that have million dollar budgets. Really, they aren’t helping.
An option for students would be to find a natural organization that is really coming up so that they can try to put the ideas they’ve learned from the classroom into practice. If you go to large multinational organizations there’s a whole range of bureaucracy, so your idea might not be implemented. But if you go to natural organizations that are really struggling, your ideas will almost be taken instantly and that will help change lives at the local level.
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