2022 was a busy and rewarding year for Make It Grow. Our team members won awards, the community food initiatives started implementing their proposed projects and the organisation took the first steps towards becoming a social enterprise.
It was a year of looking back at the prototyping phase of Make it Grow (2020-2022) and studying the impact of video proposals in community food projects. We also focused on envisioning the next phase of scaling-up and scaling-out so that we can influence grant giving application processes within food systems transformation.
There were proud moments for our team on an individual level. Sarah Wilson who interned for Make it Grow finished her Undergraduate Dissertation and received an award for best fieldwork and Prisca Adong, our research intern in the summer won the International Development dissertation award in the Masters Programme. Congratulations and thank you for the dedicated hard work and contribution to Make it Grow.
A Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation of the Make it Grow Project took place in July & August by Prisca Adong and Peter Gandakusuma highlighting the achievements of the community food projects. 15 of the projects raised the start up funding and began implementation in March of this year. For example, the Hama Maoko Rabbit Project is underway with successful breeding of their rabbits and harvesting of urine. The group have been self organising and committing to the project, with support at the starting stage from local NGO Hand in Hand Zimbabwe. They have been learning more about rabbit farming and acquiring process skills from learning visits to other sites.
We are also proud of the capacitybuilding impact of the video proposal trainings to open avenues for engagement, build community cohesion and acquire skills. "Participants also acknowledged that their participation in the Make it Grow capacity-building programme has resulted in them having transferable skills that are of value to their work in general and has led to them doing new activities."
Participants of the Make it Grow video training workshops continue to use video in their wider community, "they reported that these videos have opened up helpful conversations about issues in/with the community".
At an organisational level, we were incredibly excited when our founder Dr Pamela Richardson won first prize in the summer for the ESRC: Economic and Social Research Council-funded CRoSS catalyst hosted at The University of Sheffield's faculty of social science. Make it Grow is now taking steps as a consultancy-based social enterprise where we can continue to offer advisory services and training support as well as work to influence systemic transformation of the grant-giving application processes in the wider international donor and related INGO landscape.
Thank you for the ongoing support and to all involved near and far.
Best wishes,
The Make it Grow Team.
