One year ago, we marked a major milestone in the development of UniTED by receiving our first significant grant. Out of over 1,700 applications, we were one of two organisations to receive a generous seed grant from Kosmos Journal.

The grant couldn’t have come at a better moment for us. Eighteen months earlier, we had begun our pilot in Uganda with the vision of creating a global community of students uniting for effective social action.

Our intention was to connect as many student social entrepreneurs in Uganda (and then the rest of the world) as possible to collaborators and friends in different parts of the globe – fostering a spirit of global citizenship.

However, a key finding from our initial partnerships was that we needed to be more discerning about the social action projects we connected to remote volunteers. Only one in three projects would have a suitable task for a volunteer, so in order to create more international partnerships, we would need to find many more student projects in Uganda to choose from. And this required more scaling.

By last year, we had spread our presence to 7 universities around Uganda but were stretched to the limit. With a staff of 2, it was not possible to scale further without placing more responsibilities on students to run activities on their campuses.

(image) Fortunately, the grant from Kosmos Journal enabled us to run a 4-day training camp in August last year for 102 students from 15 universities. Along the idyllic shores of Lake Victoria, we trained these students to become ‘Uniters’. They would lead activities on their campuses in order to engage more students in social action and global citizenship. By the end of the camp, 94% of students reported to be ‘confident’ as a Uniter, and 97% said they cared more about global issues.

(image) The result has been that UniTED has been able to scale nationwide to 16 universities around Uganda and concentrate on establishing more numerous and fruitful international partnerships. Freed from so many responsibilities at the grassroots by the Uniters, at the end of 2015 we were able to launch a new programme of consultancy for the student social projects within our network. This allows us to both accelerate the social impact and sustainability of projects, whilst also screening them for suitability for an international partnership.

The result: we are currently helping 85 projects with consultancy, and 15 of them have partnerships with international volunteers– in large part thanks to Kosmos Journal!

It’s been a pleasure observing the fruit of these partnerships on projects from distributing sanitary towels to girls at poor rural schools to planting trees and developing educational materials for university students to educate school children about mitigating climate change.

We’re now at a point where we can finally open up our network to students around the world to either volunteer on one of our projects, or find volunteers for their own project. If you’re a student, then get involved at www.unitedpartnerships.org!

We could be supporting over 200 student projects in under 6 months – all that’s stopping us is the funds. So, we’re also currently running a crowdfunding campaign to help us maintain and extend our support. It costs $20 per year for each project – a bargain for the strategic thinking we help to inspire and the global friendships. We believe that universities are the natural catalyst for global networks. So, friendship by friendship, we are changing the world into a more just and friendly place!

Leo Henghes, Co-founder and Director, UniTED and Vicky Clayton, Trustee, UniTED

About UniTED (UK Registered Charity No.: 1158935)

UniTED focuses on changing the way young people understand global problems and take their first steps in tackling them. We partner up students around the world to collaborate on projects for social good, deepening their understanding of global issues.  Such collaboration not only improves the outcomes of the projects but also fosters international friendships, creating a connected community of globally-conscious citizens, confident and capable of tackling such challenges.