Change Maker Lab M4. Sedbacks turned to success

It has not been an easy road to reach this far as my initiative is concern "No sun burn no skin cancer ". Being a YALI fellow cohort 40, West Africa Ghana, 2022. I decided to use my initiative for the change Maker Lab as a community service project for YALI , this is to reach a greater audience and to create a greater impact.  

 During  my planning two members from the YALI  decided to join my initiative, I gladly accepted them because I learned from Change Maker lab that it is very important to involve many people in your initiative because many people makes work lighter. But in this case, involving them in my initiative was a very big setback because they never wanted to work or contribute anything to the initiative and it really slows down work. I had to use "tactics"  as study in Change Maker Lab M4 to get my initiative  going, one of them as me to postpone the event when we all had accepted for it to be carried out on that said date, and I had to stand firm as a leader using my tactics to make it happened.  Another  challenge  was that most of the invitations I gave out were not acknowledged and I felt discourage  but as I read in the SWOT analysis and try to put everything together it kept me. The greatest challenge I had was the Part of finance i.e one cannot do anything without  money. My mentor the best mentor  ever gave me some strategy on how I can raise money and how I can use the little I have  to achieve what I want.  I tried  and it works.

 As I read  in Change Maker Lab M4, on identifying opponents,  thanks to these lessons I could identify so many of them who pretended to be supportive but had secondary aims for example taking pictures without seeking consent, didn't mobilize as planned, comments like I didn't know this will be a success etc. Nevertheless let nothing distract anyone from their path, this sstatement kept me on track. A walk to sensitize against Skin cancer and stigmatization towards persons with albinism was carried out and a workshop was organized  to educate on Albinism, Affordable and applicable methods to prevent skin cancer and Albinism inclusion.

Parents of persons with albinism, local leaders,  Civil society organizations, church leaders and persons living with albinism were all present for the workshop.  I got a lots of positive feedback from the participants telling me to carryout more of such workshops because they learned a lots about albinism and promise to carryout the sensitization in the various communities and families.  Persons living with albinism don't really know where they belong because, people don't regards them as persons with disabilities and also as normal people  the question is who are persons living with albinism and where do they belong? A big question to be answered .