Narrative 4

In 2023, n4 continued to leverage the arts, stories, and education to create compassionate action across the globe in support of our mission: to equip young people to harness the power of stories to drive change in their communities. We continued to expand our core methodology, the story exchange, across north america, with seven total regions across the u.s. and mexico, and a new southwest region in the u.s., as well as in europe, africa, and the middle east. Through this work, we partnered with 1,788 institutions, trained 3,726 facilitators, and worked with over 125,000 program participants. We are also proud to have publicly launched our digital platform that connects students and educators through social-emotional learning, community-engaged learning, and civic action programs. The platform had 6,700+ users as of july 2024. In the near future, we will continue to expand our core programs, while scaling the digital platform and implementing a new "focus cities" approach, through which we will deploy strategic, long-term, coordinated programming, going "deep" into targeted geographical areas and building upon our already-successful n4 community.

2023 was a year to deepen our roots in countries where we have gained plenty of traction. We firmed up our work in rwanda, zambia, zimbabwe, nigeria, south africa, kenya and tanzania. We opened up two new cities - bulawayo in zimbabwe, and livingstone in zambia.overall, we facilitated 6714 story exchanges on the continent, engaging about 67140 students and community members. We added 276 new school partners, and trained 876 facilitators in the 7 countries we are present in. Our civic engagement work also deepened, as we redeemed 8165 unique vouchers at the joe slovo center, graduated 50 participants in our skills and crafts acquisition program, and removed 5325 kg of trash from the community via the center. In nigeria, 30 mentors and mentees completed phases i and ii of the hold my hands mentorship program in lagos, and we had over 250 higher institution students at our leadership summit in lagos in december.overall, 2023 was a year of setting down deeper roots in our programming.

The development of our digital infrastructure has made significant strides since its launch in september 2022, further expanding the reach of n4 to an exponential number of students, teachers, and schools. We continue to incorporate numerous improvements that have been well-received by our users, making the platform even more intuitive and impactful.n4's aim is to make the digital platform extremely user-friendly to enable mass adoption of our programs by educators. The role of the platform is to:(1) increase the depth of relationships between students, educators, schools, and communities;(2) accelerate n4's ability to scale up without compromising our standards of delivery and execution of programming; and(3) track the performance and behaviors of our users, as well as help measure the efficacy of our programs (our impact). N4's digital platform will be a digital home for global change, a place where students from across the world can connect and inspire change in their communities.

Other program services include providing program related advisory services in the areas of curriculum building, funding relationships, and strategic partnerships to an affiliated mission-aligned organization.