 Okay, we're glad to know you're still there and watching us, it's a run up and we're joined by our second guest, her name is Grace and she's graciously doing something really lofty in the slums, in areas where the children are less privileged, in areas where children don't have access to books and they don't have people to encourage them to read. Grace has been doing a lot gathering books, opening libraries and encouraging children to read. It's our pleasure this morning to welcome you Grace to our program, The Run Up. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Okay, I was just trying to ramble up, you know, just talking randomly and trying to describe the kind of work that you do, but give us an insight to what you do and what motivated you to do what you do. Okay, so I work as the Director of Transforming Lives and Communities Initiative, which is an NGO focused on bridging education inequality gap, because I believe every child deserves equal access to quality education. So if you look at communities like the low income communities, you just realize that there are a lot of deprivations and we can turn and affect every one of us. We have to reach the poor, the middle class. So I said, you know what, we have to begin to create institutions, we have to begin to create programs that would reach this inequality gap so every child, regardless of where they are, can have equal access to quality education. And how long have you been doing this, Grace? Okay, so based on research, when we started out, we were trying out different stuff to see how an underserved community can be transformed. So we started out 2014, 2015, but we took flight in 2018 when we realized that, okay, we need to lip it on education and good governance. So these are the strategies that we use to drive the change that we are hoping for. So we've been doing it for almost technically, technically from 2018 to date, that's about four years. How would you describe your level of success so far? I think it's very encouraging, very encouraging. If it wasn't encouraging, I'm not sure we would have been continuing. One of the few things that we use as a performance indicator is civic engagement. We want to see how more people can become patriotic, love their community, see what they can do for their community. So the increase in volunteer strength as an organization is very amazing. Seeing young people, seeing secondary school students, coming around to the library, saying I want to volunteer, I want to give back, I want to do my deeds. I mean, that is so beautiful. That's like a fix of sex for us. And then we also have what we call behavioral improvement evaluation, which is one of the strategies, one of the performance indicators that we use to assess how well we have done. Seeing children at the library, you know, shape up in their behavior, be more kind, be more compassionate, be more collaborative. That's another milestone for us. And then we also have the performance improvement evaluation. Of course, when you have a library, you want to be sure, you want to ensure that these libraries are directly impacting on the academic performance of these children. And it's been great. It's been, we've seen people move from maybe like eighth position to first, second, third, you know, by virtue of the fact that they visit our library. What would you say has been the challenge, the major challenges that you face? I mean, what you run is like an NGO and you probably found these things by yourself. What are the challenges you would say you've faced over the years and what's the biggest of them all? Okay, so the first was Q-Sets. You know, the people, finding people are passionate about what you wanted to. It's not easy to run a big vision by yourself. So you need quite a lot of people. So initially, people didn't even understand what volunteering was. It's like, come and volunteer, come and work with us, come and serve us. They're like, what's in it for me? What's in it for me? So when we continued anyway, and then we began to make it interesting, we began to make our volunteering opportunities interesting for people to come on board. And we have seen the aspect, that challenge taken care of. Also, we had funding issue initially, because I was doing more with my funds. Of course, I still was consistent because I struggle believing what I'm doing. Even the team also believes in believing what we're doing. So we were consistent. And little by little by little, we're getting more buy-ins from individuals, getting more buy-ins from private organizations, friends, even from out of the country who follow our works online. So these are challenges. The major for us right now is funding. Funding to do more. But I think we'll go perform, and we're still becoming debauntering the People Challenge, which it's something that we have seen progress on. But you're doing something on the one hand, and the government is also trying to do something on the other hand. What are you doing? How is your collaboration? How would you describe your collaboration with the government and with the private enterprises? And then from which area do you think you can have more of the funding that you're talking about here? Okay, so we never leave out a 10-day stake with us forum in the local government, because everything we do is premised on the fact that if every local government is actively functioning, Nigeria's development is going to be a lot faster. So people need to get involved at community level in your local government level. So we never leave out attending any of the maybe stake orders forum, project operations forums in the local government. That's where we talk to them about what we're doing, why they need to make investment plans, why they need to make investment projects, or maybe for the girls in the community, for the teachers, for schools. And we've seen them collaborate. Initially, it was a struggle. Maybe they didn't believe in what we were doing. But right now, we're seeing, we're getting some support from them. I could tell them the last time that it could be more. It could be more. And therefore, private organizations, yeah, we work with them. We talk to some of them. Of course, some people, I think the CCS are as a form of brand awareness. So if you don't have, if you're not in the high profile communities, if you're not in stores that would gain national attention, you know, they might not want to come on board, which is very, very sad. But because I feel CSR is not supposed to be like a brand awareness platform for you as an organization. Apologies to organizations that own the right to whatever they want to do with their money. But that part is a little bit of a struggle for us, although it's getting better over time. Initially, we didn't really get buy-ins, but now, people are seeing the impact. They're seeing the numbers of persons that are, that we are impacting. They're seeing the number of persons that are benefiting from our programs, benefiting from the project. So we're getting more buy-ins. So we don't leave out the government in anything we do. I mean, if we all synergize, complement each other, I know we're going to have greater impact. So the government, yes, they support not as much as we expect, but then it's getting better from where we were, when they didn't even give us a dime. They never came around. But now we've had them come around. We have them invite us for the stakeholders forums, because they know we want to make inputs. They know we have the intention of the community at heart. So I think we're not doing anything in isolation. We're working in collaboration with all of these stakeholders, the government, the private organizations, but I think my big concern is with the private organizations and how they think CSR should be about brand awareness for them. So they should look in the direction of those communities, those rural communities, those marginalized communities, communities that are not even seen, angels that are not even heard of, and they're doing something great. I think it's very important for them to look in that direction if we really want the development of our nation. All right. Let me ask you this, because we're rounding off already. What would you say is the bigger picture for you? I mean, you're doing something very graceful. Out of your own volition, you came out to, you know, organize these people and you're all together doing something amazing for these children in these areas. What is the bigger picture that you see when you think about it? And what should we be expected in the future? Okay. So for our children, we're on a mission to ensure that they have equal access to quality education, policy learning opportunities so that they do not toe in the path of crime, poverty, and teenage pregnancy, which is very common amongst low-income communities like our community. So for us, we want to establish a learning center, which is what we call the Community Library and Discovery Center, where these two grandkids have access to what they ultimately cannot afford in their low-cost schools. So that we reach that inequality gap. We close that gap between what the children of the poor learn, what and how the children of the poor learn from what and how the children of the rich learn. So who closed that gap? Now, we cannot go to every individual school to establish the quality learning center that we are looking for. It would take forever for us to achieve that, you know, but then if we have community centers like this that we have in mind as in picture in every local government, especially local government of low-income communities, then I think we will be getting every child the opportunity. We will be improving the quality of education, which will in turn improve the quality of people our communities and nation have. So we're looking at having that big center where whether it is science, technology, art, math, different learning experiences that would harness the potential of every child in Nigeria. Okay, Grace would like to thank you so much. And we're hoping that this thing you're doing in Ajaegunle, because Lagos is not just Ajaegunle, it will be replicated in all the local governments of Lagos state and beyond Lagos state, since your vision is for all of Nigeria. We pray that you have the way with all to do what you have planned to do. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Okay, you're welcome. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Okay, that was Grace, who was doing something really amazing. You know, sometimes we sit back and complain that education in Nigeria is going down when we as individuals can actually do something. Everybody might not have the opportunity or, you know, everything it takes to have a big organization like Grace does, but when you see a person like Grace, you could volunteer and help her out. It could be money that you have for buying the books. It could be books that you have that you're not using. You could donate them. Everybody has a role to play. Yeah, like they say in what is Saint Patrick's mission, some go to the mission by going or some give to the mission by going and some go to the mission by giving. So you can either volunteer to become the priest or you pay for a priest to be to be educated. So that's what everybody can do. You either give your time or your resources and all that. Anyway, we'll take a short break now and return with the news and when we are done with the news, we take our final guess that we are hoping you're just guessing and we'll get to meet at that time. Stay with us. Stay with us.