A December update from One World Together

Phew! We’ve made it to the end of another year, and what a year it has been!

On the 1st January 2023 One World Together was still just a dream in the making. After a soft launch in June at the University of Manchester and our bigger website launch in August, it’s all been ‘Go! Go! Go!’ from there. We are delighted to share with you the progress that we’ve made in even this short period: 

  • 67 Global Citizens have joined our wave of change! That is 67 times that the One World Together team have done a happy dance as we’ve seen a new member email and 67 beautiful One World Together t-shirts that we’ve sent out to our first Global Citizens!
    • If you want to join our wave of change you can do so easily here, from as little as £5.00 a year. 
  • We’ve sent our first Solidarity Fund payments of £160.00 to each of our four partners – Muungano wa Wanavijiji, Community Savers, Raising Futures Kenya and Play it Forward Zambia. That’s £160.00 of unrestricted funds, giving them the flexibility to spend and invest it however is most impactful for them. Our Solidarity Fund is also growing with our membership, we now have a monthly income into this of £270 (and rising!) from our generous Global Citizens.
    • Remember every penny of your Solidarity Fund contribution, minus the transaction fee, goes directly to our partners. And we’ve designed this to be affordable, from as little as £1.25/month. Together, we can make a massive difference and you can sign up for this here.
  • Students at the University of Manchester have launched our first One World Together Students’ Union Society! They’ve hosted weekly meetings building an awareness of what we do, they’ve held quizzes and interactive activities, developed campaigns, raised £170.00 for our partners in a bake sale and volunteered for our Manchester-based partners, amongst others. They literally haven’t stopped!
    • We are excited for a future where there is a network of brilliant Societies like this across the country, building awareness of why funding must reach communities on better terms, finding brilliant community-based organisations in their cities and geographies to support, get to know and volunteer for, reach out to schools with our message. For us to be able to find all sorts of ways to nurture a new generation of supporters of global development not just fighting for, but also building, a fairer and more impactful funding system.
  • We’ve held some incredible public events in Manchester with our partners and the Student’s Union Society. In October we welcomed our partners Muungano wa Wanavjiji and Community Savers together to talk about the catastrophic funding landscape for community organisations in the UK and Kenya and about how they see the potential of One World Together in moving from fire-fighting to social justice. And in November we hosted Jon Alexander, author of Citizens: How the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us. We talked about the power we can all have if we step into our citizen story coming together to create, collaborate and celebrate new systems in the way that we are doing at One World Together.
  • Funded by the University of Manchester, One World Together were proud to join 700 community organisers and activists from over 70 countries at the Shift the Power Global Summit in Bogota, Colombia. With all participants calling for more equitable and impactful funding that gets funds to the community-level, we were in great company. The summit was also overwhelmingly characterised by love, care and community – this isn’t something you often find at big conferences, but that’s what we’re all about at One World Together and we loved it! 

So we approach the end of the year with full hearts and a huge amount of gratitude to each and every one of you who has joined our movement or are following our journey with support and enthusiasm for what we do. This really is a collective effort. On our own, we can’t build an equitable and impactful funding system that puts communities first. But together we can.

With that we wish you all of a wonderful and relaxing holiday and festive period and look forward to 2024, when we have lots of exciting things in store – including our first all-partner in-person meet-up in Nairobi and the launch of our community space. 

We can’t wait!! 

With very best wishes,

Niki, Chibwe and the rest of Team One World Together