2023 Shortlist | Lorna Young Foundation (FVR)
Lorna Young Foundation (FVR)
Shortlist – Transforming With Digital
About the Charity
The Lorna Young Foundation (LYF) is a UK charity, based in West Yorkshire, that is named after a late pioneer of fair trade. LYF aims to reduce poverty, improve social inclusion and protect the environment in the UK and overseas. LYF’s international initiative, Farmers’ Voice Radio (FVR), uses participatory radio to improve the sustainability of smallholder livelihoods in low-income countries, through better access to information, expertise and markets. Farmers’ Voice Radio has reached millions of smallholder farmers across East and West Africa and Central America.
In the UK, LYF’s Not Just Us programme trains marginalised groups in ethical trading skills, in order to create fair trade social enterprises. The groups that LYF work with develop their own social enterprises, learn business skills and raise funds for a cause. This improves economic and employment chances for the participants and fosters local, ethical and environmental responsibility.
Charity number: 1112895 | www.LYF.org.uk
Community Development | England – North West | 0-3 paid staff
What the Board Achieved
The LYF has developed a methodology for using participatory radio to connect rural and isolated farming communities to the information needed to improve their livelihoods. FVR engages farmers in the production of radio programmes that broadcast vital farming information in local language on community radio stations. FVR brings about changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours, which contributes to more sustainable rural communities.
In 2018, the LYF board made a strategic decision to ‘open source’ FVR and make the FVR methodology and resources available to any organisation that wanted to use radio to empower smallholder farmers. In 2020, COVID-19 lockdown restrictions subsequently brought steep increases in demand for FVR training from local organisations across Africa, Asia and Latin America. At the time, radio was extolled as an effective means of engaging with rural and isolated communities, when face-to-face activities were impossible. The foundation had previously delivered several projects with local partners and began to receive many global-wide requests for FVR training.
Although the FVR platform received positive user feedback, the Foundation team soon observed that online resources were not enough to enable local partners to implement the FVR projects they so desperately needed. Through Google Form user feedback surveys and calls with international training experts, LYF learned that more interactive training, participation, context-specific support (including appropriate COVID messaging) and ongoing accompaniment were needed. In some cases, financial resources to kick start the approach were also required, to prove the concept to their boards or donors. LYF is a small organisation with limited capacity, so the team had to quickly adapt its approach to meet the demand for FVR training and the demand for better training resources.
In response, the LYF quickly expanded the FVR platform to include relevant WHO approved health messaging to communities. The team used digital tools to incorporate virtual – in real time – FVR training and project support in Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Uganda and Panama. This work enabled the delivery of funded FVR projects during the height of the pandemic, whilst many other charities had to postpone face-to-face interventions.
The LYF board agreed that these experiences should be made available to other organisations. In 2022, the foundation launched the ‘FVR Academy’ online training programme for farmer groups, cooperatives, NGOs and radio stations in low-income countries. This was developed on the back of considerable learning gathered from delivering virtual training during lockdown and extensive consultation with local partners and international training experts. The FVR Academy consists of free, interactive online group training, one-to-one coaching, a community of practice, and seed-funding competition. Each participant completes the course with a fully worked up and budgeted FVR concept that can be presented to their boards, partners and donors. This results in farmer organisations across the world setting up and broadcasting their own series of FVR programmes.
Adopting digital tools has significantly increased LYF’s return on investment, surpassing targets, despite the pandemic. Since investing in and utilising new digital practices in the last two years, 19 organisations from 10 countries have received virtual FVR training and support. More than 1,600 people have accessed materials on the FVR website. Just last year, the FVR Academy trained 13 organisations from seven countries using interactive online group training (via Zoom) and utilising WhatsApp, Jamboard, Breakout Rooms, Google Forms and Polls to enable greater participation and engagement. All sessions are recorded and shared for those not present or with poor connectivity. One-to-one coaching is delivered using Zoom and the FVR ‘Community of Practice’ is hosted on Facebook. Regular homework activities enable participants to complete the course with a fully budgeted FVR programme series concept. Graduates receive a digital badge once their coursework is submitted. YouTube and Podcast platforms are also being used to disseminate FVR audio content. The team purposefully uses existing free digital tools. Not only is this cost effective for LYF, but target users (based in low-income countries and many with English as a second language) explain that these platforms are accessible and very familiar.
Through this process, the LYF board adopted a data-driven approach to inform decision-making at its quarterly meetings and pivot the charity’s strategy quickly when new challenges emerged from the pandemic, and this enabled the charity to expand its Farmers’ Radio Voice programme. Throughout the process, the board worked to empower and support the FVR team in exploring new delivery strategies and training tools, in seeking external expertise and guidance in areas where they lacked the expertise themselves, by investing in a temporary corporate fundraiser to help to help develop new corporate partnerships, and in spending more time making connections and creating valuable stakeholder relationships to support the success of their expansion strategy.
The learning from the FVR Academy is now being applied to other aspects of the LYF’s work too, with the organisation’s ethical enterprise team Not Just Us working to create a similar approach for its outreach programmes.
