Country of Residence
Nigeria
Age
19
Project title
Circle of awareness (COA)
Project Summary: Describe your project in one sentence
COA is a youth-led community that teaches young people to heal from emotional pain and communicate it honestly, instead of letting it turn into the cruelty and silence that define so much of how our generation express ourselves to the world.
Project Category
My project is an existing project that I started
Project Stage
Growth (We’ve moved past the very first activities and are beginning to have consistent weekly or monthly impact)
Founding Story: What was the spark that led you to start your project? What was the "Aha!" moment that led you to get started and see the potential for this to succeed?
I put down my pen in 2023 after graduating highschool. I had no plan to write again. But in November 2025 I had this urge and then I started writing again, compulsively, driven by something I couldn't yet explain. The turning point came when an anonymous-messaging link went round campus. It was made for anonymous compliments and crushes, but people used it as a weapon instead, including body-shaming a pregnant classmate publicly. I watched people I knew flinch under words they couldn't trace back to anyone. What struck me wasn't just the cruelty. It was the pain clearly driving it. Hurting people communicate from that hurt, and it spreads. That was my "Aha!" moment: communication isn't only a skill problem, it's an awareness problem. If people learned to recognize and process their pain before they spoke, so much damage could be prevented. I felt responsible once I'd named the problem for myself. That reflection became the first writings that grew into Circle of Awareness, a space for communicating from awareness, not pain.
The Problem: What problem are you helping to solve? Why does it matter to you and your community?
Many young people, especially university students, carry unresolved emotional pain from rejection, comparison, family wounds, or growing up where feelings are suppressed, not processed. That pain doesn't vanish; it leaks into how people communicate, as sarcasm, silence, anger, oversharing, or cruelty toward others. This matters to me because I've watched it play out repeatedly, in classroom conflicts, broken friendships, and anonymous platforms built for fun that always end in someone getting hurt. Left unaddressed, it damages relationships, distorts identity while young people are still forming it, and weakens the trust communities need to function. In Nigeria, conversations about emotional health are still often dismissed as unnecessary, so this problem stays invisible until it explodes, in broken relationships, mental health crises, or public cruelty like what I witnessed. Unresolved pain is a quiet root cause behind a lot of the dysfunction in how young people relate to each other and themselves.
Your Solution: How are you solving this problem? Share your specific solution.
Circle of Awareness (COA) is a communication and emotional intelligence community that helps young people process their pain before it shapes how they speak and relate to others. In practice, this looks like: weekly learning sessions where members unpack a theme together, guided by discussion rather than lectures; original writings I publish on healing, self-awareness, and communication, which members read, discuss, and are increasingly inspired to write themselves; and structured multi-week journeys that build a habit of reflection over time, like our "40 Days of Purpose-Driven Communication" program and our current 12-week study working through one life principle a week with guided conversations. The model is peer-driven by design. Members don't just consume content, they participate, share their own struggles and reflections, and some have gone on to become writers within the community themselves. Going forward, I'm going to be training volunteer facilitators and writers so the model can scale beyond me, and building toward structured healing and communication workshops, both physical and online, plus a book series that will carry these ideas beyond the community itsself.
Impact: How has your project created impact / made a difference so far? Or, if at an early stage, what will impact look like?
COA launched in February 2026 and has grown to an active community of 80+ members, with ongoing weekly sessions and regularly published original writings on healing and communication. We completed the "40 Days of Purpose-Driven Communication" journey, and members are currently partway through a 12-week guided study, one theme per week. Beyond numbers, the clearest impact is qualitative: several members who joined simply to read have become writers and contributors themselves, carrying the work forward in their own voice. Over the next 6-12 months, I plan to grow beyond 80+ members, launch two new volunteer-led cohorts, publish the first volume of the COA book series, and run our first structured healing and communication workshops, both physical and online. I believe this will work because the model is already proving itself organically, through word of mouth and members becoming contributors, without paid marketing or outside funding.
Your Innovation: What is different about your project compared to other programs or solutions already out there? How is your project new or innovative?
Most communication or mental-health content for young people is either clinical (therapy-talk that feels distant) or purely motivational (encouragement without depth). COA sits deliberately between the two: it treats communication itself as the visible symptom of an inner, often invisible, emotional state, and works on the root rather than the surface behavior. Two things make it different. First, it's peer-driven, not expert-lecture driven. Members aren't just an audience, they're invited to reflect, discuss, and eventually write and facilitate themselves, which is why several have already become contributors. This turns healing into something communal rather than private and consumed alone. Second, it's structured as guided journeys rather than one-off content. Programs like the 40-Day journey and the 12-week study build a habit of reflection over weeks, not a single post that's forgotten by the next day. As a theatre artist and storyteller by training, I also bring performance and narrative into how the material is delivered, making abstract emotional concepts feel lived-in rather than theoretical. The long-term vision, a book series plus trained volunteer facilitators, is built to outlast any one cohort and scale the model sustainably.
How many people are on your team?
1
Your team: What role(s) do your team members play? How do you share leadership with them?
I'm currently the sole person actively anchoring COA day-to-day. We put out a volunteer call in March 2026 and several people joined, but I wasn't able to train them effectively while balancing school, so that team has stayed inactive rather than delivering. I take full responsibility for that gap. I graduate university in spring 2027, after which I'll have the time to properly train volunteers, build a real team structure, and scale COA beyond just me.
What’s Next: What are the next steps you plan to take to grow or strengthen your project over the next year? If your project is still in the idea stage, describe the steps you will take over the next three months to launch or begin developing it.
Over the next year, my priority is turning COA from something I run alone into something with a real team. Once I graduate in spring 2027, I'll properly train the volunteers who joined in March but never got activated, and launch two structured cohorts with them as facilitators and moderators. Alongside that, I plan to: finish our current 12-week study and start new themed cohorts; publish the first volume of the COA book series, which has been building through our weekly writings; and launch our first structured healing and communication workshops, both physical and online, moving beyond discussion sessions into hands-on practice. Longer-term, I want COA to outgrow being "my" project and become a self-sustaining youth platform, run partly by the people it has shaped, growing past our current 87 members through the trained volunteers themselves bringing people in.
How do you encourage other people to join your project or learn about the problem you’re working on? If you have a new idea, tell us how you will do this in the future.
Right now, growth happens almost entirely through word of mouth. I write and share original pieces on healing and communication, members discuss them together and bring friends into the sessions, and that personal, trust-based invitation is how we reached 80+ active members with zero paid marketing. The clearest sign this works is that people don't just join and stay quiet, they become activated. Several members who started as readers have gone on to write and publish their own pieces within the community, which pulls in their circles too. Going forward, I will make this more intentional. I plan to open official social media handles for COA with direct links into our community spaces, so people who hear about us can find and join us in one step, and to turn trained volunteers into ambassadors who personally invite and onboard new members, multiplying the same word-of-mouth model instead of replacing it with impersonal outreach.
