Why WAGiLabs is the education program CFK needs

To me, WAGiLabs means granting kids agency to impact their lives and their communities for the better. By agency, I mean permission, ability and support.

First, we are letting our kids know that they are not too young to try to change their world for the better. All they need to do is to pick a problem that affects people in their communities. After picking, they should seek both the advice and support they need to solve it. We are asking the adults in our kids’ lives to pay more attention to our kids’ questions and passions and guide them as they try to improve their communities.

Second, we are training our kids to communicate better by asking them to find people to work with and learn from as they address the problems they choose to solve. Teamwork and constructive feedback are essential to achieving worthwhile goals like those our kids will be pursuing. We want them to be able to communicate their ideas effectively enough to build the teams they need to accomplish their goals and get advice from friends and family on where and how they can improve.

Third, we are preparing our kids to create their own income earning opportunities at any point in their lives when they find doing so necessary. Recently, popular terms for describing the future are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). We do not know the economic forces and employment opportunities that our kids will face in the future. However, we believe that by training them to focus on solving people’s problems and building their communities, they would have a good chance of providing goods, services and insights for which people will be willing to pay them.

Fourth, we are teaching our kids to live as life-long learners. The beauty of focusing on solving a problem is that you do not stop at ‘doing what was good enough’ or ‘doing the best you could do’. Rather, this focus drives you to keep learning, sharing ideas and trying new things until you succeed at solving the problem. You end up learning and doing what is required, with a passion.

You keep asking questions, learning the answers to them and asking more questions to build on what you learned until you solve the problem. We want our kids to think this way. We want them to approach education not as a chore but a way of helping people and themselves to live better lives through problem solving.

In summary, we are training our kids to be empathetic leaders who are passionate about helping others and building their communities in collaboration with their friends, family, neighbors and mentors.

-Emmanuel Abebrese