We visit schools and churches and give mental empowerment training on how pressures from peers, family and society can create cognitive dissonance and distress. This withdraws youth from engaging in positive activities that they find solace in and can lead them to participate in dangerous groups that behave in unconventional and damaging ways.
We conducted a survey to explore what cultism means to people in the community. While some of the responses included acts of violence like ‘killings and bloodshed’, a cult is defined as a group of people led by an authoritarian figure who encourages his followers to engage in unconventional and often secretive activities that can be socially maladaptive i.e. substance abuse, violent acts and other anti-social behaviours.
Given that participants of the survey chose to define cultism through just one of its many unconventional manners i.e. ‘violence’, ImeyReach identified the need to provide education and training to highlight the violent and non-violent types of cultism in order to better inform members of the community and young people to recognize and minimize participation from these types of damaging groups.
Some of our work in the past includes the following:
- We visited an orphanage called the Children Center and Red Cross in Lagos, Nigeria and aside from gifting the children there, we gave a mental health empowerment training on learning to say ‘no’ to social vices. The volunteers that came along were also trained on selflessness and how to be mentally empowered against social vices.
The number of young people that attended our sessions:
- 30 Children
- 15 Teenagers
- 20 Adults