Last month, we were delighted to welcome Niveditha Purushothaman as a guest speaker to the Global Impact Monthly Forum. During the session, she detailed how the Global Impact Fellowship helped support the work of Yellow Owl.
Yellow Owl, an engaging, story-led online magazine for children aged 9 to 13, joined the Skills Builder Global Impact Fellowship with a clear ambition: to achieve Impact Level Four. Their core mission is to address the lack of engaging, accessible, and high-quality opportunities available for children to develop their essential skills.
The Challenge of Clear Progression
Yellow Owl's platform is designed to let children explore and practice essential skills through experiential activities embedded within their story narratives. The platform is highly interactive, supporting audio, video, and image sharing, and is even developing AI-powered feedback for stories written by children.
However, the team identified a critical gap at the start of the Fellowship. Despite the interactive content, they lacked a clear, measurable progression of essential skills. As Niveditha explained, the Yellow Owl team needed to establish a clear progression to truly determine if children were building these skills over time.
Integrating the Universal Framework
The Global Impact Fellowship provided a crucial opportunity for Yellow Owl to deeply understand and integrate the Universal Framework into their existing structure. The framework became the catalyst for a total transformation in their approach to content development.
Here is how they integrated the Universal Framework:
- Mapping Skills: The team began by mapping the essential skills they aimed to teach against the Universal Framework. They discovered that the framework provided a ready-made, detailed breakdown of those skills, specifically mentioning speaking and listening.
- Identifying Steps: For their target age group of 9 to 13 years, Yellow Owl identified and filtered the specific steps of the Universal Framework they would focus on for a year.
- Creating a Year-Long Plan: Yellow Owl created a plan to distribute the selected steps evenly across the year, with two magazines published monthly. Each magazine contains five activities, with each activity focusing on one particular skill step in a linear progression.
- Content Creation Shift: The Universal Framework integration resulted in a significant shift in content creation: instead of starting with a story and trying to fit in skills, they began by focusing on essential skills first and then built the story narrative around them.
Key Takeaways from the Journey
Niveditha shared these vital lessons learned:
- Team Collaboration: Working as a lean core team of three was highly effective, with brainstorming sessions providing essential clarity.
- Using the Universal Framework as a Tool: They emphasised using the Universal Framework as a tool for guidance, not as a rigid checklist.
- Iterative Refinement: The process should remain iterative and flexible, allowing for continuous refinement based on user feedback.
Advice for New Users of the Universal Framework
Niveditha urges those embarking on this journey to view the Universal Framework not as a rigid requirement to be jammed into existing structures, but as a flexible tool for empowerment. Her philosophy is clear:
"Try to understand the framework and just take in those things that you feel will fit into your program or structure."
Yellow Owl's commitment to embedding the Universal Framework allowed them to achieve the greatest possible impact for their learners.
Missed the Global Impact Forum? You can catch up on the full discussion here:
