Thematic Synthesis Essay

The struggles found in Southern Africa and other ravaged areas throughout the world needs bright innovative people to develop new plans in order to stimulate change. The world needs people like Gretchen Steidle Wallace. She founded an organization known as Global Grassroots that provides training, funding, and advisory needs to small, community based grassroots projects. One of the main change agents that Wallace lauded heavily was Zolecka Ntuli. Zolecka realized that her town’s women needed an advocacy group to help them gain more rights. She then proceeded to form a group of fifteen women whose main goal was to help combat sexual violence and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in their local community. Within just two months she

Her first step in creating change focuses on self-awareness. A social change agent must be able to look into themselves and work towards self-actualization that way they can be more confident about their choices and become more personally invested in the work that they are doing. Secondly, Global Grassroots focuses on helping one of the most vulnerable groups, underserved women. These women lack the resources necessary to help their community yet they are the most deeply involved in it, therefore by helping them they will be able to bring the most help to the community. She also believes that the infrastructure that small grassroots projects need to be successful is not currently in place, therefore, that must be built. Finally, her social innovation plan is to help heal women who have been through trauma that prevents them from acting on the behalf of others. By helping to heal these women, they can be enabled to go out into their community and create more social change. It is possible that previous attempts to help grassroots programs have failed because they failed to take into account that the change agent must focus on themselves first and help those who are most deeply invested in