The Songornya United Youth Club

The Songornya United Youth Club is a youth theater group that has been organizing and performing for the past three and a half years. The group focuses on issues of HIV/AIDS and Sexual Health, and has performed at least 20 dramas in at least 10 different communities, and has facilitated 5 community education programs and one 5-day HIV/AIDS workshop for primary school children. The group's guiding principles are inclusive democracy, unbridled creativity, and one man no chop unity (one man no chop means that one person does not eat alone).

The Club began in the spring of 2002 as a group of middle school students who organized themselves as a theater group. Their first drama (written by them) took the school administration by surprise, and then the community of Bornikope by storm a few days later. It was brilliant - hilarious yet seriously informative. In the next few years, the group continued to practice, write, organize and perform more dramas in different communities on a variety of topics including malaria, girl-child education, HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy, peer pressure, drug abuse, and sexual health in relation to poverty. During the year of 2005, the Songornya United Youth Club took part in trainings facilitated by Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana (a leading HIV/AIDS youth education organization), and then went on to facilitate two community education programs, to act a teenage pregnancy film, to design and facilitate the 5-day HIV/AIDS training for 60 primary school children, to perform two new dramas in new locations, to speak on the local radio station, to record two dramas that were played on the radio, to democratically draft a constitution and bylaws, to register with the local government as a Community-Based Organization, to apply for funding from the Ghana AIDS Commission for all 2006 programs (unfortunately the promised funding was cut), and to attend an HIV/AIDS Counseling Workshop held at the Voluntary Counseling and Testing Center at the local hospital. The group is unprecedented in their effectiveness to educate the youth about HIV/AIDS in the Dangme East District, Ghana.