- [email protected]
- P.O. Box 429, Drake CO 80515
Frequently Asked Questions
Menu
DONATIONS
The easiest way to give is to commit to giving just $1 every month through our Untold Dollar campaign.
Yes. Untold International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Colorado. If you pay taxes in the US, you can claim your donation.
If you need a donation receipt, please send an email to [email protected].
It depends on the donation method. Donations with PayPal are free for bank transfers, but incur a $0.33 fee for every $1 donated with a credit or debit card. For this reason, we strongly recommend using a linked bank account to donate through PayPal.
Yes. When signing up to give your Untold Dollar, you can give the equivalent of $1 US, or if you’re in the UK or EU, feel free to give £1 or €1.
Simply put, it’s a community of people who believe in empowering others through literacy and literature, and who each commit to giving $1 every month.
Of course, and we are so grateful for your generosity and support. We welcome every gift in equal measure, regardless of size. After all, a person who has $2 and gives $1 is just as generous as a person who has $1,000 and gives $500.
You can, and we’re very grateful for your support! That being said, we rely on recurring donations like the Untold Dollar to develop projects, curricula, and communities. For this reason, we ask that you consider also donating $1 each month with our Untold Dollar campaign.
100% of all donations go to empowering communities. This means that your donation – regardless of size – will immediately benefit real people through language, literacy, and literature.
Our work in Asisiriwa has created jobs, offered extracurricular activities for students, provided additional resources and workshops for adults, fostered community pride, and even created sustainable water conservation efforts. This work is only possible through the generosity and consistency of our donors.
Absolutely. We welcome you to connect with us on social media and share things that inspire you with your friends, or share your story with us through Untold Short Shorts, which are supporter-submitted short stories of up to 100 words.
Yes! If you would like to sponsor a book drive, send us an email or connect with us on social media. If you’d like to simply send a book or two to the library, we strongly recommend using Better World Books, which not only helps nonprofit organizations globally, but also offers free shipping to Ghana.
Our shipping address at the library is
Untold Ghana
DTD 30 Kumasi
Ashanti Region
Ghana
UNTOLD SHORT SHORTS
Simply fill out the submission form on the Untold Short Shorts page. For best results, follow the style guide provided in the submission form.
We publish every story we receive, so you won’t have to wait long before your story is on our website!
Our word limit for every Untold Short Short is 100 words. It doesn’t have to be that long, but it cannot be longer.
It’s short and sweet, and definitely a challenge! Check out our archives for some inspiration.
Absolutely! You can submit poetry, stories, anecdotes, or other writings. The only rule is that all submissions must be no longer than 100 words.
Yes. If you wish to submit anonymously, leave the name field blank. Otherwise, fill in whatever name you’d like us to use with your Short Short. Special characters are allowed.
Untold Short Shorts can be submitted in any language. So far, we have received submissions in English, Kiswahili, and even some con-langs!
After you hit “submit” on the submission form, your story will be sent to our editors for review. They will check it for length, clarity, and ensure it does not contain hate speech. If you did not specify a title for your submission, they will also create one for you. Then your piece will be published on our website and may be featured on our social media.
That is 100% your choice! We publish every submission we receive on our website, but you have the choice to let us feature your story or not.
Opt out of being a featured storyteller by un-checking the box at the bottom of the submission form next to “My story can be featured.”
If you decide after submitting your story that you don’t want it featured, you can send us an email at [email protected] and we will take care of the rest.
It depends. Our editors do check for length, clarity, and hate speech, and may choose an appropriate title for your piece. Our editors reserve the right to make any changes deemed appropriate. However, we are not censors. 90% of our editing is simply shortening submissions by 1-2 words.
If, for any reason, our editors cannot shorten your submission without maintaining its clarity or artfulness (which may happen with poetry), we will contact you to request a resubmission.
If your submission is rejected due to hate speech or inappropriate content, we will contact you to let you know. So far, this has never happened.
OUR VALUES
Absolutely. From the beginning, Untold International has been focused on the idea that Ghanaian plights must be solved by Ghanaian people using Ghanaian solutions. Kasadwini Atenaeɛ is designed to be a community space, that belongs 100% to the community. While both founders were born and raised in the United States, the organization and project are firmly rooted in Ghana, and are represented by two local librarians and a local board.
Yes–100%. We have been privileged and honored to be welcomed into Asisiriwa with open arms, and the community has provided much of the infrastructure we would have needed to cover with overhead, including housing for our founders for the 8-month (or more) duration of their volunteer work. Because of this, 100% of donations go toward the project.
This question seems strange for us to answer, but we do our best to use our privilege as a nonprofit organization based out of the United States to provide a platform for less privileged voices. Our goal is to “give a blank page to the unheard,” meaning that rather than try to speak for the communities we aim to assist and collaborate with, we want to give them the resources and skills to speak for themselves. This is so central to our mission that we emphasize the importance of providing literacy education and resources in the local language to the communities we seek to serve, as we believe that innovation is easiest and most effective when it doesn’t have to be translated. If you believe we are falling short or failing in this endeavor, please let us know.
The answer to this is unequivocally yes. By partnering with local communities and seeking to collaborate with local leaders like Professor Kofi Agyekum of the University of Ghana, we are coming alongside an already growing movement toward the decolonization of language and education in Africa, and are working toward a more informed, more literate, and more connected African continent–while still recognizing and respecting the differences each language community, nation, kingdom, and culture has to offer.
ABOUT UNTOLD INTERNATIONAL
Untold International was founded in December 2014 by Brady Blackburn and Kaitlyn Blackburn (nee Medina). It began as an organization fiscally sponsored by the Center for Personal and Relationship Counseling in Wheat Ridge, CO. In 2015, we broke ground on our first literacy center project in Asisiriwa, Ghana. In 2017, we became our own registered nonprofit. In February 2020, the organization registered Untold Ghana with the Ghanaian Registrar General.
Untold International collaborates with communities and individuals to provide literacy education and resources, locally-sourced and locally-relevant literature, and multilingual extracurricular education for learners of all ages.
Our focus has been and continues to be in rural West Africa, specifically Ghana. More specifically, we have partnered with the community of Asisiriwa in the Ashanti Region to build and operate a literacy center housing a library, a covered amphitheater, and a classroom offering courses for children and adults in both English and Twi.
We are hoping to expand our efforts into the north of Ghana soon.
The organization’s primary method is to build language arts centers in underserved rural communities that are specifically interested in linguistic or literacy education. These centers are equipped with libraries full of appropriate and relevant books, amphitheaters for community events, and classrooms for language arts classes in multiple languages. They are run by trained local staff members who strive to make the language arts a matter of community engagement. Untold International currently has one completed center in Asisiriwa, Ashanti, Ghana and is scouting locations for a second. The organization also plans to start publishing in Ghanaian languages in the future.
The short answer is that one of the founders, Brady Blackburn, fell in love with the country while studying abroad there. Untold International needed a place to start and Ghana offered a peaceful, friendly environment with needs that matched up with the organization’s mission: namely, rural areas with neglected local languages and a lack of access to reading materials and educational resources.
The founders of Untold International, Brady and Kaitlyn, spent two months traveling around Ghana scouting locations and interviewing communities about their needs. Many communities were happy to “let” a foreign NGO do whatever they wanted, but Untold was founded on the notion that it would only work in partnership with communities that wanted to help themselves – to do things with communities and not for them. Brady and Kaitlyn were then personally introduced to Asisiriwa by Professor Kofi Agyekum, a renowned linguist on the Akan language, champion of education in Ghana, and native of the village. After a thoughtful traditional council with the chief and elders of Asisiriwa, Untold International entered into a partnership with the village wherein both parties work for the betterment of the language arts center, Kasadwini Atenaeɛ, which provides educational opportunities for the people of Asisiriwa.
VOLUNTEERING
We currently don’t have the necessary infrastructure to offer volunteer opportunities in Ghana, but if you’d like to volunteer where you are, get in contact with us and we’ll find a solution together!
There are a couple of options for getting involved that don’t involve money. Here are just a couple ideas:
– Submit an Untold Short Short
– Share our posts and videos on social media
– Become a pen pal (coming soon!)
– Join our Advisory Committee
– Organize a book drive
