Failing Forward: Turning our mistake into a lesson learned Earlier this year, we visited Stepanakert, NKR, and our team grew very passionate about health opportunities available to all, regardless of financial ability. We met with a local non-profit, people in the area, and FAR experts to launch Healthy Hearts. The project aimed to introduce a public fitness alternative to those in Stepanakert, where smoking and other unhealthy habits prevail. At the end of our usual allotted 90-day fundraising period, Healthy Hearts collected less than 10% of the targeted goal. Though much of this was fundraised within Armenia, an incredible feat of itself, we failed to gain traction among Armenians in the diaspora.

We at Ayo! clearly failed to find the best way communicating the benefits of an outdoor gym to the whole community. However, we are passionate about these issues and need to make sure that the benefits of projects like these are well communicated. For the future we pledge to not only further support local non-profits who want to advocate healthier lifestyle choices in Armenia but to also clarify its benefits to the diaspora worldwide. As a start we are going to launch a newsletter series in January highlighting organizations and campaign in Armenian that are dedicated to this cause.

Furthermore, we launched our next project that promoted healthy lifestyle, Breathe Freely. Breathe Freely will launch an anti-second hand smoking campaign in Yerevan, raising awareness about the harmful effects of second-hand smoke on children and non-smokers. During fundraising, we were sure to work closely with FAR’s field experts and the breadth of our social media outlets to communicate the enormous impact our project will have.Breathe Freely, in turn, gained so much traction that it was fundraised for in merely 10 days–a new record! We said Ayo! to turning our failure into success and learning from our past mistakes!