Foster Creativity & Play for a Brighter Future

Written by Kara Stewart Fortier

Have you ever heard the quote, “Be the person you needed when you were younger”? This quote by Ayesha Siddiqi is embodied in the work of Rita Ezenwa-Okoro. Rita lives in Lagos, Nigeria and is the Founder and Lead Visionary of Street Project Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that uses creative arts and performing arts tools to facilitate opportunities for youth employment, social mobilization and cross-cultural dialogue in Nigeria.

Just like a lot of people around the world, kids in Nigeria aren’t encouraged to pursue creativity. It doesn’t put food on the table. Or does it? That’s what Street Project Foundation is all about. Even in a country that has one of the highest rates of poverty in the world, she’s proving that the creative arts can carve out a pathway to exciting career paths for the kids who go through her programs.

I’ve recently raised my hand to become a mentor to a young writer through her foundation. In this episode, we talk about what mentorship and international dialogue means for young people in today’s ever-changing world.

Meet Rita Ezenwa-Okoro

In addition to Street Project Foundation, Rita is the Principal Communications Consultant of ROC Strategic Communications, a marketing communications company focused on providing world-class communication services to growing businesses and development organizations. She triples and quadruples as a business coach and digital marketing trainer with a bias for women-owned businesses.

Rita is a Mandela Washington Fellow of the Young African Leaders Intiative (YALI), a program of the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. She is also a global fellow of the prestigious International Society of the Performing Arts (ISPA) New York. Rita is the recipient of the Lagos State award of excellence in youth and social development, the Extraordinary Women Award in France, and Next Generation Leaders Award. She recently graduated from the East Side Institute, New York, USA where she studied Social Therapeutics.

Rita has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Creative Arts from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. A master’s degree in media and Communications from the School of Media and Communications, Pan-Atlantic University, Nigeria and a Certificate in Civic Leadership from Tulane University, New Orleans, in the US. Recently, she wrote her first Op-Ed titled; Is a new world being created? It’s an opinion piece that uses the analogy of a broken bottle to buttress her thoughts about the emergence of a new social construct due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Show Links

Listen Now!

Check out this 54-second clip from Rita’s interview:

Visit Street Project Foundation's Website

“Beyond just being in the performing arts, it’s what the performing arts does for you. How does the performing arts develop you? The performing arts helped develop my communication skills, my team building skills, my critical thinking skills. All soft skills necessary for the world of work. “

-Rita Ezenwa-Okoro