Dr. Natalie Bitatore moved her in-person women's workshops online during COVID using Facebook Live and saved videos. She founded Uketa to scale access to learning across Uganda, expanded it to include men, and chose the name because it means "to receive" in Japanese.
Hello, I'm Dr. Natalie Bitatore and today I wanted to tell you about why I started juketalearning.com Firstly, Covid. We used to do horror workshops before COVID in 2019. So like on a Saturday morning about 40 or 50 women will show up and I'll do like a goal setting workshop or a public speaking workshop. And sometimes I'd even invite like a guest speaker or guest who is more an expert in the topic than me and we'll do them in person. And they were really great and we really loved doing them. So when Covid happened, we had to move everything online and we started a Facebook group and I started doing them live. And then I'd do videos and because you could save the lives, sometimes someone will ask you a question and I'll be like, oh, I answered that question in this video. So I started pointing some of the ladies to the videos and from there it started to kind of flow because I'd remember the one I did last week and now we're building on that, then we're building on the next one. So in the end it was like having a course on Facebook. You watch the videos in sequence and then you have the new skill that we were talking about. I also really love online courses. I think for the last 10 years, at any given point I'm doing like one or two courses, especially self paced courses because of my schedule and time and traveling and trying to learn new skills because I'm always moving throughout different sectors. The easiest way I found to learn was doing online courses. Yeah, you can watch YouTube, you can listen to podcasts. I really like reading books. But there's something about a course where someone has been intentional about that curriculum to get you the information and the skills you need in that concise way that flows. So I've bought courses from lots of different sites. Usually it's foreign sites and I have to like try to understand and put it in my own context. How am I going to apply this in my own life? But I've been so grateful because I've learned so much from these experts who you would never get to meet in real time. Like I could never go for a workshop with James Clear or Tony Robbins or Marie Forleo. It's. It would be so expensive. I'd have to be in America. There's visas and travel and what. So. So when people like that have courses, you get access to them and their knowledge and their insight and their perspective in a formal way for not even a tenth of the price. So I was a big fan of online courses. So when we moved from in person to Facebook and then started doing videos and I started thinking, okay, let me make them into a course, it was exciting for me because then I got to be like the people I look up to so much, whose courses I've done, and now I get to share in that same way. And when you film the video, so many people can watch it, there's no limit. And so rather than me meeting ladies one on one, one on one, one on one, depending on my time, I was now able to send videos and share. And that's something I had experience doing from having a YouTube channel. And the final reason we started Uketa was because of discrimination. So much of the work that I do is with women and I was getting a lot of pushback from men online saying, it's not fair, we can't attend your events, we can't get coaching, we can't get mentorship. How are we supposed to learn from you? How do we ask you questions? How do we. And the only way I was doing that, honestly, is through social media. So I figured since the courses were doing so well with the women and we actually had a couple of men buy the HER courses because it was all branded her, it was on the HAR website, and still you'd have men buying the courses and then asking me for feedback. So I decided, why not? This is just knowledge. It's not like it's specific to women. The courses are so varied. There's so many different coaches, different ideas, different skills. And if men are going to benefit as well, why not? So that's why we launch it as a separate platform. We rebranded. Uketa means to receive in Japanese. I really love that word because I feel like it's easy to pronounce. And that's the energy of Uketa. It's about your learning and your growth. All of us as coaches, we've lived through these things. We have this experience. No one can take it away from us. But it's a beautiful thing if we can share it with someone who's also going to benefit from it. So the whole energy behind Yukita is for you to receive. Receive the knowledge that you need to apply in your own life and so that you can achieve your own goals and your own potential. So I'm very grateful that it's worked out how it worked out. Now I can please all the men who follow me as well. And also I'm very grateful that the coaches who have been on this journey with us understand that and they have the same attitude and the same passion and the same vibe. So I hope you can check out Chetta learning and benefit from it, too.
