Newsletter · Published October 15, 2026
Ẹ káàbọ̀ sí kiláàsì wa! Welcome, royal descendants. October marks a homecoming: live classes resume this month, and behind the scenes the program has grown sturdier — a new partnership page, a fully first-party enrollment pipeline, and search visibility restored where it matters most. Here is everything that changed, and what it means for your learning journey.
📚 Classes Resume: Unit 6 — Grammar with Ifá Wisdom
This month we return to live instruction and step into Unit 6: Practical Grammar-in-Use. The unit takes the vocabulary and sentence patterns built across Units 1–5 and deepens them through grammar taught with òwe (proverbs), oríkì (praise poetry), and Ifá wisdom — because in the Yorùbá worldview, grammar is not a set of mechanical rules but a reflection of how the language carries knowledge, culture, and spirit.
Students will work through SVO sentence patterns, adjective placement, the instrumental use of fi, tense and time markers, and question formation — each anchored to a proverb or Ifá verse. The unit closes with practice exercises that have students build their own oríkì and compose simple Ifá-style verses using vocabulary from earlier units.
"Bí a bá fẹ́ sọ̀rọ̀ bí ọmọ ilẹ̀ Yorùbá, a gbọ́dọ̀ kọ́ gírámà tó ní ọgbọ́n" — If we want to speak like native Yorùbá people, we must learn grammar that has wisdom.
Live sessions continue on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with two time slots to fit different schedules: 5:30 PM and 9:00 PM EST. If you have been away, this is a natural re-entry point — Unit 6 builds directly on material from Units 1–5, and recorded sessions plus study guides are available for every unit, so a late start never means a lost start.
🤝 A New Door for Partners and Sponsors
This month we published a dedicated Partners & Sponsors page — the first place on the site where temples, schools, community organizations, and academic institutions can see exactly how to support diaspora Yorùbá education. Tuition keeps the program running; partners determine how far it can reach.
- Temple & Institutional Licensing — a managed learning environment for your temple, school, or cultural organization, from $50/month for 5 seats, with a shared instructor dashboard, centralized billing, and optional custom curriculum injection for your lineage.
- Community Sponsorship — fund individual learners or entire cohorts who cannot afford monthly tuition, with priority fit for youth and heritage-family learners and progress reporting back to sponsors.
- Academic & Cultural Collaboration — curriculum collaboration, guest instruction, and shared research on diaspora language transmission for universities and cultural institutions.
The page also names our current partners. We are proud to feature Ancestral Egbe — founded and led by Baba HeruMaakhet Ojegbile Neb-Shakara, Head Priest of the Pan African Ancestral Egbe, co-founded in 2012 — whose teaching that the community is healed by developing the individual and the family aligns directly with our family-learning model. Beyond the community link, Baba Shakara serves the program directly as business consultant and educator, advising on strategy, temple liaison work, and the development of this website. A full partner profile for Baba Shakara now lives on the About hub, alongside the program's other leadership and credibility voices.
If your organization has been looking for a structured, elder-endorsed Yorùbá program to bring to your community — or a learner to sponsor — the door is now clearly marked.
📝 Enrollment, Rebuilt From the Ground Up
One of the biggest behind-the-scenes upgrades of the season: enrollment no longer routes through external forms. The /enroll page is now the program's first-party application pipeline — track selection, Stripe Checkout for paid tracks, the Odù Ifá application flow, and private-lesson scheduling all live on our own site.
Just as important, the notification system behind it was rebuilt and verified end-to-end in production. When an application arrives, the student receives a confirmation and the Program Director receives an action-required alert — each delivered exactly once, with automatic fallback if the primary email service ever has an outage. Administrators also gained a new enrollments dashboard with filtering and CSV export, so no application sits unseen.
For prospective students, the practical meaning is simple: applying is faster, confirmations arrive reliably, and a real person follows up.
🔍 Found in Search: Visibility Fixes
A full-scope site audit in early October surfaced several issues that had quietly hidden important pages from search engines — all now fixed and verified live:
- The /enroll page — our main conversion page — had been invisible to search engines since April. It is now indexed and present in the sitemap, so learners searching for Yorùbá classes can actually find the door.
- Three About pages (Accessible Education, Cultural Preservation, Spiritual Connection) were missing canonical tags; each now declares its own address correctly.
- The homepage now carries complete FAQ structured data for all eight questions visitors actually see, and social-media link previews were upgraded from a square image to a proper branded 1200×630 card.
These fixes matter because every learner who finds us through a search is someone the program can teach — visibility is not vanity; it is reach.
👨👩👧👦 New Guide: Yorùbá for Children & Heritage Families
One of the most common questions we receive is from parents: "Can my children learn too?" We now have an honest, dedicated guide. It explains what family learning with the program actually looks like — starting from Unit 1's greetings and family vocabulary, the exact words a household uses daily — and how the program's Àkàkà/Kẹtum-tum buddy structure maps naturally onto parents and older children studying as partners.
The guide is direct about what the program is and is not: the curriculum is written for teen and adult learners, and younger children do best as participants in a parent's study — hearing the language, joining greetings, repeating vocabulary — rather than as independently enrolled students. A companion refresh of our Yorùbá for the Diaspora guide ties both together for heritage households.
"Ìmọ̀ ní ń sọ ọmọdé di àgbà" — Knowledge transforms a child into an elder. The language a child hears at home becomes the language they can one day pass on.
🛡️ Stewardship and Integrity
October also brought a season of housekeeping done with care. The program's public materials now credit teaching and stewardship accurately: all classes are taught by Olùkọ́ Ifakolade Sangodamilare, with the program operating under the cultural stewardship of Chief Àràbà Awódìran Àyìndé Ọ̀kánlàwọ́n Agboọlá, Senior Global Ambassador of Ifá and Asoju Awo Agbaye of Ile Oodua. Curriculum worksheets, flyers, and program documents were aligned to this standard across the board.
We also restored the reliability of the site's own foundations — resolving a hosting billing interruption and a deployment-branch misconfiguration that had briefly stalled updates, then verifying every pending improvement was live in production. The lesson we keep: a program teaching precision must practice it.
💻 The Digital Toolkit: Ifá Scribe
The Ifá Scribe toolkit — E-Scribe for tonal transcription, E-Orator for hearing verses spoken with correct tone, and E-Companion for 24/7 study support — continues to anchor study between live sessions. Unit 6's grammar focus makes it especially useful: transcribe a proverb, hear its tones spoken aloud, and ask the Companion why the sentence is built the way it is. The toolkit comes with course enrollment or stands alone from $5/month.
🗓️ What's Ahead
Unit 6 runs through October with Week 21 opening on professions and occupations, followed by travel and transportation, health and wellness, and a final review and test in Week 24. Beyond Unit 6, the roadmap includes deeper conversational mastery and the living language of media and modern Yorùbá. For partners: institutional licensing conversations are open, and sponsor-visible progress reporting is part of the model.
Ready to take the next step? Join our live sessions, explore the new partners page, or book a private consultation for focused pronunciation and grammar support.
Classes are resuming now — choose your track and join the October cohort.
📝 Enroll in ClassesTemples, schools, and sponsors: see the three ways to partner with the program.
🤝 Explore PartnershipsAlready enrolled? Unlock the full Ifá Scribe toolkit for transcription, translation, and pronunciation practice.
🚀 Activate Ifá Scribe AccessBring this into practice
The Yorùbá Language Program pairs live instruction, private lessons, and digital tools so language recovery becomes a repeatable practice rather than a loose intention.