Hello everyone, and happy almost February. We have some great news for you and we hope, as ever, that you will go to our students’ pages to read all the updates about them.

Our first piece of great news is that we have accepted a new student from Kenya! Her name is Mercy Mueni, and she is studying in Form 3. Mercy is from a Masai village. Unfortunately, her father is very ill and does not always have the money to send her to school. When that happens, children are forced to leave school for as long as it takes to come up with the money, sometimes months or even a year. Mercy is 19 and in a grade that is behind her age, but despite missing so many classes, she is consistently at the top of her class, and she has big dreams. The hard thing is that Mercy is of an age where, if she can’t stay in school, she will be forced to return home and be married. After reading her application for a scholarship, the board felt very strongly that this is a young woman we need to support. The only application she had was our post-secondary application, since our contact Shannon didn’t have the regular one. But Mercy took the time and made the effort to fill out all the questions and her responses are really lovely. We’ve posted them on her page, and we hope you’ll take the time to read them.

Also from the African side of our work, we have accepted Jenipha Anselm and Jenipha Joseph for post-secondary scholarships! Jeni A. is in her second year of Biomedical Equipment Engineering (we did not even know there was such a thing!), and she is doing so well. After a bit of a rocky start socially, she has become everyone’s favorite and is now Class Prefect! And Jeni J. just started teaching college to become an Educational Technician. She wants to help other students feel supported, and she will be just the type of teacher who will do that, we are certain. Their answers for the post-secondary application are also posted on their pages, and they are also very impressive. Please check them out!

Mercy Mueni

Lovely young woman, off to school!

Beautiful Jeni in December 2022

One bit of sadder news is that one of our board members, Heather Mowl, had to leave the board due to time constraints. She is working really hard and just didn’t have the time or energy to give to the foundation. We will miss her kind energy and we hope that she will continue to be involved when she can. She has always been such a huge help in our fundraisers, and we thank her immensely for that help. If you’d like to be a part of ourorganization as a board member, please let us know!

Speaking of fundraisers, if you are going to be in the Flagstaff area on April 30, 2023, we will be holding our Global Market for Girls’ Education in Heritage Square from 10 am to 4 pm. Please come join us and see what the students and teachers of NAU and the Flagstaff Unified School District have created to sell or to delight our eyes and ears with dance and music. If you can’t make it out here for the event, we will be holding our annual online fundraiser for the month of March (our founding month and the month of International Women’s Day), so we hope you’ll pass that information along to people who would like to support women’s education! We’ll post more about that in a few weeks.

As ever, thank you for your support. These students are doing great things and it is because of you that they are able to!

Birgit, Christa, Janeece, Leslie, and Meghan