Last night at the 2010 Do Something Awards, 23-year-old Jessica Posner won $100,000 to continue and expand her amazing work in Kenya.
When she went to Kenya at age 20, Jessica witnessed the extreme poverty in Kibera, the country’s largest slum. 1.5 million people live in this area the size of Central Park with no clean water, no electricity, and no schools.
In Kibera, 66% of girls routinely trade sex for food by the age of 16. Many begin as early as six years old. Only 8% of all girls in Kibera ever have the chance to go to school.
In 2009, Jessica co-founded (with Kennedy Obede, the first person to leave Kibera and attend a four-year accredited college) the Shining Hope for Communities, a non-profit that builds tuition-free girls schools. In founding the Kibera School for Girls in 2009, they built the first free school and the only school for girls in Kibera. The school has already helped over 5,700 residents gain education and employment.
Shining Hope for Communities strives to change the patterns of gender inequity and poverty in Kibera. They “combat intergenerational cycles of poverty and gender inequality by linking tuition-free schools for girls to essential social services in Kenya’s Kibera slum through a holistic, community-driven approach. By concretely linking essential health and economic services to a school for girls, it demonstrates that benefiting women benefits the whole community, cultivating a community ethos that makes women respected members of society.”
Together, with the local people, the group is working to build a community center that will provide social services to the entire Kibera community. The $100,000 will go a long way toward creating even more change.
The progress so far is a shining hope for education and social reform in Kenya.
Eric D. Dawson believes that in order to create a world where people live in peace, you must start with children. He founded Peace First with the idea that, if we can eradicate violence from our schools, we can build from there.
Dawson says the first step is changing the way we view children. Usually, adults quickly assume command when a fight breaks out at school. They divide the kids into categories: perpetrators, victims, and witnesses, and dish out punishments. But this approach fails to engage the students as problem solvers, so little improves in the long run.
Peace First strives to empower and teach kids to be peacemakers. For almost 20 years, the organization has taught techniques of nonviolence to tens of thousands of elementary and middle school kids in the U.S. and abroad. “School culture” completely changes, and the students become peacemakers.
Photo by Jessica McWade
“Kids get Peace First as a class every year from kindergarten to eighth grade taught by young adult mentors from the community. We do intensive work with classroom teachers to focus on their work with kids, [as well as] with the school principal to focus on the school culture and climate.
They spend the first half of the year learning the concepts: fairness, perspective-taking, empathy. In the second half of the year, they apply it to community problem-solving. So by January we’ll have thousands of kids who will go out into their communities and make a difference.”
World peace one school at a time.