Blog #12: Gailey, Haile, Hess

Three of our 15 recipients for the spring AllPeopleBeHappy Volunteer Service Award are Rebecca Gailey, Robel Haile, and Allison Hess. Rebecca Gailey will be receiving her 2^nd Volunteer Service Award grant.   In late 2013 she traveled to Kayanga,Tanzania with Amizade to kick-off a school breaks program in arts and science she designed to give children the opportunity to build a foundation of leadership, creativity and critical thinking skills. In order to insure the successful continuation of “The Ota Initiative,” Rebecca will be returning to Kayanga for the summer session to fine tune the project and to insure that Tanzanian staff have the information and material they need to run the program. Robel Haile, recipient of a fall 2013 Volunteer Service Award, traveled to Gondar, Ethiopia to build a school after raising funds though an organization he founded called Bottles For Poverty, which collects funds by redeeming recyclables. The school they built now serves 200 impoverished students.   Robel was awarded an additional Volunteer Service Award grant to return to Gondar to add 2 wells to the school with funds raised by Bottles for Poverty. Alison Hess will spend this summer in Rwanda volunteering with Indego Africa (IA). She has been interning in IA’s New York office since August, 2013, and will be in Kigali, Rwanda to help launch IA’s Leadership Academy, to work with the Rwandan country director to streamline their financial record keeping system, and to conduct IA’s annual social impact study of its 18 partner cooperatives.