Hello Echoers!

I'm turning 40 this month!

For my 40th birthday, I want to help make the world a better place and I need your help! I'm trying to raise "4000 for 40". We've launched a fundraiser on Facebook that hit 1700 dollars in the first day! Thanks to all of you who have already contributed!

For the last 10 years, we've been supporting my friend Esther Kanu in Sierra Leone who founded her own school for vulnerable women and girls in 1996 during the Sierra Leone Civil War. I met Esther when working overseas and we've been friends ever since. With your past donations, we've seen over 500 women graduate from the school during this last decade. This is one of the most recent graduation photos from this past Spring!

Graduating class at most recent Spring graduation. (Note that they do class years differently than in North America so their sashes say class of 2019 because that was the year they started not the year they are going to graduate)

We're heading into the Fall 2021 school season and rent is due on the building that is currently housing Esther's school. It's one annual payment which gets the school through another year of operation and frees them up to invest money earned by the school itself, through catering and tailoring contracts, back into school programs. We need to raise 5500USD total. I think we can do it.

Esther speaking at this past Spring's Graduation

If you know me through my other online work, you know that I'm typically posting online about space exploration. But ultimately, THIS is why I love talking about the cosmos so much – the perspective that space exploration brings when looking back at our own world. We all share this planet and its fate. The education of women is key in the fight against climate change, strengthens democracy, and ultimately improves the lives of fellow humans in one of the most difficult places in the world to live. Help me make this planet a bit better on my most recent orbit around the Sun.

Thank you all for your consideration and for your past donations. We are not a large community of donors and so EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU has – and IS – making a tremendous impact in another part of the world.

-Matthew

You can donate using the website donation form:

Donate Today!

Or to our ongoing Facebook Fundraiser:

You accomplished this. At the end of this past April, you helped an entire new class of students graduate from the Women in Action Development Project in Sierra Leone. Because of your donations over the past year, another 50 young women have a better education and a much better chance to find employment in one of the most challenging places in the world to live. Look at these pictures. These graduates are up there because of your support. Once again, thank you so very much. Together, and with Esther’s leadership, we helped put another class through school.

I have THREE other awesome updates coming soon but will leave these with you for now - a class of graduating students and the woman whom many of them look up to like a mother.

As always, your continued support keeps Women in Action open. Please consider donating as we begin aiming for the 2019/2020 school season.

-Matthew

Donate Toward the 2019/2020 School Season