A Message from Greg and Maureen Engle:
Please join us and our family in raising $48,712 for a furnished four-classroom school block for a village in Senale Tabia, Hintalo-Wajirat District, Tigray Region, Ethiopia. As the accompanying photo and video reflect, the need is painfully apparent. This campaign is in conjunction with A Glimmer of Hope’s Senale Integrated Community Development Program, which will include water, education, health and micro-irrigation projects. Our family spent ten years living in Africa (including two in Ethiopia), where Greg served as a U.S. diplomat and ambassador -- thus our concern for the continent and our affinity for this project.
Greg currently teaches courses at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and is also an Austin-based singer-songwriter. All proceeds from the purchase of his CD, “Take It Personally,” go to the Senale School Block Campaign until we reach our goal for this campaign. You can learn more about Greg's music or order a CD now. More about the project:
Under the Senale Integrated Community Development Program, Glimmer’s Ethiopian implementation partners – The Relief Society of Tigray and the Tigray Development Association – will undertake water, education, health and micro-irrigation projects totaling nearly $1 million. The Program will benefit 13,478 people in the target villages and 5,500 from neighboring communities. Consistent with Glimmer’s highly successful self-help model, the communities themselves will provide unskilled labor and locally available construction materials.
Happily, Glimmer has already secured funding for the Senale Program’s 27 water projects. Follow this link to see what the women in Senale’s drought-stricken target villages currently have to do just to obtain dirty, contaminated water: http://vimeo.com/13350454.
The critical need at this point is to fund the Senale Program’s education projects. This priority is consistent with teh Engle family's conviction, after many years in Africa, that education is the key to African development. Ethiopia and the people of Senale cannot pull themselves out of dire poverty unless they are literate and have the education and skills necessary to function effectively in a modern world that has rapidly closed in on them, raising demands and expectations.
Glimmer's implementation timeframe for the Senale Integrated Community Development Program is approximately 18 months from the construction start date. Its education goal for the Program is to "create an environment conducive to learning and reduce dropout rates to 2%."
Why A Glimmer of Hope?
We became aware of Donna and Phillip Berber and their Austin-based A Glimmer of Hope a few years ago. We were immediately attracted to Glimmer’s self-help model – finding out from communities what they need and providing grants that allow these communities to invest their sweat equity and achieve real results themselves. We were intimately involved in this type of assistance through the U.S. Ambassador’s Self-Help Funds in Malawi, South Africa (where Maureen was Self-Help Coordinator) and Togo.
Glimmer scored points with us in other ways:
• It invests 100% of every dollar it receives from donors in development projects. It covers all of its operating costs from its endowment.
• It has a track record of over 4000 completed projects reaching more than 2.5 million people. We also like the fact that it has focused on Ethiopia rather than spreading itself across several countries.
• Over the past two years, it has implemented an integrated model that takes a comprehensive approach to community development. Under this model, communities and their Ethiopian implementation partners address the need for clean water, schools and education, health facilities, micro-irrigation and other service at one time to achieve a greater, mutually reinforcing impact. Based on what we know about easy access to clean water and the ability of girls to attend schools, this strikes us as an eminently sensible approach.
For these reasons, we are confident that if we can raise $48,712 for a furnished four-classroom primary school block for Hidawdi or Gonok villages in Senale, Glimmer, its local partners and the community concerned will make sure that it happens and that the classrooms are put to good use.
Please help us provide hope to the people of Senale.
Many thanks to daughter Jessica Engle and the The Uniform Project in NYC for raising funds for this campaign during Jessica's January pilot project, and to superb Austin musicians Stephen Doster, Tommy Elskes, Moonlight Towers and Uncle Lucius for helping us raise funds at the School for Ethiopia benefit concert at Threadgill's on April 10. We really appreciate your commitment and support!
