Repairing Girl's Shelter after Flood, Sierra Leone

Dear Donors, Colleagues, Friends and Family:

Thanks to the generous contributions from all of you over the last few years that has enabled us to build a shelter for abused girls in Sierra Leone, helped women and girls who were subjected to emotional, physical and sexual abuse to recover and increase our bed capacity from 12 beds to 32 over the past year.

We finished the new shelter and helped reduce the incidence of sexual abuse among girls: 312 in 2016; 230 in 2017 and 201 in 2018.

We have improved the nutritional status of abused girls through regular feeding; we did flood prevention work by building a culvert, shelving for perishables and reinforced the well.

We opened a nursery in concert with another NGO (One Day) to allow pregnant girls at our shelter to give birth with medical support and learn how to provide their child pre- and post-natal care.

To increase communication with international organizations, we built a router tower and got working internet at the shelter. This was important since the shelter is located outside the central town of Bo.

Developed a monitoring system to track parent and caregiver responsiveness to their children's health and wellness needs.

Our needs have increased:  We need to raise $20,000 to meet our goals for 2019.

This amount will help support the shelter throughout 2019 and continue providing trainings locally in Sierra Leone; buy farming equipment such as seeds, gardening tools, cassava graters and refrigerators; and install solar panels as a way for the shelter to have reliable electricity.

On behalf of commit+act Board, we are grateful for your support and hopeful that you will continue to have our shelter in mind for whatever contribution you can give us and help us move forward with our mission.

In gratitude,

Jennifer Nardozzi, PsyD

Board Member and U.S. Representative