A Brighter Future for Ghanaian Teenagers

Dear followers,

We hope you had a great start to the New Year and we wish you a lot of luck, love and adventures.

At Meet Kate, we had a wonderful end of the year 2014. Board member Kiymet Schipper and chair of the board Myrthe Oostenbach went to Ghana for two special reasons. To visit Meet Kate's project, but first and foremost, to attend founder and director Kelly de Vries' wedding. On December 20th, she married Maxwell Asempapa Adosu, it was a wonderful day! Of course, Meet Kate couldn't miss out. All our employees and children from the MKCH travelled in a big bus from Ekwamkrom to the capital Accra to join in with the festivities. After the ceremony Kelly and Maxwell were surprised with a fantastic musical performance. 

Since the foundation of Meet Kate (2006), education has been one of our most important pillars. Even now, with our focus on sustainability and self-reliance, education still plays a big role in our foundation.

TEACH THE TEACHERS

The project we're starting up in 2015 is therefore called Teach the Teachers. This project gives our teachers the opportunity to get a professional education. The 3-year program is expensive for new teachers, but it offers great perspective after finishing it. We see a lot of potential in our teachers and we are convinced the course will bring more quality to our educational program. Thanks to fantastic donations by Foundation KenD, ZijActief & ZLTO and the Lionsclub in Voorburg, we can offer our motivated teachers a scholarship. So far, seven of our teachers and one accountant have applied for the project, of which the admission will be this month.

SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM

Our high school students are doing very well! After exams Kelly was called by one of our Senior High School students: the results were in and Benjamin had passed his exams! His grades were even high enough to enter university. Unfortunately, we are not able to offer our students a university scholarship, but we hope that with hard work and perhaps a helping-hand, they will be granted with the future they desire and deserve. We are always open to and would very much appreciate your help as a sponsor. Since the scholarship project is still fully funded by foreign sponsors - and is not able to run independently - we will not accept any new students this year and will end this program once our last scholars graduate, in three years’ time.

However, any further donations are still welcomed and will make up our ‘sustainability pot’. This will essentially provide a savings account for the foundation to use towards its self-reliance projects e.g. the cocoa plantation and poultry farm, or any unexpected costs which may occur once the foundation is left to stand on its own feet.

Back in England, the members of the UK board, Naa, Guy and myself, have settled in to our new ‘home’ where we will complete the next stage of our university course. With a new city comes lots of new opportunities! Having made good connections and raised funds with the students and people of Exeter, we were not prepared to stop there and are working hard to spread the word to yet more lovely people. In fact, we have already linked up with the university’s Afro-Caribbean society who will be running a cultural showcase this spring in aid of Meet Kate. It promises to be a fun night and we are very excited!

Despite this new outreach, we are forever grateful to all our followers and previous donors. We have not forgotten you! This weekend, the students of Peninsula Medical School will be celebrating making it half way through their course and they have chosen us as one of their ball charities. We are delighted to know that they still hold us in their hearts after all they have already done for us.

We hope you have all had a cosy winter and enjoy the Spring rays that are to come!

Best wishes, 

Rebecca. 

Hi lovely followers!

I recently came back from Ghana and I am so happy to report to you that, our team in Ghana remains phenomenal, (not that we doubted them for one second). Our vision has always been for Meet Kate in Ghana to be self-reliant, independent of support from the west and we are so excited that we are getting closer to that becoming a realisation.
The children and young people we support are at the centre of the work that we do and when I arrive at Meet Kate in Ghana, this is immediately obvious to me. I should be used to it now, but it never fails to warm my heart. It is always so good to see the children. They grow so quickly, and their energy is infectious. Here I attach a short clip for you to enjoy.
The people I was really interested in though were the scholarship students, because as you know, they are Meet Kate UK’s focus. And we now have our first group of Alumni! Many of them were home with their families after a long, seemingly endless exam period. But I did get to catch up with Philip, who lives in the Meet Kate Children’s home. We took a walk together and he filled me in on what was happening in his life after exams.
Phillip is a charming, kind young man and acts like an older brother to all the kids in our home. He takes this role very seriously and we are very proud of the hard work he put into final year. We trust him completely and to show him that we believe in his dream, we have now employed him in a small role at Meet Kate. With your help, he majored in business studies in Senior High School and wants to be an accountant.
Of course we already have a regular accountant, but we have now given Philip a small role where he keeps check on the accounts and reports to our accountant, who also mentors him on the side. We are sure that this is the just the start of great things to come for Philip and we are so excited to be a part of his journey.
It was just one year ago that we took the Global Giving UK challenge to raise £2000 in one month and with your help we were able to raise more than that. Where has the year gone? As Christmas comes round again, we hope you will remember us as you do your Christmas shopping. Why not make a donation to us on behalf of someone else? It will be a nice present for them and definitely for us too!
We hope you are enjoying the last few days of autumn as winter begins to creep in. Surround yourself in warmth and love and thank you once again for being our friend.

Till next time
Naa