Provide Job Skills to Kenyan Slum Youth

Dear friends,

We at the Shauri Yako Community Youth Support Centre are so excited to share with you that we have reached a huge milestone - we are now within $1000 of our fundraising target for this project. 

This will be our final quarterly update to you - our generous donors - for this project. Can you help us make a final push and achieve our goal? In the coming month, we will share a new project and objective through Global Giving and hope that you can continue to help us to empower the impoverished youth from the slums in Nyeri County, Kenya. 

You may recall that we are a very small grassroots charity, founded when a local grandmother opened the doors to her home to give local kids reprieve from the streets. We rely entirely on the donations of friends and supporters but accomplish a lot. With Global Giving-raised funding, we have:

• offered many rounds of job skills training in high demand trades like tailoring, welding and masonry
• rebuilt our drop-in centre to make it structurally sound and keep the doors open to youth
• installed 2 flush toilets in a community where up to 30 people shared each pit-latrine
• built a computer lab
• offered ongoing soccer, Scouting and music and theatre programming to give youth an outlet and confidence
• provided ongoing reproductive health education to prevent high rates of teen pregnancy, STDs and violence against girls.
• Started an informal school to help give little kids who cannot afford to attend school a shot at an education.

We hope you feel proud - because we do!

As we wrap up this project, we take we'd like to share a few highlights from this past quarter:

Health Education:

• Together with Nyeri Scouts Association, we organized 3 health education workshops focused on reproductive health, STDs, HIV and drug use, attended by 270 youth age 18 to 30 years. 

• We collaborated with CITAM Church in March to offer a free medical checkup and treatment for the people of Shauri Yako and beyond. We'd love to make this an annual event - so if you are or know of a a doctor or can donate to support us, please reply to this email.

Skills training:

• 4 youth who recently completed our six-month masonry course and internship secured jobs with the China Road Construction Company. By helping us reaching our final fundraising goal, you will help us cover the cost of travel allowances for participants and workman’s complementation insurance. 

Informal school:

• The school continues to run at capacity with 48 children attending. We are grateful to the members of our community who have donationed used books, chairs and sports equipment and time to teach the children.

We thank you and bless you for all that you do to help give the kids we support a better chance.

Kind wishes,

Joe Mwai