There have been some new developments here at LeapingStone, and I am excited to be able to tell you about them:

First, to date, we have raised over $29,000.  With only ~$2000.00 left in our goal to complete the first phase, there is still time for you to contribute to this very important project.

Second, the board of directors and I have made a decision on the contractor we will be using to build the school in Dèdèké, Togo.  His name is Laté (Ruben) Lawson-Lartego and he works for Care International.

Ruben Will Lead the Building Effort on the Ground

Ruben has worked in development in Togo for twelve years and brings a high level of confidence to the project that it will be completed on time and on budget.

He also has an organization in Togo, Affordable Housing Owned by Everyone, A.H.O.E.   He is well aware of the needs of the village, and the difficulties in doing philanthropic work.  We are lucky to have him on board.

Third, the board and I have decided to break the school building project into three phases:  Phase I will consist of drilling a well that will be used for construction purposes and then finished to provide clean drinking water to the citizens of Dèdèké, pouring the foundation for six classrooms, and finishing three classrooms.

We have enough money to start phase I as soon as possible.  We only need to raise another $2,000.  As of today, we think the well could be started by the end of March.  Weather permitting, we could conceivably start the construction on the school itself in April; however, we may have to wait until August to begin building the school.  Thankfully, Ruben’s commitment to excellence and the wisdom of the LeapingStone Board has foreseen the seasonal complications that might arise and accounted for contingencies in the project time line.  We are soooooo lucky to have such a smart and talented team to make this building project finally happen!

As always, your contributions are vital to the success of this project too, so please, visit our donation page and help us leap forward to Phase II

Oh, and one last thing, in the Chico Area, we are hosting a Wine Tasting Benefit.  You are invited!  Thank you so much for your help ~ stay tuned for more great stuff to come!

Well, here we are starting a new year. Things are moving along well for the villagers of Dedeke.  The men of the village have created stands for the fruit and vegetable market, and the women are setting up bank accounts. There was a celebration for the holidays —  stay tuned for new pictures  posting here soon.

We are looking forward to breaking ground on the primary school this year. We are still shy by about $13,000, but we are confident that, with the help of our supporters, we will be able to raise this amount. Our end of the year giving request raised about $1,500, so we are on our way. Last year, most of our supporters sent amounts of $25 – $100. We are so hopeful that will happen again. Of course, we welcome larger donations as well!!

Just today we received a check from Oracle for $300.  This was part of a matching gift made by an employee of Oracle.  If anyone reading this knows of other corporations  or works for a business that does matching funds, please let us know.  natalie@leapingstone.org

We are also working on qualifying for grant money.  You have to jump through a lot of hoops, but it will be well worth it when we are granted the funds.

Lastly, we are actively looking for volunteers, especially with computer skills.  If you would like to give some time to help LeapingStone, please contact natalie@leapingstone.org.

I can tell you that things are going well in Dedeke!  The people have embraced the idea of self-help.  

The next move is to register the Village Development Committee.

The women’s group has progressed. They have saved money to open a saving account. They need to have the identity documents for the leaders (which they are working on)  to complete this process.
The men in the village built some sheds for  the market so women will soon start economic activites there.

 FLORAISON (the Togolese NGO we have teamed up with) is planning to have a Christmas event for the village. I think it will occur between Christmas and the New Year Day.  They will send photos!!

In the Member’s Stories section of the web site Oprah’s Angel Network, LeapingStone’s narrative about Building a School in West Africa was featured to the delight of Natalie Huberman, President and Founder of LeapingStone.

The word is getting out about sustainable philanthropy and developing this school building project will establish LeapingStone as a  model of charity that keeps on giving not only now, but well into the future.

Share this story with a friend and if you can, please take time to donate whatever you can at our donation page.

More blogs to come soon, stay tuned!

Just some thoughts…..

I actually like Madonna.  I think it is wonderful that she is trying to help the people of Malawi.  I am also envious.  I only wish I had the resources she has.  I think I read that she is spending $15 million on this school.  If that is correct, then I have to wonder about a few things.  First, it seems like maybe she could spend  a lot less and perhaps create more schools.  I mean, why not spend $1million on 15 facilities?  Also, I wonder about her empowerment idea.  I am not sure that you empower people by giving them something without expecting them to contribute in some way.

I know that we are working with the villagers in Dedeke to help them to become self reliant.  We want them to have income-generating skills so that they can eventually support their school without our help.  When we  build the school, we will be using villagers as workers.  Those who have building skills will be employed as skilled workers and the rest of the villagers will help as unskilled labor.  This is their school.  This is their village.

I assume Madonna knows all this and has advisers who are knowledgeable and experienced.  It will be interesting to see what happens in Malawi.  I certainly hope it is a success!

Roofs over their heads

By Robert Speer
roberts@newsreview.com
More stories by this author…

EAGER TO LEARN Paul Agboglo (right), the Hubermans’ guide in Togo, passes out school supplies to Dédéké children. One of the village’s thatched-roof classrooms can be seen in the background. PHOTO BY NATALIE HUBERMAN

More on LeapingStone: To learn more about the group, meet the members of its board of directors, see a video shot in Dédéké and donate to the effort, go to www.leapingstone.org.

Natalie Huberman and her husband, Robert, are world travelers with a particular interest in developing nations. The Hubermans, who live in Chico, have journeyed to China, India and Southeast Asia and even spent a week with the shamanistic Mentawai tribe deep in the jungle of Siberut Island, off the coast of Sumatra.

Only when they visited West Africa, though, did Natalie Huberman discover the cause she now says she will be pursuing for the rest of her life. “It hit me like a ton of bricks” is how she describes the moment when she understood her new purpose. “It wasn’t until I got to West Africa that my heart was slammed.”

The result, many months later, is a new international philanthropic organization, LeapingStone, based in Chico and with her as president.

Huberman had witnessed poverty before, but nowhere had she seen it in tandem with such desire for better lives. Unlike the Mentawai, who though poor were happy and wanted to preserve their traditional way of life by avoiding modern society, the people of West Africa craved development.

The Hubermans went to Togo as part of a small tour group that also traveled to the two countries that border it: Ghana on the west and Benin on the east. Togo, which has 6 million people in an area slightly smaller than West Virginia, is a long, thin country whose capital, Lomé, is on the coast, in the far south. The official language is French, but in rural areas people speak a variety of tribal languages.

Their guide was Paul Agboglo, a college-educated man and former teacher of German who worked for the government’s cultural sector. One of eight children, he’d grown up in a village near Tsévié, a regional center about 40 kilometers north of Lomé.

He took them to Dédéké—a “pretty little village,” as Huberman describes it, also near Tsévié. Like virtually all rural Togolese, the several hundred people of Dédéké are subsistence farmers, growing yams and tomatoes and other crops and raising pigs, goats and chickens. The village has no electricity and no source of drinking water. Villagers must walk seven miles to the nearest clean well. The nearest medical clinic is in Tsévié, 10 kilometers away.

The village does have a primary school. There are three teachers, one for each of the three open-air, thatched-roof classrooms. Children who complete the primary grades can attend secondary school in Tsévié, though getting there isn’t easy.

At one point during the tour, Agboglo told the Hubermans about an American woman who had visited the village and the classrooms. When she got home to Atlanta, she raised $1,000 by baking and selling chicken biscuits and sent the money to the school. It paid for a year’s worth of books, uniforms, pens and paper for the 42 students.

Seeing the deep desire of the villagers for a better life, Natalie Huberman began asking them what they wanted. Several things, including better transportation and a new well, were important, they said, but most of all they wanted new classrooms that didn’t leak during the rainy season.

Natalie Huberman is founder and president of LeapingStone, which is raising money to build six modern classrooms in Dédéké, along with a well. PHOTO BY ROBERT SPEER

That’s when the “ton of bricks” landed on her. She would do something to help the people of Dédéké get their new classrooms. But what?

The question loomed even larger when the Hubermans returned to Chico, where their comfortable lives—she’s a Pilates instructor; he’s a radiologist—are a world away from subsistence farming in West Africa. They and their three dogs reside in a spacious custom home on two acres that is filled with beautiful artifacts—African masks, Buddha figures, Chinese embroideries—collected during their travels.

Huberman knows how fortunate she is and wants to give back. “I’ve had a blessed life,” she said. “I have a lovely home, a husband who earns a good living, and something I do myself that I enjoy doing.”

At first she tried to contact the Atlanta woman, thinking to augment her bake-sale effort, but she had no success. Then, by chance while vacationing in Yosemite, she and her husband met a man whose business card described him as a “neophyte philanthropist.” They got to talking, and he urged—and later helped—her to form a nonprofit corporation.

Since then she’s put together a board of directors and a Web site (www.leapingstone.org) and obtained nonprofit status for the group. She’s also gone on the Internet and located an association, called Ametoco, representing the 300,000 Togolese living in the United States and Canada. “They’re very excited about LeapingStone and what we’re doing,” Huberman said—to the point of putting the group’s icon on the Ametoco Web site home page (www.ametoco.org) as a link.

Two men she met by Googling “Togolese Americans” proved helpful in connecting her to important people in the country. The most valuable of them has been Eléonore D’Almeida, a Lomé-based banker and consultant. When Huberman, along with two of her board members, returned to Togo in December, D’Almeida had arranged for them to meet with several influential people, including U.S. Ambassador Patricia Hawkings.

“She was very happy to see us and very generous with her time,” Huberman said, adding that Hawkings spent a full 90 minutes with them. LeapingStone, Hawkings told them, was the first grassroots American aid agency in Togo.

The group’s mission is simple enough: “Providing quality, sustainable primary education for girls and boys in West Africa.” Huberman has no intention of stopping at Dédéké. She wants to build schools throughout West Africa—and put in water wells, too.

She’s been in touch with Ron Reed, the Chico attorney who is personally funding a project to dig some 40 wells in Tanzania and, just as important, set up a system that trains and pays for workers to maintain the wells. Huberman says she hopes to work with him in the future.

She and her board members, aware that building classrooms is pointless if the buildings aren’t maintained, have incorporated similar sustainability efforts in their proposal.

Their immediate goal is to have the buildings up by the end of this year. With Dédéké residents providing much of the labor, construction will cost $30,000 to $40,000, “not that much, really,” as Huberman says. In an effort to acquaint Chicoans with her project and drum up donations, she gave a slide presentation during the King Day ceremony on Jan. 18 at Trinity United Methodist Church, and she continues to talk to various groups to enlist their support.

It’s a big job. She says she spends at least four hours a day on it. Her husband, she says, is very supportive, though she likes to joke that it’s all his fault, since he was the person who led her to explore such places as West Africa.

In poor countries, she says, “education is the only answer. … For me, it’s just a matter of giving back to the people I’ve known over the years who have given me so much. I don’t think it’s enough to go through life without giving back.”

I have been thinking about what I would do differently with next year’s event.  First, being new to a community was very hard.  I really didn’t know who to ask for help.  The few people I knew, were helping as best they could, but this kind of event requires more people involved from the beginning.  I now have a better idea who  in the community would be willing to step up and work on the event.  Staying organized is  key.

I would also involve the bachelors more from the start and be clearer as to their roles and what they could do to make the event a success.  I was so afraid of asking too much, that I ended up not asking enough.  It is a fine line when dealing with volunteers.  I know I will get better at it. 

I had one person suggest that we share the evening with a local charity.  I have mixed feelings about that.  My plan is to work with other groups on other projects, but I may want to keep the Bachelor Auction exclusively a LeapingStone event. 

Speaking of working with others in Chico, I am talking with a local school about doing a joint fundraiser.  I think this is an important idea and has been a desire from the start.  We are in the preliminary stages, but I am excited about the idea of children helping each other.  I think it is so important for the kids here to learn about other cultures and to realize how lucky they are.  It would be wonderful to be able to forge some friendships between children here and in Togo.  I will keep you posted as to our progress.