National Office Blog

Nourish's University of Pennsylvania chapter has selected their 2010 summer project! They will be working with an organization in Uganda called NACWOLA, the National Community of Women Living with AIDS. The participants will be assisting them in setting up a Paper-Making business and training a group of 10 women on the skills required, who will further train hundreds of other women in NACWOLA's 60,000+ network. This paper will further be used to create Memory Books which assist these women in communicating their HIV positive status to their children and help the children to cope with the prospect of losing a parent.

Danielle Berfond, UPenn's chapter leader, expressed the chapter's reasons for picking this project. "We are very excited to work on this project because of its ability to impact such a large group of people, as it not only provides jobs and thus income for women living with AIDS, but also has the potential to impact their childrens' lives and educate them on the disease. We are looking forward to watching the entire process of starting the business and trainings, as part of our work with them will involve documenting the process both for further trainings and future marketing materials. And we are especially excited to go into the communities later into the project and start taking pictures and writing down the stories for women who are illiterate. The future potential for the business itself, in perhaps selling to US scrapbooking groups or using the paper for other products in the region, makes us believe that we are contributing seed money to a scalable, successful business idea as well as generating huge social impact."