It started with a press release with an appeal for host families for foreign exchange students that Kara read in the Bennington Banner in 2005.
“After our first year of serving as a host family, I became a community coordinator for dozens of teenagers from 2006 through 2011 who lived with host families and attended high schools in the tri-state area.
The work that started with that one press release led me to discovering my passion for working with Afghan youth and trips to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uganda, and Afghanistan. Many of those students won full scholarships for university studies, have become engineers, peacemakers, entrepreneurs, doctors, and true global citizens.
With the addition of many more beautiful, far-reaching wefts on my tapestry, in 2016, I established a non-profit organization called ROYA-Resources of Young Afghans which, through individual sponsors around the world, currently supports nearly 400 impoverished Afghan youth in various educational capacities. In Washington DC in November 2016, represented by ROYA’s two young volunteer coordinators from Kabul, ROYA’s program was honored as the co-winner of the World Bank Group Youth Summit Competition ‘Rethinking Education: Innovative Ideas to Transform Education’ beating nearly 900 proposals from 103 countries.
Our life-changing work has helped orphans, child street workers and carpet weavers, children of drug addicts and disabled parents, and hundreds of other impoverished youth. The tapestry will continue to grow through the success of all the young people and their families who have been indirectly but profoundly touched by one press released printed fifteen years ago.”
Thank you for finding your passion and sharing it with the world Kara! We’re in this together.