New grants!

The SIA Board of Directors gathered last month for our semi-annual meeting. If the mention of a meeting makes your eyes glaze over, let me assure you that our gatherings are inspirational and I always leave feeling encouraged! We collected grant reports from all SIA grants in the past two years, and we also consider new grant proposals. Our meeting was harmonious (we always make decisions by consensus) and we even finished before the official end time! Please keep all these dedicated, energetic partners in your prayers. They will receive their funding soon and then the new work will be underway. Habiba Sabuno showing off some of the beaded items that are models for the training workshop in Nairobi. Additional 6-months rent for Progressive Volunteers ’ Dressmaking Training Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. Already, 42 woman have been trained in sewing and tailoring skills and classes start again soon for a new group of women. 50 guardians of orphans and vulnerable children will attend a beadworking skills training workshop in Nairobi, Kenya. The workshop will extend over two months and the grant covers the cost of the materials. A new building for the very successful Manyamula COMSIP Cooperative in Malawi . The building will be used as a restaurant, guesthouse, office space, and conference room for the local savings and investment cooperative. The Cooperative is contributing the bricks and labor for the project. I can’t wait to stay there during my next visit! 13 new Small Business Fund grants . And a new SBF Coordinator , Hastings Phiri, in Malawi, who will be trained by experienced Coordinator Canaan Gondwe. Tanya at the site of the future Manyamula COMSIP Training Centre, guest house, and restaurant! (Malawi) We believe that these grants will be impactful drops in these communities, which will ripple out to amplify the positive power of the drop: “Humanity is like an enormous spider web, so that if you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling … As we move around this world and as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference, or with hostility, toward the people we meet, we too are setting the great spider web a-tremble. The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt. Our lives are linked together. No one is an island.” — Frederick Buechner Let’s pledge to set the web a-tremble with kindness! #Kenya #Malawi #SIAGrants