Jump for Joel is a non-profit organization that promotes awareness & provides support for children living in extreme poverty. Our current work is focused on Gathiga Children's Hope Home (GCHH) in Gathiga, Kenya, as well as the Kabiria slum in Nairobi.
Joel, the namesake of our organization, is a 9-year-old, HIV+ orphan at GCHH. He's a rock-star at jump rope!
What makes us different from other organizations working in Africa is our passion for a student-to-student connection. We do this by traveling to schools, churches, & youth organizations throughout Illinois to tell stories about the children we work with in Kenya, bringing them to life with videos, photos, and silly stories. By the time we finish presenting, it's our hope that students view poverty on a personal level, on a "Joel & his friends" level. Our goal is to help people realize that poverty is much more than a statistic or infomercial. Poverty has faces, stories, and emotions. Though it seems we are vastly different than our third-world counterparts, we are not. Students in Kenya study math, too. They have recess & play sports, just like we do. And, no, they don't like homework either.
We believe the best source of education is through personal relationships. With today's technology, it is possible for students to directly interact with people from the very country or culture being studied. Think of how exciting it would be to supplement traditional styles of teaching - textbooks, maps, graphs, notes - with personal interaction!
We believe that providing students (and adults, too!) the opportunity to build friendships across cultures will drastically reduce our tendency towards apathy. A less apathetic world is a more peaceful one.