The NDUTIME Youth Leadership Initiative is a youth leadership centered initiative organized to offer college scholarships, curriculums designed to facilitate servant-leadership development, enhance life skills as well as equip and empower youth who desire to become servant-leaders in their community. Our desire is to support youth who are passionate about making a difference through community advocacy and activism and express a sincere desire to attend college and/or a trade school. Your tax-free donations will assist us in this effort as we endeavor to transform our communities one youth at a time.

Africa Community Exchange (ACE)

Africa Community Exchange (ACE), a non-profit 501 (C) (3) organization, supports several humanitarian projects to assist in the reconstruction of Liberia. The Ann Sandell International School is just one of them. The story of how the school came about is extraordinary as is shared here by a member of the Board of Directors of ACE (Rose Sherman).

“One day in 1990, I came home in Gbarnga, Liberia where I was working with PLAN International to find a seventeen-year-old girl sitting on my steps with her suitcase beside her. She had been displaced from the border town where the Liberian Civil War started and she had lost her entire family. This was the beginning of my relationship with Leabeh Gboko.

When the war intensified and I had to leave Liberia, she moved with me in Sierra Leone and then Togo where she completed high school. As providence would have it, I could not get a visa for her to come with me to the US. She returned to Liberia in 1995 when we thought the war over and moved into what was left of a house I owned in Monrovia. There (at 22 years old) she started a tutoring and counseling program for children in the area who were traumatized by the war and who could not afford to attend the few schools that were still opened. A year later she had to take refuge in the Ivory Coast when fighting started again. About 25 of the children went with her. There she opened an orphanage in the refugee camp. She returned to Liberia with the children when hostilities ceased and resumed the program she had started. She registered her activities as The Children Welfare Foundation. The demand for schools was so great she started regular classes, assisted by university students who were themselves displaced by the war. Pastor Ann Sandell of Minnesota whom she named the school after donated the funds for the first school building.”

Starting from a war ravished three-bedroom house, she constructed temporary classrooms made of mat walls and tarp roof to accommodate the ever-growing number of children. Over the past six years, she has constructed three permanent classroom buildings of mud bricks plastered with cement with zinc roofs. This school provides free education from kindergarten through 9th grade for more than 800 orphans, displaced, and destitute children in war ravished Liberia. On several occasions she has put herself at great risk to save the school when there had been outbreaks of violence. Because of her overwhelming commitment and determination, everyone who meets her is impressed that someone so young has been able to accomplish what she has done with so little and under such difficult conditions.

The school is overcrowded; some children have to take their chairs to and from school each day and most cannot afford school supplies. ACE, with the support of its donors, plans to increase teachers’ salary and hire additional teachers to start an afternoon session in order to reduce the overcrowded class sizes of 60 or more students. For more information about ACE you can call 804-379-8855 or visit the website: www.africomexchange.org.