Educating Girls

JBFC started ten years ago with a mission to provide refuge for abused and abandoned girls. Over the last decade we have grown into a more holistic organization, not only providing refuge, but education, access to healthcare and economic development through agriculture.

While our mission has grown, we remain true to our roots. We believe empowering women and young girls is a key factor in fighting poverty. This week, JBFC took another step towards making sure young girls in rural Tanzania have the opportunity for a better life.

JBFC's social worker partnered with the Kitongo village government to give girls who want to learn a place in our school. The admission team worked to identify the neediest girls in our community, who were either attending school intermittently or not at all, because their families couldn't afford it.


These five girls are the most recent additions to the Joseph & Mary School student body.



6-year-old Gaudensia will be entering pre-school, joining seven of her relatives. She lives with her grandmother and 13 others. Resources at home are tight. But now that she's enrolled at Joseph & Mary Schools, she's not only going to receive an education, but two farm-fresh meals a day.

10-year-old triplets, Kulwa, Dotto, and Shidja, will be entering first grade. They've missed a lot of school, trying to help their grandmother run their family farm. The girls will be able to take some of the lessons they learn about permaculture to improve life at home.

Kulwa

Shidja

Dotto

11-year-old Mwashi will be entering the third grade. Her older brother Peter already attends JBFC's Joseph & Mary Schools. JBFC worked with the family to make sure their daughters, as well as
their sons have a chance at a better life through education.



All five girls are on scholarship to attend the school. To keep their scholarships, they will have to maintain good attendance, good behavior and good grades. All Joseph & Mary students receive a school uniform, two meals a day, and school supplies.

You can help provide an education for these girls and our other scholarship students, by becoming a sponsor.  Click here to sponsor a scholarship student

JBFC 10 Years Ago in Pictures

Editor's Note: JBFC is celebrating a decade of impact in rural Tanzania this year. Thanks to your support, we have served more than 1,046,828 meals and harvested 14.5 tons of food over the last decade. This blog is part of a year-long series looking back at how far we've come over the last ten years. You can read more about JBFC's origins by clicking here.

10 Years ago, this is what JBFC's campus looked like...

We started with just four isolated un-developed acres on the shores of Lake Victoria. Most of the early days were spent clearing land, pulling bamboo, and moving rocks.




A decade later, we have a 70-acre footprint that's dotted with permanent buildings.

Back in 2006, JBFC was focused on developing our newly acquired property. The organization was building its first house, enabling us to accept our first 7 girls. Back then JBFC's mission was solely focused on providing refuge for abused and abandoned girls.

JBFC's mission has grown a lot over the last decade. JBFC's Founder & CEO, Chris Gates, believed that providing refuge for girls wasn't enough. He couldn't truly change their lives if they didn't have a quality school to attend. That's when this piece of property captured his eye and his imagination.

This was under-utilized farm land a decade ago, but grew into this.

A home for JBFC's Joseph & Mary School which now serves more than 330 students.

 



In 2006, JBFC's farm was just getting started. We had a few cows and some chickens. Now the farm is a booming operation, which includes chickens, pigs, sheep, rabbits, and tilapia.

Ten years ago, JBFC's fields were also just starting to take root. The sandy soil often made it difficult to grow crops. And heavy rains would wash away a lot of our progress.

With JBFC's investment in permaculture, we have transformed our farm over the last ten years and turned it into an economic engine for our organization and community. JBFC now harvests 300-400 pounds of food a week.

While many things have changed at JBFC, since 2006. One thing has remained.

These girls are still at the heart of what we do.

And while they may look a lot different now...and our family is much bigger.

After ten year, these girls, this community, are still the reason we do what we do every day.

heART for Tanzania

Editor's Note: Veteran volunteer, Tammi Mayfield, returned to JBFC for the third time last month. She got to see first-hand what her Denver fundraiser, heART for Tanzania, means to the JBFC community. This is an interview with her about her trip.

How many times have you visited JBFC's campus in Tanzania and why did you want to return?

Tammi Mayfield: This is my third year to visit JBFC. Before I came, I never realized the impact that the girls and the organization would have on my life. To be a small part of something some much larger than me is incredible. On my first visit I never thought of this would be an annual trip and now I can't imagine going a year without it.

What did you do during your trip? 

TM: This year I had the opportunity to work one-on-one with a couple of students every afternoon on reading, which was great. I have to say that Emma [one of JBFC's residential girls] has a great sense of humor. One day, she decided to call me Emma and introduce herself as Tammi! It was very sweet and memorable, not to mention hilarious!

You hosted a fundraiser, heART for Tanzania, in Denver, CO for the second year in a row. The fundraiser is a silent auction featuring art work from local artists and JBFC girls and students. Last year, it raised enough money to build a brand new chicken coop and stock it with chicks. What was it like to see the chicken coop that your fundraiser helped build?

TM: I was so thankful to be able to see and photograph the chicken coop that my Denver friends and I supported. I am so excited to be able to have something to return to year after year to see how it's progressed. The chicken coop is just another of the sustainable projects that makes JBFC so unique and I am so proud to be part of.

Why would you encourage people to participate in heART for Tanzania? Or to put on an event of their own?

TM: I was amazed, but no longer surprised with the support of my friends and neighbors. Giving people an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others is easy and a great way to create community. Love JBFC and Denver!

Tanzanite Nights 2016!

Deep in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania there is a unique treasure. It’s rare, beautiful and precious.

We've named JBFC’s annual spring fundraiser after the rare gemstone, Tanzanite.  This deep blue-purple jewel represents the beauty and potential of Tanzania. And that's what JBFC is all about.

Tanzanite Nights is Friday, April 22nd in Downtown Tulsa.

This is not just another party, although it's a lot of fun with a cool venue (IDL Ballroom, Downtown Tulsa).

This isn't just one more auction, although our live auction will feature unique experiences like a 9-day Tanzanian Safari, which includes a stay at JBFC, a trek through the Serengeti and a visit to Ngorogoro Crater.

This isn't just another fundraiser, although you can help JBFC by buying unique Tanzanian treasures.

This night is about 400 children and families more than 8,000 miles away...

It's about supporting the education of children who wouldn't have a good school to go to without your help.

It's about investing in a farm that provides nearly 400 pounds of food a week, which translates into 200,000 meals a year.

Coming to this party makes you part of a very special mission. We're ending poverty one girl, one student, one family at a time. 

For the last ten years, we've been chipping away at a problem many think is too big to tackle. Thanks to friends like you, we have worked with a small, rural community to prove that dedication, commitment, and passion can change lives. And you can do more than just feed a child once. You can change the way that child lives, grows up, and empower their whole family to achieve more.

That's what we've seen in our little community. Not only have we provided a home for 48 girls who had nowhere else to turn. We've seen children who would have dropped out of school in 7th grade, graduate from high school. We've seen families who were barely scrape by, transform their farms using permaculture techniques and now growing enough to not only feed themselves, but also sell. We've seen mud walls and grass roofs give way to sturdy homes with metal roofs and doors. 

Our community is flourishing. 

Ten years in and we've served more than 1,000,000 meals and harvested 14.5 tons of produce (that's 32,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables).

That's the kind of change you can be a part of at Tanzanite Nights.

So come for the party, stay for the mission, and get involved with JBFC's next decade of changing lives and ending poverty.

Hope to see you at Tanzanite Nights, Friday April 22nd. You can purchase tickets to the event by clicking here.

And click over to Facebook for the latest on our auction items, jewelry pull prizes, support JBFC tiles and more. 

Papa's Update

For those of you that haven't visited us in Tanzania, you may not be familiar with our on-campus restaurant, Papa's. Papa's is named after Chris Gates' late grandfather and was built in 2012. It contains an outdoor seating restaurant, green grass for camping or playing, and two bungalows situated right on the shores of Lake Victoria.

The concept behind Papa's is dual-pronged and ladders up to the JBFC mission to end poverty one child at a time. The goal is for Papa's to be a vocational educational facility to train underprivileged youth in the service and hospitality industry. Papa's utilizes meat and produce from the JBFC farm, and all profits from Papa's go right back to support JBFC's home for girls.

Each weekend, we get individuals, families, and groups of friends that make the hour-long trek from Mwanza for food you just can't find in the city, not to mention the amazing view of Lake Victoria. We make a variety of dishes, from char-grilled pizza with vegetables fresh from the farm, to coconut curry fish, featuring fish straight from Lake Victoria.

This year, we will break ground on our education facility. This is very exciting for us as we will be able to take that next step toward our goal. This is a promising alternative for students and girls that may not be able to continue formal education at a college or university. With tourism being such a huge industry in Tanzania, this can put them on a path to a successful career.

In 2015, Papa's generated nearly $4,800 in profit for the year. To put that in terms of benefits for our JBFC girls, that covered an entire year of healthcare expenses.

Papa's helps generate a ton of local exposure for our home, school, and farm, and we hope to see if grow even larger in the future. 

Melinda Wulf is JBFC's Administrative Director in Tanzania

JBFC Healthcare Update

Since its official opening in the fall of 2014, JBFC's healthcare clinic and on-site nurse have made massive strides in improving the healthcare of our JBFC community.

Three-hundred and thirty students means an awful lot of paper cuts and scraped knees. More than 70 employees, many of them doing physical labor, that's a lot of kitchen burns and "oops" cuts. Forty-eight residential girls adds in a slew of coughs, colds, and bee stings. Add to this environmental challenges and diseases specific to Tanzania, such as Typhoid fever, malaria, and amoebic infections, and the JBFC community faces many and varied healthcare challenges. Tanzania as a whole faces a shortage of healthcare workers, so without our little clinic, a medical professional could be a dozen miles away.

With the help of our supporters in America, JBFC is making a dent in some of these challenges. We're providing health care to our immediate community. Not only treating what we can, but making sure to refer girls, students, and staff members for more healthcare when needed.

 In 2016, however, we are doing even more to tackle our healthcare challenges, using a multi-pronged approach of outreach and capacity building.

First, since her arrival in October 2014, JBFC's nurse, Paskazia, has spent dozens of hours (many times with the help of volunteers!) educating our students, our girls, and our staff about everything from proper first aid to personal hygiene to the importance of environmental cleanliness. In classrooms, in one-on-one sessions, and in the various kitchens and dining halls around campus, Paskazia has made the education and  disease prevention, her most important tool in improving the health of our community.

This year, we are taking healthcare outreach to a whole new level on our campus and in our surrounding community.


So far this year, Nurse Paskazia has conducted a food-preparation and disease prevention seminar with our kitchen staff regarding the prevention of food-borne illnesses.

She has planned monthly age-appropriate seminars focusing on nutrition, family planning, first aid, HIV/AIDS awareness, mental health, personal and environmental hygiene, and disease detection and prevention.

By the end of this year, all of our students from pre-school through Form 4 (U.S. equivalent of 11th grade) will have received basic introductions to all of these topics.

Knowledge is power, especially when fighting disease.

While 2014 and 2015 saw JBFC improving health-related education on our campus, we hope to take the fight into our surrounding community.

We have begun planning several seminars that will be offered to our community, potentially through community partners like the Kitongo Primary School, aimed at providing free information and tools to our neighbors.

The more people we talk to the bigger our impact, and the better our chance of reducing and preventing disease.

JBFC's friends in Tanzania are taking notice. A local community partner saw what we were doing to improve health on our campus and is now providing all of JBFC's residential girls with free annual check-ups.

JBFC is also improving our capacity to reduce diseases on campus and improve the general health of our 400+  family. While treating cuts, burns, scrapes, and common illnesses like the cold and flu are important, 2016 will see us take prevention and treatment up a notch.

In January, we were able to receive new mosquito nets for all of our JBFC girls from a community partner. Simply sleeping with a net at night can largely prevent malaria, the number one killer of children under five-years-old in Tanzania.

In March, thanks to a generous donation from a JBFC volunteer, we will begin construction of new hand-washing stations at our school dining hall to allow for better sanitation and hygiene. Improved hygiene, especially in the dining hall, will help reduce food-borne illnesses like Typhoid and intestinal parasites. By the end of April, working with another community partner, we hope to be able to start testing and treating our staff, students, and family for malaria.

While JBFC has made important strides over the past year in improving the health of our community, we still have a long way to go. Our staff, students,and girls still suffer from malaria and typhoid. But thanks to you these preventable and treatable diseases have not been fatal. That's the difference having regular access to a licensed medical professional can make.

Preventative care is still a relatively unknown in this part of the country. With the continued support of our friends around the world, the hard work of our nurse, and the dedication of our volunteers, we believe 2016 will be the healthiest year to date for our JBFC family.

Seth Diemond is JBFC's Chief Operating Officer in Tanzania.

Our Tanzanian Friends

One weekend a few months ago, I was relaxing on the weekend watching a movie, when Jackson, our waiter from Papa's (our on-campus restaurant), comes to find me.

"Someone wants to talk to the Director," he said. My first instinct was that they had a complaint of some sort, so I made my way down the hill to see. I arrived to meet two jovial men who introduced themselves as Mukherjee and Sivakumar, both employees of the Coca-Cola bottling company located in Nyanza (between the JBFC campus in Kitongo and Mwanza).

"We like what you're doing here and we want to help," they said.

There's really no higher compliment JBFC can receive than that statement. We have so many friends across the globe who have felt the same way. We raise about $800,000 a year in donations to operate our 70-acre campus, including our residential home, school, farm and clinic. JBFC does as much as we can to save money on campus, by growing our own food. And we are trying to be as sustainable as possible by charging a modest school tuition. But we still rely on hundreds of people liking what we're doing and wanting to help.

I talked to my new Coca-Cola friends about our mission, about the girls who live in our home, and the upcoming Christmas holiday. The men promised they would come back with soda and shirts for the girls before Christmas.

A few days before Christmas, I was sitting at Papa's after lunch when a SUV pulls up and men start carrying box after box of orange Fanta into Papa's. My new Coca-Cola friends had returned with another employee, Marco, all in Coca-Cola hats and shirts with exactly enough t-shirts and hats for all of our residential girls living to open on Christmas morning!

The JBFC girls love their new shirts and hats and wear them often. We drank the Fanta and Coke donated at the holiday party. Coca-Cola also promised to give our students tours of the plant any Friday this year.

Since Christmas, we have had other wonderful and much-needed donations from other in-country partners. Our district Ministry of health and Social Welfare provided mosquito nets for each of our girls, in addition to free medical check-ups.

Grumeti Reserve, located in Northern Tanzania, sent a few boxes of goodies for the girls that included necessities like soap, toothpaste, bug repellent, and laundry soap.

We are so grateful to our in-country supporters and look forward to growing this area of opportunity in the future.

Melinda Wulf is JBFC's Administrative Director in Tanzania.

JBFC's Origin Story

I have always used the month of March as a period for reflection. March is the month when JBFC was born, so it has always been a good time to look back at all that JBFC has accomplished. This is especially true this year, as this March is JBFC’s tenth anniversary. 

But this journey began long before 2006. I was in kindergarten, when I proudly announced on Career Day that I wanted to be an exotic animal veterinarian in the Serengti National Wildlife Park. No one in my family really knows where this aspiration came from, but my fascination with Africa, in general, and Tanzania, specifically, remained throughout my childhood. My grandmother and best friend, Janada (Mimi) Batchelor, promised she would take me to see the Serengeti when I was 15. In the summer of 2002, my grandmother kept her word, but added a twist. She wanted my trip to be about more than just looking at wildlife. She decided before the safari, I had to serve.

She took me to do community service at the Tanzania Children’s Rescue Centre (TCRC) in Mwanza, Tanzania, where I came face-to-face with the grim realities many Tanzanian street boys endure. This single experience, which I didn’t want to do in the first place, molded my future. I returned to Tanzania to continue to volunteer with those same street boys at TCRC. I learned the language and what it meant for these boys to live on the streets. I watched as some of the boys I had become friends with literally left their sisters at the doorstep. The only way they could have a safe place was to leave their sisters behind. And I decided to do something about that. Three years after my first trip with my grandmother, I decided to start a nonprofit organization to help abandoned and abused street girls, who had no place to turn.

At 19, I had big dreams, lofty goals, and a family who thought I was more than a little crazy. While everyone admired my idea of starting a nonprofit in Tanzania, many had some concerns. I had just finished high school and getting ready to head off to college at NYU. Everyone said it was a great idea, just not the right time. Being young and bull-headed, I didn’t listen. I began the paperwork to register the Janada L. Batchelor Foundation for Children as a nonprofit in September of 2005. On March 6, 2006, JBFC was born, receiving our federal registration as a 501c3. My dream had become a reality (or so I thought), now I just had to get to work.

But the paperwork was only the beginning. I needed money, a facility, a staff, and I was moving to New York City and starting my course work in the school of social work. My experience volunteering in Tanzania paid off and I was able to reach out to a retired pastor, Jacob Ngalaba, who I had met while working at TCRC, the boy’s home in Mwanza. What many people don’t know is Jacob is the person responsible for finding the land that JBFC sits on today.

He scouted several locations, helping negotiate prices, and making introductions to village elders. I’ll never forget my first glimpse of our property in Kitongo. It was four acres of raw, undeveloped land on the shores of Lake Victoria. It was rocky, covered with reeds, and absolutely perfect. It was the safe haven that I was looking for, the kind of place that girls who had been living on the street could feel safe and secure.

While many folks still doubted my sanity and my commitment to this fledgling organization, my grandfather, Ray “Papa” Batchelor, believed in me. And it’s because of him that JBFC got off the ground, literally. He provided the first donation to this organization. He’s the reason we were able to purchase land and construct our first building. With his recent passing, I will never forget that Papa is a bedrock of this organization.

In the summer of 2006, we had our first four acres and hired our first four staff members (Jacob Ngalaba being our very first staff member). We began construction on our first building that summer. There wasn’t even a road to our property that first year. We had to carry supplies in by hand. I helped lay the rocks that would become the foundation for the first house on campus. And ten years later, here we are.

Four acres has grown into more than 70 acres. One rock house has multiplied to include three houses, six dorms, two schools, two dining halls, three livestock barns, and several other permanent buildings. Forty-six girls call JBFC home. And we have 330 students enrolled in our school. Our humble beginnings have turned into a movement that has elevated an entire community.

We are so incredibly grateful and humbled by all of the love, support, and encouragement everyone has given us throughout these past ten years. Our organization could not be prouder of our girls, students, and staff, and the incredible work that they do day in and day out.

We are celebrating JBFC’s birthday all month long with several special events. For those of you in Tulsa, there are several ways to join the party. We are partnering with several local restaurants to Dine Out for JBFC. Tuesdays in March you can dine out at the following restaurants and JBFC will receive 10-15% of the proceeds.

March 8th, please join us at Elote (514 South Boston Avenue) from 5pm-close

March 15th, please join us at Hop Bunz (3330 South Peoria Avenue) from 5-9pm

March 22nd, please join us at Hideaway Pizza (Kingspointe Village, 5966 South Yale Avenue) from 5-9pm

And on March 6^th, we’re throwing a birthday party at The Tropical from 5-8pm (8125 E. 49^th Street, Tulsa, OK 74145). Come meet the staff, hear more about our decade of impact and enjoy good food. The Tropical has kindly agreed to donate 10% of the evening’s proceeds back to JBFC.

Throughout the rest of this year, we will be sharing more about our early years and looking back on all YOU have enabled us to accomplish these past 10 years, so please stay tuned…

Blogger Chris Gates is JBFC's Founder & CEO.