White Feather Foundation

Los Angeles— The Blue Chip Foundation, along with the White Feather Foundation, is proud to announce the completion of a girls’ dormitory designed to provide safe haven for girls attending the Uranga Secondary School in Sauri, Kenya.

The founders of each organization—Jennifer Stengaard Gross of the Blue Chip Foundation and Julian Lennon of the White Feather Foundation—first visited the school in February 2014 to assess the girls’ needs and find ways to contribute to the children’s educational aspirations.

“The school was benefiting from working with Connect to Learn, a partnership of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, Ericsson, and Millennium Promise,” says Gross. “That organization’s mission is to address the lack of access to quality education in marginalized populations, and they’re having great success in academics. However, the challenge was getting the girls to and from the school safely so they could access the rigorous academic programs offered there.”

Gross and Lennon spoke with a group of scholarship students, some of whom had to walk up to 10 kilometers round-trip each day. 

“Connect to Learn purchased bicycles for some of the girls on scholarship, but the school’s location beyond rough, hilly terrain still made commuting difficult for many of the children. It was also dangerous,” says Gross. One young woman, just a year before Gross and Lennon’s visit to the school, was attacked and raped on her way to school; the rapist was later convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Other girls reported being mugged and assaulted during the commute.

Each expressed a desire for a dormitory where they could stay safe—and be able to focus on the high-quality education Connect to Learn was helping Uranga Secondary School provide.

“It was obviously a very traumatic experience for all the girls,” says Gross. “When we got back to the States, Julian and I decided we needed to build this dormitory for them. In November of 2014, the funds came through and we were able to give the good news to the girls.”

Construction on the dormitory began shortly after Gross and Lennon organized the funding for the project, which is now complete. A statement from Connect to Learn says, “The dormitory construction has been completed and the girls have moved in, the two scholarship students (Blue Chip and White Feather) are supporting are now in their second year, and the Graduate Fellows pilot (Blue Chip and White Feather) helped fund led to a great year of enhanced program support interventions for the scholarship students and to a successful transition to university for the Fellow we hired. She completed her year of service in January and is now a university student working toward her BA in Human Resource Management.”