RESPECT is growing everyday, everywhere!
2007 -
A Year Of Positive Change For RESPECT
by Marc Schaeffer
Founder and President
RESPECT International
The changes in RESPECT International in 2007 have mirrored changes in my own life.
Ashok Pillai, coordinator of RESPECT University and his team of committed volunteers were nominated for and won an Online Volunteer Team of the Year Award.
Ashok and his team have taken the tremendous challenge of offering quality correspondence education to high school graduated war-affected students personally and seriously.
They have built RESPECT University into a program of a dozen or so instructors with more than 100 students in just over a year. This is just the beginning.
RESPECT International has always had fantastic online volunteers going above and beyond the call of duty but this year marks a significant shift in the development of strong volunteer teams that have taken ownership of swaths of tasks to further build the organization.
Will Wallace, our Webmaster (and so much more) has recruited and managed a dynamite team of volunteers to translate sections of our website into various languages and to publish our bi-weekly e-Zine in Spanish for the first time.
Will, also our chief e-Zine editor works together with our content editor, Angela Carter, and our e-Zine volunteer coordinator, Aruna Gupta, a cadre of talented writers and translators to get out the quality bi-weekly publication.
RESPECT International's Global Letter Exchange Program has had an "embarrassment of riches" with many more requests for letters from war-affected communities than we could accommodate.
RESPECT also partnered with World Computer Exchange to get 20 refurbished computers to Peace Pals Education Network in Sierra Leone and is about to get a similar number of computers to Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana.
RESPECT also has a new and reinvigorated board of directors and has applied for charitable status here in Canada (still pending). It is our hope that 2008 will bring continued energy and enthusiasm, new sources of funding and person-power, and new ideas for ways to build more a wareness between refugee and non-refugee communities around the world.
In 2007 I started a Master's program at the University of Manitoba. My wife Kae and I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Hannah, on October 15 who added an entire layer of love to our lives that we were unaware of before she came into existence.
Thank you to everyone who works with RESPECT, who participates in our programs, who works to do good in the world and may 2008 bring us all more health, happiness and meaning.