Who We Are
We are Community Collaborators creating sustainable communities
Charity Vodjogbe aka Mama Charity – Togo
Founder of Orphanage and Project Director for Agrifarm and Primary School
Charity Vodjogbe is the Founder of the Fondation Secours Universel (FSU) also known as Orphelinat Mother Charity. The Foundation was created in 2003, to look after orphaned children, many born from women with mental health issues, some who have been raped. Most of these girls abandon their children in the markets or on the beaches. Her orphanage was originally created in Lomé, the capitol city of Togo. At that time, she had 35 children under her roof, from three months to 18 years old. In 2017, as the space in the city was very expensive, she decided to relocate her orphanage. Mama Charity being a charismatic entrepreneur, won the hearts of the villagers. It is on this piece of land, given to her by the council members of a small village, Sagbado-Lankouvi, outside Lomé, that she decided to build what she calls a village. She has created an infrastructure that will support orphaned and abandoned children from her community for a long time. Before putting the shovels in the ground, her teenage children planted 200 mango and avocado trees. This is Mama Charity’s idea of sustainability. The fruit will feed her children and what is not eaten will be sold at the market. The money will be used to buy food and pay school fees.
She has a vision to interrupt the culture where ‘’children are treated like trash’’. Today, she has 117 children (12 babies under 1 year – old and 16 under 2 years of age and 26 staff to assist her in this endeavor of love. She refuses no child brought to her. In her mind, every child deserves to be loved and educated. Her dream has been to expand her opportunities to become more self-reliant. She located and purchased a plot of 3 acres of fertile land, to grow vegetables and plant more fruit trees with support from Hand-in-Hand. A woman of head and heart, her efforts will impact a large number of people in her community.
Siteya Nabaala aka Mama Dinah – Maasai Mara in Kenya
Project Director for Water Project
Siteya Nabaala aka Mama Dinah is a leader of women and girls in the Oloonkerine community in the Maasai Mara in Kenya. An educator and an activist, Mama Dinah understands feminine leadership: collaboration is a ‘way of being’ for her. Decades ago, she introduced women to the ‘merry-go-round’ concept to promote practices, leading to simple abundance by collectively sharing resources. In her community, she advocates for education of girls, discouraging young marriages and creating awareness regarding the now illegal practice of female genital mutilation. 95% of the community mamas are illiterate but naturally gifted on beadwork. Mama Dinah is hoping to discover companies or individuals who will could market beadwork products as an alternative sources of revenue for the women, hence support their livelihood.
Hand in Hand is committed to supporting the community’s effort to have clean drinking water. Their bore hole has an inadequate supply of salty (brackish) water and the diesel generator used to operate the pump needs repairs often and no one is this pastoral community is familiar with repairs. The vision is to drill another bore hole seeking a stronger adequate flow of clean water and use a solar operated pump for clean energy and no repair.
Sr. Agnes Vitali Khati – Western Kenya
Project Director for Agribusiness
Sr. Agnes along with Dr Pamela are project directors for agribusiness. She belongs to the religious congregation called the Sisters of Mary of Kakamega who own and run St. Joseph primary school. She cares for 30 young adolescent children who stay in the villages and communities to allow for integration into the society and in line with the Kenyan laws. She dedicates her time and energy to nurture the young adolescents through feeding, educating, and mentoring them. The children are at risk of being kidnapped-enrolled as child soldiers or in sex trafficking activities. She is enthusiastic and committed to educating all these children so they may eventually contribute positively to their communities when they graduate and achieve their goals.
Sr. Agnes is determined in her approach to getting food and basics for these children. . She is interest ed in creating sustainable projects which will have far-reaching impacts for her community. 30 children benefit from her efforts in creating agribusiness projects. Her goal is to provide sufficient and nutritious food and earn enough from the agribusiness projects to support educating children in vocational skills The hope is to eventually achieve self-sustenance, to access household food security, income generation and eventual self-youth employment.
Hand-in-Hand is supporting the building of the poultry business. Sr Agnes on her own has started raising and selling pigs and raising and using maize and beans to feed hungry children and their families with the hope of selling these harvested crops and putting that money towards education as well.
Sister Pamela Musinzi Liluga Co Project Director for Agribusiness.
Pamela is a nun(Religious Sister) in the congregation of the Sisters of Mary of Kakamega who started her journey of religious life in 1998 and is celebrating her 25th year with the order. She trained in Nursing in 2000 with a diploma in Nursing and began her nursing practice in 2004. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Nursing in 2018 and is currently studying for her Masters Degree with a specialty in Oncology.
Her work has included working with HIV/AIDS programs, both children and adults and she has a special interest in working with vulnerable. populations . She is currently at St Elizabeth School of Nursing as Deputy Principal working with over 500 students doing different courses that include nursing, social work, and perioperative theater technologists. She and Sister Agnes have become a team working together to create a sustainable future for the children in the community. Their projects are designed to help feed the hungry children in the community, house a few who have no homes and provide tuition for education and uniforms so children can support themselves and their families after receiving advanced education.
Sister Pamela brings special expertise in tracking the various agribusiness projects to monitor their financial sustainability in reaching the goals of the team.
Lucille Mandin is the founder of Hand in Hand for African Women and is a change agent for restorative and social justice. As a university professor, she led international projects in a university setting. Her leadership role of Projet Afrique educational and humanitarian programs since 2009 at the Campus Saint-Jean of the University of Alberta, inspired her to join African women in their quest to transform lives in their communities. She embraces the opportunity to create sustainable structures that will bring African women closer to autonomy, to self-reliance. In 2018, she received a United Nation International Women’s Day Award, an award to recognize the important contributions women make to the betterment of society at the local, national and international levels, drawing attention to the obstacles and challenges women and girls still face here and around the world as we strive to achieve equality, opportunity and safety for all. Following her humanitarian project in Togo, Mama Charity nominated her as an Ambassador of Good Will of her foundation, La Fondation de Secours Universel in Togo. She pursues this mission as she continues to share the stories of our three partners in African, with our donors and supporters, on our FB Group page and on Instagram. As a member of GIFEW (The Global Institute for Evolutionary Women), she endeavors to widen the circle of ‘Hope Whisperers’. She is a ‘shameless idealist’.
During the 2022 Annual Global Walk, Ilana, one of our team members interviewed Lucille. See interview for more insights on Lucille
Eliana has had an interest in Africa ever since traveling there 12 years ago. She had a career as a nurse practitioner in the U S, and before retiring worked in clinics providing primary and mental health care for homeless and low income clients. After retirement, she started looking for an NGO that was interested in providing support for women in Africa to become entrepreneurs and increase sustainable living. While there are many charities that do this, Eliana wanted to have relationships with the women in the communities and work with them on all levels to bring about greater sustainable living. She and Lucille met on a call in another global group and discovered they both had the same dream, and Lucille already had relationships with 3 African communities with strong feminine leaders who were working to make a difference in their communities towards greater sustainability. A team was created in which the African communities and team members from around the globe work together collaboratively. Eliana developed the Hand in Hand Website and continues to maintain it and to write the Newsletters.
During the 2022 Annual Global Walk, Ivana, one of our team members interviewed Eliana. See interview for more insights on Eliana
Ivana is a strategy and impact consultant, originally from Slovakia. She has 8 years of experience in the non-profit sector in her home country and in Balkan countries. She was working in different positions such as volunteer, marketing manager, Erasmus+ projects manager, and strategic leader. During these years Ivana developed a solid knowledge in system-thinking for NGOs and social enterprises due to international experiences including travels across Europe, South-East Asia and East Africa. Ivana got to know about Hand-in-Hand with African Women at The Global Institute for Evolving Women (GIFEW) and immediately felt the calling to contribute. Ivana is committed to development, education, sustainable impact and youth and women’s empowerment.
Barb has always supported the empowerment of women and especially welcomed the challenge of ensuring its’ recognition in male dominated environments. The last 18 years she spent in various roles in the residential construction industry in sales, management, human resources, safety and volunteering with the builder association, be it heading up or participating in committees or on the Board of Directors. She has always been the woman to be counted on for the entrepreneurial approach to developing and implementing new initiatives and innovative marketing strategies. In the first week of joining GIFEW, she met Lucille at a Hand in Hand fundraising event. This cause resonated with her and she asked to join the team as she felt that her varied experience could be a valuable contribution in achieving their goals.
During the 2022 Annual Global Walk, Ivana interviewed Barb. We invite you to watch their talk which shares more insights of who Barb is.
Diane Matthews’ role with Hand in Hand is doing the bookkeeping and financial tracking. She has worked many years in finance departments for various companies and enjoys the details and data involved. Diane met Lucille, Ivana, Andrea, and Barb through Global Institute for Evolving Women and was touched by the work that Hand in Hand was doing. When she was asked if she would be interested in helping, Diane quickly said yes. Living in the same city as Lucille and Barb, she enjoys getting together with them in person.After her career in accounting, Diane found herself attracted to energy work, specifically Reiki. She is a Usui Reiki Master & Teacher and has clients in Canada, the USA and Europe as she can give Reiki sessions at a distance. Distance sessions are just as powerful as being in person. She has numerous local Reike students and is expanding her Reike teaching globally.
Rovena was born and raised in Albania during a time of hardship in the country. Albania became free of Communist control in 1990 and in 1997 experienced a civil war. For years of her life, she saw poverty even though her own family was middle class. She understood what it was like to have no money for food and the destructive personal and cultural patterns of children being lured to other countries for sex enslavement. Limited employment opportunities resulted in the family moving to Italy in 2002. Rovena met her Albanian husband who had fled from Albania to Italy by small boat. In Italy,she started a family of her own and in 2015 when the economy there became less hopeful for children growing into adults, the family choose to leave and moved to Canada with only 3 suitcases for a family of 5 and started over. Her background seeing others hungry and not having their basic needs met attracted her to joining the Hand-in-Hand team when she heard Lucille sharing the stories of our 3 African Projects. She desires to have an impact. Rovena and her son Andrea have agreed to take over the creation of the stories of the Mamas for social media posting
As the team considered where we needed the most support, it was in social media posting and sharing the Hand-in-Hand story.
Rovena courageously agreed to take this task on and her 18 year-old-son, Andrea, has graciously agreed to support her in learning any of the technical things she needs to learn. Andrea lives at home and attends a local University studying Business. He also works at a bank. Andrea will bring a second source of creativity to the project. We are so excited to have them and look forward to a steady flow of articles and photos on our Facebook and Instagram pages
Consultants
Marie lives in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada (the same city as Lucille).
She is a young woman involved in leadership roles for youth. Having traveled with Lucille on an educational and humanitarian project in 2013, she was privileged to discover Kenya, teaching and building a library in the Maasai Mara, home to Mama Dinah. Marie uses her background as an executive director of a non-profit to advice and support Hand-in-Hand activities.
During the 2022 Annual Global Walk, Ivana, one of our team members interviewed Marie. See interview for more insights on Marie
Kristen dabbles in graphic design for Hand in Hand and supports the distribution of our Newsletter. Kristen had the privilege of having Lucille as a professor while completing her education degree. As part of the course, she traveled to Kenya to complete a teaching practicum as well as support the construction of a new classroom in Eor Ewaso. During that trip, she visited Mama Dinah’s community of Oloonkerine. After returning from Africa, Kristen, along with a couple of other classmates, raised funds to purchase sanitary napkins for girls in Mama Dinah’s community. Kristen currently works as a classroom teacher outside of Edmonton, AB, Canada, and is a strong advocate for quality education and social justice.
Patrice Lumumba has been a consultant for Sr Agnes’s poultry farm project. He has supported Sr Agnes in the planning and supported Hand-in-Hand in understanding the needs and requirements for the poultry and selling of the eggs and broilers. Patrice works in the Kenya State Department of Planning and uses tools such as Geographic Information Science to visualize spatial issues at all levels of local, county and state planning to guide the basis for policy development. His avocation is husbandry and he has a deep desire to contribute to ensuring food security in his community.
Richard Eberlein is a Water systems engineer. He has 40 plus year career working with wells, pumps and water issues primarily in municipal, commercial and agricultural industries.
Richard consults with Hand-in-Hand primarily on water related projects. He lives in California and has traveled to Africa in the past.
Richard was raised on a farm and had full experiences and a keen understanding of farming before he reached adolescence. He suggests driving a tractor at 4 years old at 5 in the morning is a key ingredient! Along with traveling, he continues to enjoy farming on a much smaller scale
Siobhán’s role within Hand-in-Hand is to give technical insight to the wider team on various engineering aspects of the projects. Siobhán is a Chartered Civil Engineer &Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). Living in Ireland, the owner of a Civil Engineering Consultancy business, she has a keen interest in renewable energy and sustainability. The opportunity to become involved with an organization, with the goals and ethos of Hand-in-Hand, has been a long-held aspiration for Siobhán. With twenty plus years of professional experience within the civil engineering industry, and as an active member of the ICE , at both the Regional and National level, Siobhán hopes to bring her experience, knowledge, and skills to the organization, with a focus on her, shared ICE aspiration to “Shape the World using the knowledge and experience of civil engineers to help find solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems”. Siobhán is working on the future design aspects of the projects and seeing the projects delivered successfully within the three communities.
Cheryl Pederson is a nurse and a communication consultant who has dedicated her career to inspiring individuals to understand and be their true selves. She believes that our life journeys are our opportunities. Her keen insights have helped individuals to know themselves and create the lives they desire.