![Citadel Foundation For Kids [CFK]](http://www.citadelfoundationforkids.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/cropped-Screen-Shot-2016-02-09-at-7.00.43-PM.png)
I discovered early in my college career at Washington and Lee University (W&L) that I was very passionate about ending poverty. However, I was initially concerned about how pursuing this passion might affect the amount of time I had for my academic work and research—my main priorities.
On the one hand, I had spent the first three of my college summers working on service projects targeted at improving healthcare and education in resource-deprived Ghanaian communities. I spent the first summer assisting in the diagnosis and treatment of schistosomiasis in a village, teaching biology and grammar in a resource-deprived town, and delivering donations acquired from Burkina Faso, The United States, and Ghana to orphans and widows in Northern Ghana.
I spent the second summer working on construction projects including building a library at a school. Additionally, I assisted community health nurses to vaccinate children and counsel their mothers on proper child care. I worked as as a Davis Projects for Peace Fellow, with assistance from a W&L Shepherd intern.
I spent the third summer assessing the impact of previous donations to a school, and identifying schools I could collaborate with in the future. I also made arrangements for the efficient distribution of an incoming shipment of school supplies and books from the Waddell Elementary School in Lexington, Virginia. The shipment was expected to arrive in Ghana after I had returned to the United States. I worked on these projects with help from a W&L Woolley Fellow.
As a pre-med biochemistry major, I found these service projects to be as rewarding as my academic work. However I anticipated that the time commitment of my future academic pursuits might compel me to abandon my service projects in the future.
As such, I decided to create Citadel Foundation for Kids (CFK), a non-profit organization with branches in Ghana and Virginia so others could contribute to the initiatives I started. I also decided to focus on children’s healthcare and education challenges where I thought I could have the most impact. CFK will mainly address child education while I address child health through telehealth platforms as part of my personal research and through another organization in the future.
In education, I wanted to train children to become social entrepreneurs so they could find sustainable ways of addressing social problems in their communities like only they would know how. I believe that WAGiLabs would fulfill CFK’s education objective. The challenge now is building the sustainable models and ecosystem to support this initiative. Please join us, we need all the help we can get!
-Emmanuel Abebrese