Rotary Club Member Receives Prestigious Ashoka Award

NEW ORLEANS – The Rotary Club of New Orleans Riverbend is pleased to announce that its member Sydney Gray has been selected as a 2015 Ashoka-American Express Emerging Innovator.  The Ashoka Foundation will pay for Ms. Gray to travel to Nairobi, Kenya, where she will be one of 20 award recipients to participate in a series of workshops and training with social innovators, business experts and industry leaders.

“I first heard about the Ashoka Changemakers program when I was notified that I had been nominated in March,” Mrs. Gray said.  “I am still not certain who nominated me, but I was definitely excited.”

“There was a two-part application process, and a two-round selection process,” Mrs. Gray explained. 

“Ashoka accepts applications from five regions in the US, and each region had hundreds of applicants.”

Of the 100 finalists selected by the Ashoka Foundation, only 20 of them will head to Kenya, which holds a specific lure for Mrs. Gray: she’s the founder and head of a non-profit in Kenya dedicated to promoting the economic empowerment of women through control of clean water.  Through Mama Maji, women in the Chiga community are provided sanitation and business training, and the charity provides a water kiosk, which currently supplies more than 1,500 villagers clean water daily.  Two expansions of the initial project have brought water taps into homes for the first time, as well as to a village school serving 275 students.  Mama Maji plans two further expansions of its Chiga water kiosk business this year.

“I expect to leave New Orleans in early August to arrive in Nairobi no later than August 5th, but I won’t be getting back to middle August,” Gray said.  “I will be taking the opportunity to visit our project sites in western Kenya while I am there.”

The Rotary Club of New Orleans Riverbend has been highly involved with Mama Maji for the past two years, holding a fundraising water walk in conjunction with UN World Water, and also applying for grants from the Rotary Foundation to develop Mama Maji’s water projects.

“Rotary’s support has been invaluable,” Gray said.  “We certainly are very excited about what the future holds.”

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For more information on the Ashoka Foundation and the Ashoka-American Express Changemakers program, please visit www.ashoka.org

For more information on Mama Maji, please visit www.mamamaji.org

For more information on the Rotary Club of New Orleans Riverbend, please visit www.nolarotary.org

To contact Mrs. Sydney Gray, please email sydneysgray@gmail.org

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