L.E.A.D Uganda locates forgotten children, educates them, and helps them achieve their dreams.
LOCATE
We locate the best and the brightest children living on the edges of society - AIDS orphans, former child soldiers, child laborers. We mold them into leaders. We give hope to children who had no future.
EDUCATE
We educate our orphans in very best primary and secondary schools – where cabinet ministers send their children. We furnish them with everything they need to succeed: school fees, books and supplies, clothing, and food. Our children receive medical care from the best doctors in the country. During school breaks, our students receive coaching in English, math, and science. They attend workshops in leadership, web design, writing, video, and photography.
L.E.A.D Uganda is a family to our children.We give our youngsters a disciplined, loving family environment. Our professional staff and volunteers nurture them and help them overcome their traumas with counseling and emotional support. We imbue the children with a strong work ethic and a desire to serve.
ACHIEVE
Our students achieve academic excellence. Our scholars receive scholarships to top universities in Uganda, India, and the United States. Because of this, our children are transformed into leaders: entrepreneurs, teachers, doctors. Instead of remaining victims, they will be able to lead Africa.
DREAM
Our children dream of helping Africa. L.E.A.D Uganda gives our scholars the world-class social, entrepreneurial, and communication skills, as well as, the confidence, necessary to lead their countries into the future
Our Model Works
L.E.A.D Uganda is no ordinary program. Our intense, capacity building model helps children heal and achieve. L.E.A.D Uganda provides a vision, a road map of how we can alleviate poverty and create a safer world.
Please support us so our talented children can realize their goals.
What Makes L.E.A.D Uganda Special
Our work is based on three core principals which differentiate us from most other organizations.
CORE PRINCIPLES
We treat the children like we care for our own children.
These are our children. We are a family, a clan. This is not charity. We do not give things to them because they are wretched children, that we feel sorry for and superior to. We give them skills because they are our children and we want them to have the best of everything.
We give them what they really need, not what makes us feel good.
We serve the children’s needs. We listen to the community. Our approach is African, not western, centered.
The HIV-positive Ugandan women and the village elders we met in 2000 were dissatisfied with the dependency created by many charities. They told us they did not just want to receive a chicken from someone. They wanted their children to have the skills that they didn’t have.
We do whatever it takes to help our children succeed.
We have no limits. We are the Marines. We teach our children to overcome all odds. We imbue them with a strong work ethic and a desire to serve. Each child is different. We do what is best for each child.
OUR STRATEGY
Working together, we decided to take a different approach. We would give excluded youngsters 21st-century skills; make them leaders so they could help their communities. To accomplish that we settled on six strategies:
(1) Give them a family / a clan.
We give our traumatized scholars a loving family, a clan; because the clan is the glue of African society. Our children’s clans have been decimated. Our children need a family because they feel inadequate and alienated; suffer from depression and loneliness.
(2) Heal their Pain
Healing their pain is the first step Our children have been traumatized by war, AIDS, and poverty. The Ugandan staff nurture them with counseling and emotional support. We help them feel whole again. So they can move forward.
(3) Keep them in the community.
We don’t segregate our orphans in an orphanage. We build partnerships with local communities. Our kids go home to their communities during school breaks. Every child in Africa has someone. We search out their relatives. In some cases, it takes two years to re-integrate our children into their communities. Though they left as outcasts, they return as heroes.
(4) Give them the very best education.
We give our scholars an excellent education at the best boarding schools. We are not looking to serve large numbers of children with minimal services. What is the point of raising children from starvation to abject poverty?
Our idea is to create real change. To do that we must transform their lives – not just sustain them in their misery. We put children in a position where they can help their communities.
(5) Train them to be leaders by integrating them with the elite.
Our strategy is based on our understanding of how power works and by the transcendent goals we set for our children.
Every society has a ruling group. How can our kids be leaders if they are outside the group? We put our children into the schools attended by children of the ruling group. They make friends and learn from them. Our children gain confidence when find out they are smarter and are looked up to by children of cabinet ministers. This is essentially what transpired in Obama’s youth.
(6) Transcend tribal and religious differences.
Our children will be able to bring the nation together because they have brought their L.E.A.D Ugandan siblings, who come from many different tribes, together. We have brought children from northern and southern Uganda; we have linked Christians and Moslems into a strong clan.
L.E.A.D Uganda locates forgotten children, educates them, and helps them achieve their dreams.
L.E.A.D Uganda is an educational leadership initiative for abandoned children affected by AIDS, war, and poverty.
We locate the brightest children living on the edges of society—AIDS orphans, former child soldiers, child laborers. We enroll them in the best schools, help them climb to the top of their class, and propel them to university. Our children are transformed into leaders: teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs. Instead of remaining victims, they will be able to lead Africa into the 21st Century.
