Coming Face to Face with the GSGC Difference

Laury Bryant thought she had a grasp of how to support struggling communities in Africa — until she met GSGC mentors and teenagers face to face.

For the Seattle resident and her husband, Bill, this most recent trip was their 10th to the continent. Over the years, the couple helped build a library with their church and dig a well with Rotary International. They painted walls and slept in a school.

They are longtime GSGC donors — Laury and Priscilla were college roommates. But after seeing the nonprofit’s grass roots model for the first time, they’re ready to increase their commitment.

A key take-aways emerged after sitting and visiting with aunties and mentors, Laury said.

“One is that this work is one girl at a time, one auntie at a time, one village at a time,” she said. “There is no big approach or way to move faster.”

GSGC and the aunties let the girls dream and envision themselves as leaders in their communities, she said. “They are lifting up these girls. We heard one say she wanted to be a pilot, one an engineer.” Laury added, “The leadership of the country is going to rely on them. They’re going to need those girls to rebuild the country.”

Another is how important the boys clubs are and how different the GSGC approach is from, say, Oprah Winfrey’s, she said.

“GSGC is engaging young men, giving them a new narrative that does not ring hollow,” Laury said. “It’s the rising tide lifts all boats— the boys will have a way out of poverty by girls and women gaining better social status and being better educated and families having two incomes, as meager as they are by our standards.”

A third, she said, is that GSGC is a community, that Priscilla, partners and supporters are intertwined. Compared with experiences on earlier trips, she said, being with GSGC partners and youth felt like a comfortable family, “more us than them.”

“It’s abundantly clear that Priscilla has the right approach,” Bryant said. “She has a depth of experience and her love of the continent. The people, the geopolitical issues, as complicated as they are, she figures them out.”

The Bryants donate to various projects in the US, but have only “dabbled” in charitable giving overseas. Now, having seen GSGC’s partnerships at work, that will change.

“Giving people, particularly young women, a vision of what could be says this is going to be longer lasting than a well or painting a building,” Laury explained. “We felt part of something that is long-lasting.

“That well we donated outside Mombasa, it’s broken and there’s nobody to work on it,” she said. “We want our international philanthropic dollars to go to Global Sojourns Giving Circle.”