Black & Abroad is driven by the desire to encourage our community to travel through service based efforts, which we've titled "The Empower Initiative."
Our first service project under the Empower Initiative is "Books Abroad."
One of the first steps to seeing the world, is learning about what the world has to offer. Our goal is to support South Africa with an investment in its children that will promote additional educational opportunities and expose the children to the world through literature. To achieve this change, we are donating “mini libraries” and school supplies to Streetlight Schools in Johannesburg and Cavelleria Primary in Cape Town.
For each shirt we have sold and will sell by the end of August, we will add a book to the library.
The mini library will be filled with books that highlight the world, feature authors from the African diaspora, and books with diverse characters and stories that showcase characters that reflect the population. We also plan to give each child at the educational sites books to start their own libraries.
100% of the proceeds we receive will go toward school supplies (paper, pens, pencils, crayons, calculators, backpacks, rulers, notebooks, journals, etc.), buying additional books for the libraries, and any educational projects the school plans to provide to the students.
When you give a child a book, it puts the world in their hands. These books will provide the students with an understanding that no matter what your circumstance, the world is at your fingertips. These books will allow the students to learn about the world, and see images of themselves in the characters. These images will help create life-long learners and ignite the traveler within these young minds.
Black & Abroad will be visiting the schools in the fall to deliver the books and supplies to the students. We'll be keeping you updated throughout our trip, including pictures and video (here and on our Instagram/Facebook pages) as we visit the schools. We will also keep you updated on how your contributions are used during the school year.
Dreams come in all shapes and sizes. Help us as we work to make impactful donations of service, knowledge, and empowerment. We have committed a portion of our company's sales to this service project, but we also need your help to make this happen. The efforts you put forth will go on to inspire the children of South Africa to dream big dreams and to strive for excellence even in the face of challenges.
