Establish a community where kids and women achieve their rights, protection and equality.
Provision entrepreneurship education to women, supporting them economically, protecting the rights of underprivileged kids by giving them better education and fulfilling their basic needs. All while creating awareness to the community on how they can defend and protect the rights of the kids.
1. Support kids to access education. We offer the same opportunity to all kids and consider them as equals. This is done through our free school, where we also provision free water, food, school materials and daycare.
2. Women empowerment. We help to protect the rights of women who are considered to be fruitless in their communities. This is done through provision of education and seminars to women, so that they can do better and contribute a lot towards the development of the nation.
Most of the mothers of our school’s kids are single mothers, and they struggle a lot to have enough, even to have food every day. With the help of our volunteers, we just recently started to make workshops for them so that they can learn more skills to earn money and to improve their lives.
3. Support kids living with disabilities. We support kids living with disabilities to enjoy life as they are the group who most lacks basic rights like access to education and social life. We provide wheel chairs , walking clutches and other tools which enable them to do what they could not do without.
4. Nutrition improvement for women and kids. We address the problem of malnutrition through trainings for parents about a balanced diet and about producing and using nutritious food. We also support kids who are in critical stages of malnutrition to recover.
We are 5 women in the permanent staff.
However, we also hire local women of our Women Empowerment program
whenever we have the chance to help each other out.
Elizabeth is the founder of New Stars Foundation. She has a big heart and her huge passion is to support kids so they can have a bright future. She has 6 kids by herself, 2 of them are adopted and she considers all of the New Stars Foundation kids her own family too. She organizes the women empowerment events, volunteer stays and administers the funding. She is working hard to make sure that New Stars Foundation will be self-sustainable in the future.
Betina is the main teacher. She has been working as a teacher before, but she wasn’t paid for months. After giving birth, she stayed hungry for days until Stela came to pick her up. After that, she started living at the school with her newborn. She’s doing a great job teaching and making every day special for the kids.
Stella was our first member at New Stars Foundation. She is a very good teacher and makes sure that each kid gets their own customized homework and tasks based on what they need to learn. She can fill out any role easily: teacher, cook, care taker. Unfortunately, she has a hearing problem, which made it impossible for her to find a job at a normal school.
Eunice is our lovely cook. She prepares the food for all 38 kids and the teachers, while always wearing a smile. Even though her past has been very tough. When she was still a teenager, she got pregnant and the guy ran away. After giving birth, she ran away from home and worked as a construction worker. However, she rarely got paid. When our women empowerment program started, volunteers heard about her story and we decided to make her part of the team.
Karen is one of our childcare workers. She originally studied to be a teacher, too. But due to her medical condition, she can’t find a job. Now, she takes care of our the smaller kinds, which she enjoys a lot.
Elisa is helping us out whenever we need additional hands. Right now, Stella and Eunice are on maternity leave, so Elisa is our cook while Stela takes over the classes. She is a very polite and humble girl. We want to make her a permanent member as soon as our funding allows it. Until then, we hire her whenever we can.
Right now, we rely on donations to be able to cover the operating costs of our NGO.
But this is not the way we want to operate in the future. We are currently setting up many small, diversified income sources in order to be sustainable.
Agricultural income: We already have chicken that produce eggs which we sell, but we would also like to get our own piece of land where we can grow our own vegetables and have a couple of cows. Our dream is to use this piece of land for multiple purposes: the daycare center, a school for our kids with disabilities and for our agricultural income.
Sewing and weaving income: Another source of income will be sewing the uniforms for certain schools as official partners. We would also like to achieve a machine that can be used to make school uniform sweaters as they are still rare in Tanzania and many schools import them from China. However, the machine is quite expensive so we can’t start yet.
Our women from the women empowerment program also sew Tote bags, headbands, pants and other things from 100% African cotton fabrics. We mainly sell these to tourists and friends and family of volunteers, so we can get the funding to become sustainable one day.
Party service income: We would also like to offer a party service where we prepare the food and international cakes, while also decorating for the party. We learned some recipes for delicious international cakes thanks to our volunteers.