Rippling Opportunity Into the World
- By Stacy Cooper Dent (906),
- July 16th 2024
With pumpkin spice season in full swing, it has us thinking back to summer with a bit of wistfulness. It’s the perfect moment to share a remarkable program that Torani was lucky to support this past summer.
SHE-CAN is a non-profit that empowers young women from post conflict countries with education and mentorship. To date, they’ve helped 103 young women from Cambodia, Liberia, Rwanda, Guatemala, and other nations attend U.S. colleges, where they are surrounded by a network of supportive mentors, and build the skills to eventually return home and become powerful change agents.
Torani’s long time purpose of creating more opportunities fits like a puzzle piece with SHE-CAN’s important work. We’ve been a long-time financial sponsor with many of our leaders personally dedicated five+ years to mentor scholars throughout their journeys.
When we heard about the summer Make-A-Change Program, we enthusiastically contributed. The program funded summer service projects for ten scholars, each addressing their community’s most pressing challenges. Every project exuded creativity, thoughtfulness, and care. Projects ranged from establishing a women’s agricultural co-op with bookkeeping classes in Cambodia to challenging menstrual taboos and period stigma in Liberia.
In late spring, as the young women were cramming for their college finals, they were simultaneously organizing their projects. A few of us at Torani had the privilege of assisting two of these young women in planning their efforts, including Tarlee Dahn, a Babson College junior. Her project focused on Liberia’s food insecurity issues, she implemented a 6-week project, including a high-school student workshop and the creation of a school/orphanage garden that soon flourished with kale and potato greens.
The Torani team also supported Sythong Run, a junior at Syracuse University, who aimed to help families in Cambodia’s Kampong Phluk Floating Village, where many live in raft houses on the lake. Most of these families rely on unsanitary lake water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning, which harbors bacteria like E. coli. Sythong identified 20 families for an educational program on water-born illnesses while presenting them with a long-term solution: a reusable water filtration system.
At Torani, we’re fortunate to be a growing company, not just in sales, but also in our ability to create opportunities for our team, customers, and communities. SHE-CAN’s Make A Change Program is the definition of opportunity. It empowers young people to address their community’s challenges and we are honored to support these amazing changemakers.
