TERJA TERRY AND JACK OSUNDWA FOUNDATION INC
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Mission Statement
TERJA Foundation works with communities to create quality education, equitable and sustainable opportunities for learning and growth, and collaborative problem-solving for children and youth around the world, especially for those who are marginalized.
About This Cause
TERJA Foundation Inc. is a 501c3 organization based in Houston Texas that cultivates equity for children and youth. The TERJA Foundation mission is to work with communities to create quality education, equitable and sustainable opportunities for learning and growth, and collaborative problem-solving for children and youth around the world, especially for those who are marginalized. From providing scholarships to students in need to elevating student stories for global visibility and connection, TERJA creates and engages in a broad variety of equity-building. Collaborations, explorations, and interventions include local and internationally based, multipronged opportunity-building with adults and other youth in the community to identify, address, and solve problems. Mentorship, leadership, group dynamics and experiential learning programs produce sustainable community partnerships that bring concrete results. Outcomes and results include ongoing cross-cultural communication forums, and access to education, clean water, sanitary and dignity products, and safety from gender-based violence. Gender equity in education and sustainable ways to overcome the cycle of poverty drive TERJA’s mission in the United States and abroad. Participants in TERJA programs gain mindful communication skills that form a grounding foundation for their overall advancement and life skills. TERJA empowers youth in under-resourced communities through Mentoring, college applications help, job training and internships, scholarships, experiential learning and media, global, and cultural literacy. Children and youth are protected and empowered through actions to create equitable access to quality education, health care, technology, bridging the digital divide as well as equitable access to a safe and clean environment. TERJA advances gender equity and equality for girls through building infrastructure and opportunity for girls’ secondary education, supporting menstrual health and hygiene, preventing, and responding to gender-based violence, promoting gender-responsive adolescent health, including prevention and care for malnutrition, pregnancy, HIV, and HPV. TERJA is committed to promoting inclusive education and opportunities for inclusive education for all, including children with disabilities. Through workshops, events, and facilitating conversations and workgroups, TERJA enhances community awareness of the prevention, acceptance, and management of disabilities and differences, prioritizes age-appropriate mental health promotion, prevention, therapeutic treatment, and rehabilitation. One of TERJA’s signature programs is the Community Unity Global Story Exchange Project. TERJA’s Community Unity video Global Story Exchange project links diverse students across communities to collaborate over a large scale to prevent and solve local, regional, and global issues of concern. TERJA believes that when students are given opportunities to speak up and hear others, they better collaborate to find creative solutions to a wide variety of global issues. The TERJA Community Unity Video Global Story Exchange Project creates the opportunity for students in the United States to interact with students from communities different from their own and students in other countries in the world. The team initiates and facilitates these partnerships and works with students and their schools to partner students from schools in different cultural environments to create and share video stories about their lives and communities. TERJA recruits volunteers of all ages from the community. TERJA partners with universities to create collaborative service-learning opportunities that engage students with people in marginalized communities. Currently the storytelling project is undergoing at Patterson Elementary school located in Southeast Houston with grade 3 to 5 students in the after-school program. The students are partnered in the digital/video storytelling exchange project with children at Namasanda elementary school in rural Kenya in East Africa. The students exchange video stories about their communities and communicate their thoughts, surprises, and questions via video response. Trained TERJA volunteers facilitate the storytelling process. Facilitation includes coaching and brainstorming with students on possible community topics and projects, helping students create scripts and storyboards for their videos and teaching editing and writing skills. This intercultural video story exchange uses the universality and boundless creative potential of video/digital technology to empower youth from underserved communities, to compose original videos about their communities. These videos (highlighting issues of racial inequity, poverty, environmental racism, disability justice and gender inequality etc) are then shared within an online platform alongside videos by young people from around the world. The goal of this cultural exchange is to use the shared language of digital technology to foster open communication, cultural understanding, artistic expression and problem solving among children and across cultural, linguistic and geographical barriers. This intercultural video exchange project at Patterson Elementary after school program pairs children ages 9 to 12 years with student volunteers from Baylor’s College of Medicine, to produce original videos. Medical student volunteers support child participants with storyboarding, filming and editing their video projects. The goal of this partnership is to not only provide child participants with enthusiastic volunteer supporters for their projects but to also build bridges between underserved communities and medical professionals. Medical student volunteers will have the opportunity to collaborate directly with communities to better understand the roots of health inequities and develop immediate, sustainable and targeted health interventions for communities. TERJA needs support to provide students with filming and editing equipment including editing software, hard drives and lighting equipment. Support is also needed to fund anti-racism and social justice training for our medical student volunteers and further research into the impact of community-based partnerships on health inequities in underserved communities. We also continue to recruit schools and organizations that are interested in participating in this cultural exchange.