Womens Shea Group Roofing Project

Hello friends,

Those of you who know Adrianne and I well know a lot about this story, so bear with me if I'm repeating myself (shocking, I know).

In 2019 Adrianne and I joined the U.S. Peace Corps, and we're stationed in a beautiful community named Dalun in northern Ghana. Adrianne and I were overjoyed to be sent to Ghana. We had visited Ghana before, and we were overwhelmed by the people's generosity and hospitality. Our experience living in Dalun was much the same. It's a cliché, I know, but Adrianne and I received more from our community than we could possibly give back.

While in Dalun, Adrianne and I work independently and together on several projects to assist our community. The project that resonated most for me was our effort to establish a new group cooperative for the women in our community who produce shea butter. Briefly, the Shea tree is native to the semi-arid parts of West Africa. In these areas, the locals have been processing the nuts of the Shea tree into butter. The finished product is then used for various purposes, including cooking and skin moisturizing. In northern Ghana, tradition has established that Shea butter processing is predominantly a women's task, and mothers have handed down the methods for processing to their daughters for untold generations.

When Adrianne and I arrived in Dalun, we found a community of local women who independently produced and sold their Shea butter in local markets. With the help of our local community counterpart, Musah, we identified our community's Shea butter-producing women as a group that could use some assistance to maximize the positive effect of Shea butter production.

Our efforts were focused on three goals:

1. Organizing the women of our community into a cooperative that was officially registered with the Ghanaian government.

2. Establishing a working relationship between our Shea butter cooperative and large-scale shea butter buyers that could purchase bulk batches from our community.

3. The establishment of a dedicated space for Shea production in our community.

Most women produced Shea butter at home, using the same utensils that they used to cook meals. Our thought was that having a dedicated Shea processing center would allow our cooperative to increase the volume and quality of the Shea butter they produced.

By early 2020 the first two of our goals had been realized. Our local shea-producing cooperative had been organized and registered (currently registered on the regional and district level of government). Additionally, we had developed a professional relationship with a buyer located in Ghana who could purchase bulk quantities of shea butter. Unfortunately, our first shipment of shea butter went out only a few weeks before Adrianne, and I received word that our stay in Dalun would be cut short. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected us all, and in the case of the U.S. Peace Corps, it meant an immediate ceasing of all operations all over the world. We were immediately repatriated to the US; our time had run out as official volunteers in our community.

Two years have passed, and Adrianne and I have remained in contact with a few members of our community. Though our Peace Corps service had formally ended, we had several friends and family members who approached us about whether we could offer some additional assistance to our community. Seeing that people were motivated to help, I reached out to Musah to see if there was interest in establishing the dedicated shea processing center, we had set out to create during our service. The community was extremely positive about this proposition, and we were given a plot of land from our village chief to construct the building for the center. Thanks to the generosity of our friends and family, Adrianne and I were able to collect the funds necessary to build two buildings, each one with two rooms. These buildings would be dedicated spaces for processing, storing equipment, and serve as warehouses for unprocessed shea nuts and processed shea butter before shipment. People from the community donated their time and labor to construct these structures, primarily completed last year. Unfortunately, we were unable to source the funds required to put roofs on the building. As a result, our shea butter processing center is unprotected from the elements and cannot be used to its fullest potential. Additionally, due to being exposed to the elements and having had an uncharacteristically late and violent rainy season last year, one of the buildings has experienced some rain damage that will need to be repaired before the roof can be put on.

The women in our cooperative have collected money on their own to fund the repair and roofing of the buildings, but we are still short of our goal. This is where you come in. The generosity of our friends and family has gotten us to this point, and I am reaching out to see if you can help us financially to conclude this project. As I am not a fan of asking for anything I would not be willing to do myself, I have a proposition for everyone. For every dollar donated towards funding this project, Adrianne and I will personally donate another dollar. This means that whatever your donation is, it will be doubled when it gets to the community. This is an old NPR fundraising trick that I'm going to steal for our purposes. The total cost of roofing both buildings and the rain repair will be $3600. We are hoping to raise $1800, and will support the additional $1800 ourselves. If you have the means to do so, I hope you consider helping us complete this project. Thanks so much for your time.

Leo and Adrianne