Providing Education & Advocacy for Youth
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The Liberia Hope Fund was founded in 1999 after writer/filmmaker Elma Shaw spent some time in Monrovia doing research for a documentary on child soldiers. The short trip turned her focus to creating programs for Liberia's war-affected youth.
The Liberia Hope Fund began by working with the American Refugee Committee (ARC) and the Episcopal Church of Liberia to establish residential facilities and a vocational training center at Boys Town for Monrovia's street boys and former child soldiers.
Boys Town served over 100 young men from February 2000 until the end of 2002. Program areas included Basic Literacy, Agriculture, Carpentry, Masonry, and Graphic Arts. Some graduates were placed with small businesses for practical training, and others were reunited with their families and sent back to formal schools.
The first Hope Scholarships were awarded in August 2000 to ten senior high school girls in four counties: Montserrado, Bong, Nimba, and Grand Gedeh. In 2001, and again in 2004, with major grants from the Education for Development and Democracy Initiative - US Ambassadors' Girls' Scholarship Program (EDDI-AGSP), the Hope Fund was able to take on many more Hope Scholars. Mentoring activities and educational support during Phase I (2000 - 2005) included multi-year scholarships, academic and life skills workshops, computer literacy training, career and education fairs, and HIV/AIDS awareness and peer education training. During this phase the Hope Fund also began publishing Destiny, a youth-focused HIV/AIDS newsletter.
Current programs of the Liberia Hope Fund include Hope Scholarships, the Girls' Mentoring & Advocacy Group, HIV/AIDS Education, and Activism for Social Change.