Greenheart’s Global Impact Grant – December 2022 Winners!
Greenheart believes in connecting people and planet through fair trade, personal development, environmentalism, and volunteerism. Our cultural exchange programs help create global leaders by building mutual understanding and fostering diplomacy. And Greenheart encourages our alumni to give back to their communities through our Global Impact Grant.
A Greenheart Global Impact Grant is a financial award of up to $1,000 given to exemplary members of the Greenheart community. It provides current participants and alumni with the opportunity to create, improve, or maintain a community-focused project abroad or at home. As the Greenheart alumni network continues to expand, more and more of our participants are working towards an environmentally sustainable, socially just, and peaceful world.
Congratulations to our December 2022 Awardees:
- Precious Esi Mensah // Ghana
- Tiara Prasetyaningtyas // Indonesia
Precious Esi Mensah, a former Summer Work Travel participant in 2018 and 2019, wins for her Project RISA: Resilience for Inclusive and Sustainable Agriculture in Ghana
Precious Esi Mensah is the founder of Liquid Love Foundation – a skill training and menstrual health nonprofit organization, focused on empowering Ghanaian women and young girls in remote communities. She is also the founder and editor of Nonprofits in Africa – a premium news website and growth partner for African nonprofit organizations. Precious participated in Greenheart’s Summer Work and Travel program in 2018 and 2019 at Rushmore Tramway Adventures in Keystone, South Dakota and at Truist Park in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2019, she participated in Greenheart’s Global Leaders’ conference in Washington DC and was featured on a Greenheart Connects episode in 2021. Precious is a graduate of the University of Ghana with a bachelor’s degree in Nutrition and Food Science.
Her Project: Daeyiri is a leading agricultural community in the northern part of Ghana. Farmers in this community travel over 10 kilometers just to access electricity to charge their mobile phones that then connect them to agents/networks for selling their products. Project RISA seeks to train these last-mile farmers in Daeyiri on basic digital literacy and how to build portable solar power banks using electronic waste. The project also offers climate-change education and climate-smart solutions to the farmers using their native language, ‘Dagomba’, via WhatsApp voice notes. Precious has completed her project. To learn more about its success, check out her summary post here.
Tiara Prasetyaningtyas of Indonesia wins for her “Agni Project”, an initiative to help tailors with disabilities recycle clothing and remake fashion waste into sellable items at local markets.
Tiara Prasetyaningtyas is from Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She attended Martha Layne Collins High School Greenheart on the YES Program in 2014-2015 and also participated in The Greenheart Global Leaders Conference in 2019 Previously, This is her second Greenheart Grant win! The first was in 2019 for a project to revitalize rural libraries Yogyakarta, Indonesia when she was a law student. Today, Tiara is an associate lawyer specializing in business cases and is exposed to many problems caused by fashion factories. She wants to use the grant to help her community support the zero-waste fashion, local market movement, and provide employment opportunities for people with disabilities.
Her Project: The Agni Project will collect leftover fabrics and old clothes that can be reworked to increase the selling value of the items. Tailors with disabilities will be part of the project–making repairs to clothes that are still fit to wear. Concentration will be on fabrics with natural base materials such as linen and cotton, as well as fabrics with natural dyes that do not pollute water sources. These reworked items will then be sold at local market events around the city of Yogyakarta to encourage buying from local crafters. Tiara hopes this can improve the economy of the people around in her home town. Tiara has completed her project. To learn more about its success, check out her summary post here.
Congratulations to Precious and Tiara! We can’t wait to see how their projects progress.
Got a project in mind? Earn up to $1,000 for an opportunity to create, improve, or maintain a community-focused project abroad or at home. Follow Greenheart on Facebook and Instagram to see when the next application window opens.
Click here if you’d like to donate to help Greenheart fund the Global Impact Grant program.
Thank you!