S.O.U.L. Foundation on Righteous Crowd this week!

S.O.U.L. Foundation
Supporting Opportunities for Ugandans to Learn

In this week’s Torah portion, Vayera, Abraham welcomes three visitors, who announce that Sarah will soon have a son (Genesis 18:1-15). Of course, at age 90, Sarah laughs. But ultimately, as we know, she gives birth to Isaac. In honor of Sarah becoming a mother, Righteous Crowd is proud to fund Uganda's S.O.U.L. Foundation. In addition to food security and education, S.O.U.L. focuses on women's empowerment and maternal health.

In Uganda, one woman out of every 49 will die of a maternal complication related to pregnancy or delivery. S.O.U.L.'s Maternal Health Network (MHN) directly serves over 2,000 women and their families each year through its Antenatal Education Center (AEC). This includes community health worker training, antenatal education classes, and the provision of ultrasound scans, prenatal vitamins, and birthing kits.

S.O.U.L. Foundation works in 30 villages in the Jinja and Iganga Districts, impacting over 14,000 Ugandans. Righteous Crowd learned about Brooke Stern Okoth, Co-Founder/CEO of S.O.U.L., from the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York where she is part of The Collective, a cohort of entrepreneurial leaders who use their Jewish values to address intractable issues facing women and girls in the United States, Israel, and around the world.

Katy Kutzner, Director of Development of S.O.U.L. Foundation, emailed us about their COVID-19 response.

S.O.U.L. has distributed over 4,600 masks so far and plan to give out another 2,000 masks in the next two months. Our tailors continue to make the masks daily and S.O.U.L. has even formed partnerships with the local hospitals to give masks, prenatal vitamins, birthing kits, and antimalarial soap to pregnant mothers at the hospitals there to help them give birth safely and with dignity. 

As our students are out of school, we are providing one-on-one mentorship and academic guidance at the homes of our students. We are also giving educational packets and materials to students as they have no access to internet or online learning so that they can continue their studies. For our maternal health programs, we have begun offering smaller antenatal classes (we offer two-month classes) that follow all social distance protocols. We continue to hand out masks to our students, women entrepreneurs, and mothers. We've also begun a scholarship program for our sponsorship program, as our traditional model is to have parents pay half the school fees and S.O.U.L. pays the other half. With our communities so economically fragile due to the pandemic, we are helping parents by paying their half of the fees for their students' first term back at school. These are just highlights of our pandemic response.

To learn more about S.O.U.L. Foundation, click here.