Elimisha Kakuma Newsletter | Vol. 4

Goodbye Party for the Second Cohort!

Students from the third cohort organized a goodbye party for the second Cohort, as they were getting ready to pack their bags and board their flights to their respective universities.  Shoutout to Deng Chol, class President of Cohort 3, for organizing the farewell event!  View photos from some of the first arrivals on our Instagram here.


We Held a GREAT Minnesota Friend-raiser!

On the 22nd of October, we invited friends and supporters of Elimisha Kakuma to a friends-raiser courtesy of Racheal Jarosh and Joel Connor. The event was well attended, and included remarks from our first student at Macalester College, Makol Deng, co-founder Mary Maker, teacher Anika Brennan, and others.

A call to action was put forward; How do we reach out to our networks for growth of the program? What colleges do you know in our networks to introduce Elimisha to? What organizations give funding to start up like Elimisha Kakuma? Thank you to all attendees for the support, and watch out for our next friend-raiser! View photos from the event here.

Rutgers University Visits Kakuma Camp!

Deirdre Hand, Co-Founder and Head of Education at Elimisha Kakuma shares the experience: “During my visit to Kakuma in September, we hosted guests from Rutgers University and Talking Eyes Media.  Dr. Tim Raphael, Dr. Michael Conteh, and Dr. Paul O’Keefe  came from Rutgers University, and Julie Winokur came from Talking Eyes Media.  Julie and Tim (co-founders of the Newest Americans), conducted a four-day digital storytelling workshop for our students and students from another organization. The students improved their photography skills on their smartphones, and were able to tell beautiful stories about their lives and communities (see Winokur’s recent blog post for more details). The rest of my time in Kakuma was spent meeting with students one-on-one; as their college counselor, I will write their counselor recommendation letters, and having the opportunity to connect with them in person is a great change from Zoom classes and WhatsApp conversations.  

One of our main takeaways from our time together is that we all need to be more conscientious about taking breaks. I noticed that students would just work through the 30-minute breaks that we provided in our daily schedule. Of course, I am as guilty of this as they are, but sometimes it takes noticing other people you care about doing the same unhealthy behaviors for you to recognize the need to adjust your own habits. So, in the time I was there, we created a new plan as a class, with the social chair taking the lead, to make sure that everyone got up from their tables, closed their laptops, and went out into the world to move, talk, and laugh.  More than a few times, we ended up heading to the laga, which is a dry river-bed that floods when it rains in Uganda, making transportation across the camp impossible. We’d stand out in the dusty laga, and the students would take turns thinking of games that they used to play as kids, and doing a Tik-Tok challenge, which we may or may not post on social media one day.”

Host Family Success!

Local host friends have stepped up for nearly all of our second cohort—first-year students at UC Berkeley, Elmhurst University, Macalester, Calvin University—as well as a few of our first cohort students already studying at Dartmouth, University of Tulsa, and Trinity College.  Thank you!  We’re still hoping to find host friends to provide warm welcome and doses of off-campus support for two second cohort students in Nova Scotia and Prague, Czech Republic.  Might you or someone you know have interest? Let us know!

End of Summer Semester

The 3rd Cohort just finished their summer classes.  We’re thrilled with the progress and commitment to learn from the students!  Professor Katherine Hall said, “I was very pleased with my students' progress in public speaking this summer. Not only did they learn how to develop a variety of speeches but also they delivered their own original informative and persuasive speeches. Our students also got to listen to guest speakers, including Ater Maper and Ayda Haydarpour, who were both refugees and had the opportunity to attend university.”

Professor Vince added, “The students were committed to pursuing knowledge and mastery within their respective disciplines. While not all initially recognized their artistic capacities, the class illuminated their inherent creativity. The highlight of this experience was their creation of compelling and reflective poems as one of their assignments. In those poems, I beheld creativity and ingenuity.”

Elimisha Kakuma Announced as a new HALI Member

HALI (high-achieving and low-income) students are young people from sub-Saharan Africa who come from low-income backgrounds, have achieved success in their secondary studies, and are hoping to continue their educational journey at the university level. The HALI Access Network is a coalition of non-profit organizations, secondary schools, tertiary institutions and other access organizations that work together to invest in HALI students and their university ambitions.  Read more about the partnership here!

Deirdre In Zambia

“After about 10 days at the camp, I traveled to Lusaka, Zambia, for the annual HALI Indaba. The HALI Access Network is described as “an association of non-profit organizations across Africa that work with high-achieving, low-income (HALI) students to access international higher education opportunities.” Elimisha Kakuma became a member of HALI this year, after being mentored the previous year, and we recently published a blog post on their website introducing our work and ourselves. In addition to members, there are “friends of HALI”—admissions representatives from universities from North America, Europe, and Africa—who attend.

The connections and relationships built among people doing similar work across the continent is invaluable. Sessions during this Indaba included thinking through how we support students after they finish university, recruiting strategies, planning a college counseling curriculum, writing letters of recommendation, decolonizing African education, and sharing information between admissions representatives and college access organizations. This year we also created the Refugee Task Force to support members whose classes include refugee students, and I was named as the leader of this task force. Our goals include increasing access to higher education for refugees as well as using our collective leverage to navigate barriers that refugees face, including documentation.” - Deirdre Hand, Co-Founder and Head of Education, Elimisha Kakuma

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Elimisha Kakuma Founder Speaks at UN Political Forum