Educators That Rock!: Alex Grossi
Alex Grossi.
While studying international development in Kenya as part of his final semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Alex Grossi was inspired to find ways to improve the educational opportunities for students there. After returning to the U.S. and graduating from college, he and a few friends created the Kenya School Libraries Program.
FindingEducation interviewed Grossi, now living in Oregon, over the phone last week. “I never went to Kenya with the intention of doing something like this,” he said. “The opportunity just happened upon me and I couldn’t really say no.”
The Kenya School Libraries Program is slated to have 22,000 books delivered to 12 or 13 schools in Kenya by the beginning of the next school year. The organization’s next fundraising event—a dinner, raffle and silent auction—will be held in Denver, Colo., on March 1. The auction will include original artwork from the Maasai tribe of East Africa.
fE: How did the Kenya School Libraries Program get started?
AG: During my time in a place called Maua, which is in central Kenya, I got to know a principal and a librarian. The principal’s name was Nick Nyagah and the librarian’s name was Eliphas Kimathi. They spent a lot of time talking with me about development and where they saw their country going.
We realized that the excessive amount of [educational] material we have in the U.S could be easily transferred to places like rural Kenya. In essence, the plan was not to build libraries but to furnish them.
fE: How did you go from the idea of furnishing these libraries to actually building an organization and making it happen?
AG: I never went to Kenya with the intention of doing something like this. The opportunity just happened upon me and I couldn’t really say no. And to be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing when I began. My friends [that had also studied abroad in Kenya] and I came back with the idea of collecting excess books from large organizations but we quickly learned that three individuals that just graduated from college don’t really have the capacity to store thousands and thousands of books.
So we were fortunate enough to find an organization called Books For Africa whose main mission is to store and house and ship books for programs like ours. We partnered with them in November.
And from there it became an even more manageable task. Now we can honestly say, “We have all of the books at our disposal, and for every dollar that we raise we’re giving two books to a student in Kenya.”
fE: On your Web site, you write about empowering Kenyans by giving them access to truth through education. Do you think giving people access to certain books has changed their view of the world? Do you think many Kenyans have had the experience of thinking and believing something they were taught was true and then realizing it simply wasn’t?
AG: One of the things that I’ve always worried about is forcing people to amend their belief structures to our more Western style of life. Certainly, just talking to students and hearing them describe the potential for change that can come with having access to material has been pretty powerful, but I haven’t talked to students who have necessarily said this one thing has changed my life for good.
But in a sense that is the hope for us—that people will realize that they can be and do whatever they need to do and still do it within their community. Our hope is that by providing the materials they’ll be able to explore their own potential.
fE: There are more than a quarter of a million refugees in Kenya, according to the CIA World Factbook. Do you see differences in background creating tension among library staff or among students?
AG: That’s an interesting question. I don’t believe it’s one of refugees. It’s more one of ethnic divisions.
When I first went to Kenya they were in the midst of an election and it really brought forth a lot of underlying mistrust between different ethnic groups. They closed down the University of Nairobi for over two months because they didn’t want groups mixing and because of the fear of violence.
Now a lot of the towns that you are in, unless you’re in somewhere like Nairobi, are sort of homogeneous in their ethnic makeup. So you don’t have so much of that [tension] until you get into boarding schools and high school where the groups actually do mix. But then there are a lot of teachers who work to make it less of an issue, I guess. It’s certainly not an inside/outside conflict as much as it is the people within.
fE: In a post on your Facebook page, one student made some suggestions for ways to make her library better. Do you think these students know what a library in the U.S. looks like? And does it make you feel proud hearing a young girl in Kenya say that she feels entitled to having an even better library?
AG: I think they have a sense of our access to more material, especially to more technology. It is always wonderful to hear a student say, “There’s no reason that I shouldn’t have that as well.” When I started talking to Nick and to Eliphas, that was what we wanted to recreate in each individual student: that sense that “there’s nothing inherent in me that makes it impossible to have what I can have.”
So it is wonderful that already there are students, who just by asking them about the possibility of a library, start to develop that self-assured sense of entitlement, but a positive one, that we absolutely hope to foster in these students.
fE: What other ideas do you have for this program moving forward?
AG: There are two things we want to do: We’re going to be giving every one of our schools a computer. And assuming that the Internet ever gets better in Kenya—there’s a lot of politics that come into things like telecommunications—with that computer we’d like to create more instant relationships between students here and in Kenya. Because access to a way of life here, and for students in the U.S. to a way of life there, helps young people develop a sense of the world in general.
We also talked with a member of parliament in a community we’re serving right now, and he is adamantly behind putting together community libraries, not just for students but also for older generations to come in and utilize a lot of the materials that they’ve never had a chance to browse.
fE: What has been the biggest surprise for you in helping furnish these libraries?
AG: The excitement of students. When we ask them, “What will this library do for you?” Their overall response seems to be: “It will change my life.” I always thought that we were doing a good thing. But I certainly never expected these students would make it so meaningful to themselves and to us to actually see that this happens.
fE: How can you be sure that your work will be sustained?
AG: A nice thing about the program we run is that we don’t have to rely on matching grants or anything like that. It’s not like we have an office in Nairobi that if we couldn’t pay the bills, we’d have to shut down. It’s simpler than that. It’s myself and two of my friends taking a vested interest in communities, going there ourselves and paying the money out of pocket.
I feel that the program will run as long as there’s interest in education both here and there, and I don’t see that dying anytime soon.
fE: How can educators help support your program?
AG: We’re in a position where fundraising to actually get the books to Kenya is our biggest priority. I’ve been thinking for a while about how we can get individual schools involved and I would love to have something like a read-a-thon as a fundraising event. I would be happy to work with any individual on specific ways that they can help us achieve our goal.
Alex Grossi’s Favorite Sites:
Neopoet
Facebook
Reuters
Skype
