This year, I will be joining ChildVoice’s team of cyclists to ride in RAGBRAI (Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa). Celebrating its 50th year, riders will be riding 500 miles!

For all of us, however, this ride is so much more than just a bike ride. Each mile will be a somber reminder of the thousands of adolescent girls and children in northeast Nigeria whose lives have been violently and radically upended by Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsmen conflicts. They are among the nearly two million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Nigeria, over half of which were children and adolescents under the age of 18.

While this ride helps to bring attention to ChildVoice’s work in Nigeria with these adolescent girls and children, more importantly, with your help, we can do something even greater! Our team has set out to raise $20,000 to install a solar system at ChildVoice’s Youth Empowerment Center. This center is a bustling hub of activity every day during the week. Hundreds of kids pack into the center to come for trauma counseling, vocational training, and just to hang out with their friends in a safe space.

But it is HOT in this part of Africa!! Temperatures can reach 120 degrees during the day. Although we have ceiling fans in the center, we have to bring a generator from town every day to power them. In the last month, fuel prices have more than tripled making it extremely expensive to run the generator. With a solar system, we will take advantage of the sun to create a sustainable power source to power the fans, the water system, and our staff’s computers.

As a member of ChildVoice’s 2023 team, I have committed to raise $12,000 towards our $20,000 goal. But I need your gift to help me reach this goal.