Jennings Wright - Partner Spotlight

In this week's "Partner Spotlight" we meet Jennings Wright. Jennings is the Founder and Executive Director of Ten Eighteen Uganda, a non-profit  working with extremely poor women and children in Uganda since 2009. In this blog, you will hear about how and why Jennings founded her organization. She also shares some encouraging stories of success and why she loves the DonorSee community.

Tell us a little bit about you. What inspired you personally to get involved with this work?

I started Ten Eighteen in late 2008, and over Christmas that year reconnected with a friend who was living in Uganda. She asked if we could help an NGO that she was working with in the slum to rent a building, which we did. That led to us making a “once in a lifetime” trip to Uganda, where we just fell in love with the country and her people. We’ve been working there ever since!

Can you tell us a little about the work that Ten Eighteen Uganda does?

Our main project is in Uganda’s largest slum, Namuwongo. We work with teen girls and teen moms there, providing vocational skills in Skills for Life, a residential program for teen moms in crisis, a basic literacy program for girls who haven’t ever been to school, as well as a free clinic and daycare, counselling, mentoring, and community outreach. We have 60 or more people at our compound on any given day!

We also provide food for 2 schools and a babies home in some of Uganda’s poorest areas. In all, we serve about 500 kids through this program.

What is one amazing project you fundraised for on DonorSee this year.

Wow, it’s hard to choose! DonorSee has allowed us to fund some really great projects. I think my favorite project, which most people might not see as important, was the Christmas outing for our residential teen moms and their children. Believe it or not, they wanted to go to KFC! The reason this was so amazing is that it was such an unexpected blessing for them. 

These are very poor teen girls, some as young as 15 when they had their babies. Many have never been to school. They have had extremely hard lives, often including informal or forced prostitution. They’ve never eaten in an actual restaurant, ever, or ridden in a nice vehicle.

The trip to KFC in a van with a driver, their favorite meal of chicken and chips, getting a new outfit to wear, and having the choice to leave their kids at the compound with a sitter if they wanted to were all things that they never thought they’d experience. And they had SO MUCH FUN! (We’re really big on fun!)

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What are the key challenges you face?

For 2020 and 2021, our main challenge (aside from funding, which is every nonprofit’s biggest challenge!) were the very harsh and complete lockdowns in the country. The first lockdown at the end of March 2020 closed all schools. They only just reopened in mid-January 2022! Kids not only get an education at school, but they also get 2 meals a day – often this is the difference between life and death.

The lockdowns also caused the informal economy to completely collapse, which is how the majority of the poor earn a subsistence living. This greatly exacerbated the existing teen-pregnancy problem, as well as child bride practices, because girls and their families were starving and kicked out of homes because they couldn’t pay rent. Many were sold as brides or turned to sex work to try to survive. The impact has been devastating, and will last a long time.

What are your hopes and dreams for next year?

We want to continue expanding our residential crisis-intervention program. There are so many girls in need! And we also hope to keep expanding Skills for Life into digital literacy (we have a project up on DonorSee for a computer lab - view project) and entrepreneur training. We also want to expand our community outreach now that lockdowns are lifting, so that we can try to prevent teen pregnancies and not just help once they’ve happened. Now that we’ve opened our on-site free clinic, the nurse will be able to do workshops on health, hygiene, childcare, and training to educate young girls and boys on preventing pregnancy. We really want to change the culture around teen pregnancy, even while we’re working with teen moms and their children.

Do you have a message for the DonorSee community?

We are so grateful for the DonorSee community and your true involvement in our work. We love that we can show you who we are and what we do, and that you so generously respond to the needs you see. It really feels like a partnership, and we are really excited by that every single day. (The first thing I do with my coffee is check on DonorSee to see who has donated - it’s so exciting!) Thank you all for your generosity!

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If you want to stay up-to-date with the incredible work that Jennings and her team are doing, you can can follow them on DonorSee at donorsee.com/10eighteen