Reflections and Updates

As we near the five year anniversary of Erica’s passing, we would like to take this time to remember and reflect on her life.

Looking back at some of her pictures and journal entries has re-inspired us to remember our cause and work harder to achieve all of our goals this year. Our missions and goals are grounded in Erica’s original ideals and dreams for the world, and we hope that this year will allow us to bring many of our own goals into fruition, and create something that will really be true to Erica’s essence.

With that said, we have some very exciting news to share with you all: the building for our new school is a few steps away from being completed! We have completed about 75% of the building, and we aim to have the rest done by this May. Instead of opening the school in the middle of the year, we have decided to take our time and open when the new school year begins in August. By then we will be able to peak interest with more students, create a smoother transition for them, and have a fresh start.

With the school opening delayed, we have had a little more time to iron out the details for the school. Two of those details included coming up with a school motto and designing a school crest, as most Ghanaian schools have both. We did a survey of a few to sample, and noticed that a lot of the mottoes for these schools encompassed the ideas of success and high achievement (many of them in Latin or English).

Although we loved many of the other mottoes out there, we chose to stick with a very simple three word motto in English centering on a different idea: “Learning with Love.” We wanted something simple and easy to remember while communicating a major rule and guiding principle for our school: to foster a safe and comfortable learning environment that has zero tolerance for caning, an unfortunately common practice in Ghana. This motto is also the foundation and basis of our school crest. A big thank you to Philip Zhang for the wonderful design of our school crest and to The/Studio for providing us with a very steep discount on our order of badges for our school uniforms.

We would also like to take this time to thank every single one of you for supporting us in different ways and inspiring us to continue on- to continue her dreams.

With Love,

Erica’s Global Outreach

P.S. Check back with us in a few weeks for updates on the next fundraiser!