When Callie Brauel left North Carolina in 2008 to study abroad in Ghana, she didn’t expect to be running an international nonprofit organization two years later.
The organization, A Ban Against Neglect, operates a facility in Aburi, Ghana, where young women who were living on the streets are taken in and educated in English, math and health in a two-year program. The girls also make products from recycled materials that are then sold in both the United States and Ghana.
“These girls didn’t really have a way to make a sustainable income and they were facing unimaginable things on the streets,” said Brauel, ABAN co-founder and a 2009 UNC graduate.
This summer, the first class of 10 women will graduate, but Brauel said they plan to expand to a second facility in Ghana to train an additional 20 women.
“We realized throughout the first year that we needed a whole second program,” she said.
Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt and Town Council member Matt Czajkowski visited the Franklin Street office this month and donned ABAN-made aprons for the organization’s March photo contest.
Czajkowski said the organization is a great organization both for Ghana’s industry and for entrepreneurship in Chapel Hill.
“This to me is just a beautiful example of college students and recent graduates who want to make things better for people devoting their energy and creativity and coming up with novel ways to help people,” he said.
In 2010, ABAN won a $15,000 Carolina Challenge grant to build the nonprofit facility in Ghana.