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A Ban Against Neglect, nonprofit founded by UNC grad, empowers Ghanaian women

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Mary Kathryne Hutton, a 2009 UNC graduate and internship coordinator at ABAN, holds some of ABAN's products. ABAN is a group which empowers and helps Ghanan street girls get off the streets by teaching them a trade. "The first class of women will be graduating at the end of the summer," said Hutton.

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.

And in 2011, the organization raised $100,000 for the facility through product sales, fundraising and donations.

Brauel met her future co-founder Rebecca Brandt — a 2010 graduate of Concordia University in Irvine, Calif. — at the University of Ghana, where they both studied abroad in fall 2008.

While working in a day shelter for street children, Brauel and Brandt felt a need to help homeless young mothers in Ghana.

“At five o’clock they’d be leaving the shelter with their babies to the streets, and Becca and I would be going back to the university,” she said.

Brauel and Brandt began helping the girls make coin purses from discarded water bags found on the streets. When they returned to the United States, they brought the purses with them and sold them for the girls.

The recycled purses, wallets and pencil cases are now sold online and in several boutiques, including Jackson on Franklin Street and Whole Foods in Durham, for less than $30.

“Growth has been by leaps and bounds and our U.S. sales are skyrocketing,” said Michelle Lewis, a member of ABAN’s board and a 1984 UNC graduate.

Lewis said she joined ABAN because her 9-year-old daughter, Kristin, was interested in helping women in developing countries.

Kristin has since volunteered 100 hours with the organization.

Lewis said the organization is fundraising for the first time in the Triangle area, starting with a house party on May 6.

“We’ve had so much interest from UNC students and UNC leaders,” Lewis said.

Though the nonprofit is based in Ghana and North Carolina, she said they have volunteers in Argentina, Spain and across the United States. The N.C. headquarters on Franklin Street employs 15 interns from UNC.

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Alison Wells, a UNC senior, began interning at ABAN as part of her minor in entrepreneurship.

“It’s just an incredible organization to work with and they really support and care about their interns,” she said.

She has visited the facility in Ghana, works on sales communications and plans to continue with ABAN after graduation.

“You just get to play such a big part of the organization.”

Contact the City Editor at city@dailytarheel.com.

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