UNA-USA Dane County Events

On her 60th birthday, our speaker, Susan O'Leary, threw herself a birthday party that raised enough money to buy 120 bicycles for the Cambodian School Project.  Bicycles went to the poorest of the families to provide transportation to and from schools that are not always nearby.

Exerpted from an article in Asian Wisconzine:

What started as a small project to help Cambodian grade school children has taken wings and grown into a project that serves nearly 1,200 Cambodian children in the country’s poorest rural villages. The Cambodian School Project, based in Madison, Wis., has built four schools and adopted a fifth in villages across Cambodia. The goal is to educate poor children so that they can succeed in Cambodia’s ever-changing economic landscape. According to project organizers, many of these children are living the lives of their parents: farming on small plots of land and spending the day working instead of attending school. Modernization and the increase of speculators who are purchasing farmland put these children at an even higher risk for extreme poverty in the future. The Cambodian School Project hopes to change this dire prediction for a least some of the country’s poorest children.