Grand Valley Magazine Summer 2014 - (Page 22)

Brown, an adjunct instructor in Grand Valley's Master of Public Administration program and former Cook Leadership Academy Fellow with the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, now runs a Grand Rapids-based organization called SowHope, which works on local projects in areas of the developing world where women earn less than $2 per day. By SowHope's estimates, there are more than 1.5 billion women who ﬁt that criteria. In the eight years since SowHope was founded, Brown said that grants to women or women's advocates in developing countries have had a direct impact on more than 38,000 women. "When we would travel on mission trips I would see over and over again where women were being exploited, abused and undervalued," Brown said. "I knew that there had to be a better way to change the culture of poverty for some of these women." SowHope beginnings Brown, a trained photographer who had worked in the White House in the Carter administration, started her journey toward establishing SowHope in the late 1980s. She ran her own photography business and her husband, Doug, was on the front lines of the desktop computer boom when they went to Tijuana, Mexico, on several mission trips to build homes. She said the experiences were increasingly enlightening, and in the late 1990s the couple moved from Chicago to West Michigan when Brown accepted the position at Bella Vista Church in Rockford. That position took her around the world and showed her the plight of women living in abject poverty and treated like second-class citizens, lacking even basic opportunities. She met women for whom gathering water, cultivating and preparing food, and washing clothes was a dawn-to-dusk practice. Brown decided that it was time to use her experience to help women break the cycle of poverty. She looked for multinational organizations whose goal was primarily to empower and enable women around the world. She couldn't ﬁnd one. "There were hundreds of organizations working to help children around the world, great organizations that were working to get rid of hunger and poverty for children, but none that focused exclusively on women and how to help them," Brown said. "I realized, reluctantly, that I'd have to create one." In 2006, SowHope was born. Fortyﬁve funded projects later, Brown said she knows there is much more work to be done, but she's happy with the relationships she's made with amazing women around the world. "We're making a difference one project at a time. We are partnering with local leaders, people who are advocates for women, by giving them the resources to solve local problems using local solutions," Brown said. "And by improving the lives of women, we're improving entire communities." Brown said that targeting women in poverty makes sense because when a woman's station in life is improved, she immediately reaches out to help her children, other families and her community. "We keep getting reinforcement that women are the nurturers of the world," Brown said. "The secondary beneﬁts to their families and their communities are signiﬁcant." Mentoring students Brown isn't limiting her efforts to implementing projects for women across the developing world. She is an active mentor in the Hauenstein Center's Cook Leadership Academy, a program "When you empower women, they can empower their children, and that's exactly what they do." Mary Dailey Brown Founder, SowHope photo by Bernadine Carey-Tucker 22 Summer '14 that helps prepare emerging leaders to impact the future. The program is a co-curricular development program for 40 Grand Valley undergraduate and graduate students representing dozens of different areas of study. Brown said she values mentoring promising young people. "The leadership academy is full of exceptional students who really give me the motivation to keep going, keep pushing. It's a great program full of people who actively want to be leaders and inspire change," Brown said. "There's a lot of corruption in the developing world, and in our world, too. If you only talk to older people, they've all been through some life experiences that were probably negative, but when you get with young people, they have hope and they have dreams, and they still want to change the world. It gives you excitement." The optimism is a big reason Brown continues to teach. She also gets to create excitement among her students by sharing success stories of SowHope's impact around the world. "For me, the university is a place where you can share ideas and you still want to make things better and have the energy to do it. I like being around young people because they have the energy and the will to do whatever they want," Brown said. Brown plans to continue to mentor young leaders and teach at Grand Valley, while continuing to pursue projects that will help women and their families and communities in the developing world. She said she thinks that SowHope's model of providing funding and resources for people who want to solve a problem in their own community is working, and that the relationships the organization has built with established project leaders indicate further success for the future. Women who started off with small micro-loans to buy livestock or supplies for a shop have come back with larger proposals for more money that will allow them to use their experience to help other women where they live. "I believe helping impoverished women is the key to unlocking poverty," Brown said. "When you empower women, they immediately want to empower their children, and that's exactly what they do. I've made it my life's vocation to reach out to women, give them dignity and opportunities, and I see them take that opportunity and pass it on. I think it's a powerful tool."

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Grand Valley Magazine Summer 2014

Table of Contents
Campus News
Fall Arts Celebration
Athletics
Donor Impact
Sustainability
Research
Q&A Karen Gipson
A seat at the table
Students dig program
Deployment to enrollment
Seeing double
Off the path
Arts
Alumni News

Grand Valley Magazine Summer 2014