Mission Statement
The Beautiful Door project seeks to improve the quality of life among squatter camp youth in a sustainable way. By providing its residents with basic hygiene and work skills, the project encourages self-sufficiency. This concept of empowerment through skill acquisition is crucial to squatter camp residents as it allows them to acquire gainful employment opportunities that were previously outside their reach. The community will undoubtedly see a reduction in unemployment, crime, and prostitution rates as men and women move from the streets to the workplace. As health awareness and disease prevention techniques are also taught, HIV/AIDS rates will begin to decline.

Goals
The Beautiful Door’s goal is to improve the quality of life within the squatter camps, wherein the rates of unemployment, poverty, crime, and prostitution are far too high. The creation of a center for skills training will provide men and women with job-proficiency, positive self-esteem, and a valuable certificate of recommendation that will increase their opportunities for future employment.

Areas of Skill Development

• Housekeeping
• Childcare
• General hygiene and cleanliness
• HIV/AIDS awareness
• Interpersonal communication and relationship skills

Steps

• Identify the target group. Ask local church leaders to recommend training instructors.
• Organize a support group of volunteers from His People Christian Church, Gospel Outreach, and The Jesus Centre to discuss project details, forming a curriculum and training guide alongside the Red Cross Society of Namibia.
• Organize a meeting between the church volunteers and the target group to introduce the instructors, curriculum, and explain the training process.
• Those trained in domestic skills will learn in the classroom for a period of one month, after which they will intern for a small allowance in the homes of volunteers for three months.
• After training, students will be tested by instructors then given a certificate of recommendation from the pastor upon successful completion.
• Advertise employment for graduates.

Results
Leadership Initiatives facilitated a partnership with the Red Cross and a contract within the Namibian government to provide transport for volunteers between the project site and three churches in the Windhoek area. Leadership Initiatives provided initial funding and an additional fifteen percent of the total cost, the Red Cross rallied volunteers and pledged eighty-five percent of the funding, and the students of the Beautiful Door project functioned as the administrative directors.

The Beautiful Door launched a coalition between His People Christian Church, Gospel Outreach, and the Jesus Centre Churches, coordinated volunteers, and provided a venue for onsite training in the Babilon squatter camp. The coalition formulated a curriculum of hygiene skills, worker training skills and basic home repair for squatter camp participants. Upon completion of the project, the participants were given internships to further develop their knowledge. The course commenced with an enrollment of seventeen students from the squatter camp and graduated fifteen, who all remain fully employed within the Windhoek community. Two of the Leadership Initiatives students have since been hired by the Red Cross to continue the program.

Mission Statement
The Goreangab School Renovation Project (GSRP) has two important goals for the Windhoek Community. The first is to renovate the Goreangab school, which is in grievous disrepair, and the second is to add a new aspect to the Goreangab curriculum that will allow students to understand their role in the international community. Because the Namibian government is unable to fund the necessary renovations and curriculum additions, the GSRP will work with a group at the Goreangab Junior Secondary School called Teenagers Against Drug Abuse (TADA), storehouses willing to donate tiles, and construction companies willing to contribute materials, as well as arrange meetings with local business officials. GSRP will also coordinate a sister-school program between the Goreangab school and Paw Paw High School in Michigan that will add a cultural exchange between the countries and help raise the funds needed to complete the extensive renovations. Finally, GSRP will provide digital video cameras for documentation.

Goals
The Goreangab School Renovation Project is designed to improve the quality of life for students within the Goreangab school system. Students attend classes with broken windows, dilapidated ceilings, two-foot holes within the floors and a multitude of other problems that are detracting from student education. Students also lack any education on nations outside of Namibia or of the international community. The creation of partnerships with TADA, local construction workers, and a sister school within the United States will provide students with the manpower, fundraising programs and new educational opportunities necessary to rebuild and strengthen the Goreangab school system.

Steps

• Identify students willing to fundraise for a school renovation project.
• Create a partnership with a local construction company to complete school repairs at cost to the students.
• Build a partnership with an American school through Leadership Initiatives.
• Conduct cultural exchange programs with the American school.
• Create fundraising programs for the renovation of Goreangab day school with American counterparts.
• Renovate Goreangab day school with construction company, parents, faculty and students.
• Continue new educational projects with the American school.

Results
The primary phase of the project instituted a Pen Pal program that linked thirty Paw Paw students to thirty Namibian students from several different schools who maintain a faithful contact schedule of one letter or e-mail per week. The personal one-to-one level of interaction has been complemented by a snapshot of daily American life in video format created and sent by the American students to visually and technologically educate their Namibian counterparts.

The secondary phase of the project introduced the students to their global environment by linking a Paw Paw Social Studies class with a corresponding class in a Namibian secondary school. Each class has examined the influence that various nations assert on one another, introducing the modern concept of globalization. Each school will access the other community’s newspaper to prepare weekly inquiries about the other nation’s current events and related opinions; this interaction is a crucial step to an easier digestibility of an often complex world phenomenon.

Further, the third phase arranged for both groups of students to send personal artifacts and materials to be displayed at each institution. Paw Paw students sent clothing, photographs, a video of the city, stories, student biographies, and some typical packaged foods. Paw Paw students hosted fundraisers and resource drives in order to send critical supplies to various Namibian schools. Through their intensive efforts, they were able to raise enough money to complete the renovation of Goreangab.

Leadership Initiatives is currently seeking to expand the Educational Partnership Program to middle and high schools across the United States.

Mission Statement
The Leadership Initiatives students involved in New Phase believe that the many AIDS awareness campaigns, despite their vast resources, are not successful in reducing the transmission rate of the disease among youth. Their error lies in focusing on creating awareness rather than on taking action: they have attempted to cure the disease by examining general statistics of its aftermath. The New Phase approach is unique because it addresses the individual problems that may lead to AIDS, thus focusing on the psychology of its target group rather than on their sociology.

Goals
This project aims to initiate a new phase of effective AIDS campaigns. The students will investigate the reasons why most youth with AIDS prevention information do not follow its advice, and then attempt a new way to reach them. The New Phase students, whose young age will help them relate to their target group, will interact with students from Concordia and Goreangab High Schools in an effort to recruit the most influential students of each grade for a peer-to-peer training seminar. They will concentrate on the prevention of AIDS and pregnancy that result from unsafe drug usage and unprotected sex. By the conclusion of the seminar, the students will be trained peer counselors, ready to give advice and disseminate information from an apposite mouth to a more receptive ear. By creating an environment where constructive peer interaction and positive self-esteem flourish, the better educated group of youngsters will see a safer, more protected future.

Steps

• Contact the Ministries of Education, Women and Child Welfare, and Health in order to access the administration of Concordia and Goreangab High Schools.
• Contact the principles of Concordia and Goreangab High Schools to gain access to the students.
• Identify 15-30 prominent and influential students for a two month counseling program to teach AIDS, pregnancy, drug, and crime awareness.
• Arrange for transportation for the Concordia boarding school students to go on educational field trips around the city.
• Identify possible collaborative partners, such as UNICEF, UNAIDS, NASOMA, to provide funding and materials for the program and its curriculum.
• At the conclusion of the program, the trained high school students will organize a peer counseling program in their respective schools.
• The New Phase students will meet weekly with the trained high school students to manage the difficult problems and to continue mentorship.

Results
Leadership Initiatives secured contacts at both Concordia and Goreangab High Schools and arranged meetings with the Namibian Education Ministry. Leadership Initiatives recruited Gwen Lister, chief editor of The Namibian newspaper, to mentor the high school participants with her valuable insights into Namibian society. New Phase, the Namibian Education Ministry, and Leadership Initiatives worked in collaboration to develop an effective and relevant curriculum for the Namibian school system which was approved by their government for implementation in January 2004. It resulted in the first effective AIDS awareness and peer counseling program in the city.

Mission Statement
This project aims to assist the United Nations with their task of dispensing necessary winter clothing to the refugees of the Osire Refugee Camp. The camp was created as a temporary haven for refugees of all ages suffering from the Angolan civil war. It is sponsored by various aid organizations who gather resources in order to maintain suitable and sanitary living conditions.

Goals
The Osire Refugee Camp Project seeks to ease those suffering from the Angolan civil war by providing them with winter clothing.

Steps

• Contact the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for camp information, statistics, and clothing donations.
• Solicit Namibian citizens and the communities of the University of Namibia and American University for clothing donations.
• Advertise through radio stations, television stations, posters, telemarketing, e-mail, and letters to donor agencies.

Results
In collaboration with the Refugee Relief Program, Leadership Initiatives not only contacted churches and government agencies to assist with funding and finding volunteers, but also arranged public service announcements with local radio stations to involve the community. Leadership Initiatives was then able to transport the donated clothing from the designated donation areas around the city to the Red Cross facilities in Windhoek. The project proudly collaborated with the many members of the international community to clothe almost all of the refugees in warm winter clothing before the winter temperatures settled.

Mission Statement
Situational crime prevention is a concept created more than thirty years ago by environmentalists and criminologists. Through present day, they have meticulously researched crime statistics and their many variables seeking to prevent future crimes from being committed. Mentor Brent van Tander suggested the students model their project on an existing organization called Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) that has over 300 members in more than 30 countries. He defined CPTED as “a branch of situational crime prevention which has as its basic premise that the physical environment can be changed or managed to produce behavioral effects that will reduce the incidence and fear of crime, thereby improving in the quality of life. Drawing heavily on behavioral psychology, CPTED concepts and strategies take advantage of the relationships which exist between people and their environments” (source: http://www.cpted.net).

Goals
The project seeks to reproduce the CPTED’s research in the city of Windhoek. The students seek to discover how the frequency and type of criminal acts are influenced by the physical environment in which it occurs. The results will map out certain areas of the city that are most susceptible to crime and will attempt to identify the contributing factors. Once the students gather and analyze their results, they will collaborate with the local government and police units in effort to prevent and reduce crime rates.

Steps

• Gather all past crime statistics and monitor all recent and current criminal acts with the aid of digital cameras and grid maps of the city.
• Create charts that assess: type of crime, time of crime, number of persons involved, and environmental factors that may have been conducive to criminal acts.
• Begin research by sampling neighborhoods highly affected, moderately affected, and almost unaffected by crime.
• Approach a random sample of houses to gather unbiased opinions and experiences with the use of secondary information supplied by the Armed Response, City Police, Rescue 911, State Police, and the Chamber of Commerce.
• Solicit rehabilitated criminal convicts with mailed questionnaires and telephone interviews to identify their specific variables.
• Develop a plan to eliminate the prevalence of crime in specific areas (i.e. better lighting on street X) and present to local government and law enforcement agencies for consideration and implementation.

Results
Equipped with digital and video cameras and the expertise of Mr. van Tander, Leadership Initiatives conducted research on crime source influenced by the physical environment. Leadership Initiatives provided access to crime statistics, police crime maps, city maps, and other materials to assist with information-gathering. The result of the study was then distributed to every government agency in Windhoek, and a conference with the Namibian Police Force discussed the best methods of crime prevention. Several programs were launched that indeed reduced crime in the city.