About the Harpswell Foundation
The Harpswell Foundation is an American based 501c3 tax-exempt organization, classified by the IRS as a private operating charity, with a mission to provide education, housing, and leadership training to children and young women in the developing world. In May of 2007, we became an officially registered Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) in Cambodia.
Studies by the World Bank and other international organizations have shown that educating and empowering girls and women is the single most effective way to aid developing countries. As described in Nicholas Kristof's and Sheryl Wudunn's new book Half the Sky , women around the world, discriminated against and marginalized, are not the problem but the solution to poverty, lack of education, lack of health care, lack of community. The Harpswell Foundation is dedicated to improving the condition of women and the societies they live in by promoting women's education and leadership.
All major projects of the Foundation so far have taken place in Cambodia, a country in desperate need after essentially all of its educated class was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. In June 2005, the Harpswell Foundation completed a four-room primary school building in the village of Tramung Chrum, about 50 miles from Phnom Penh. We maintain the school and its teachers and further have created a scholarship program in which the brightest graduating sixth graders from Tramung Chrum are sent to another village to attend secondary school. We have also helped the village develop drip irrigation farming and start a sewing business, under the direction of villager Hap Saly and Marie Eckstein in the U.S. This business will allow some of the young women in the village to remain working in the village rather than going to the garment factories near Phnom Penh and their very unpleasant living conditions.
In July 2006 the Foundation completed construction of a dormitory and leadership center for college women in Boeng Trabaek, Phnom Penh; in December 2009, we completed the second such facility in Teuk Thla, Phnom Penh. These two facilities, among the first dormitories in Cambodia, allow women from the provinces (90% of the population) to attend university by eliminating one of the major obstacles: not having a place to live in Phnom Penh. Colleges in Cambodia do not provide housing for their students. Male students can live in the Buddhist temples, but female students cannot. For this reason, many women from rural areas are prevented from receiving higher education. The dormitory and leadership center at Boeng Trabaek houses 36 women, the center at Teuk Thla houses 48. Our students have been selected from a wide geographical distribution on the basis of their intelligence, ambition, and leadership potential. Most of them come from poor farming families in rural areas. Despite these beginnings, our young women are now at the tops of their classes at their various universities and have received internships at some of the leading international and national NGOs and other organizations working in Cambodia.
In May 2008, the government of Cambodia awarded us the Gold Medal for humanitarian service to Cambodia. The medal was personally presented to Alan Lightman by Deputy Prime Minister Kong Sam Ol.
In January 2010, we were the cover story of the Cambodia Daily newspaper.
Future plans include developing workshops and conferences on the subject of women's empowerment and leadership, to be held in the large conference room called the "Great Hall of Women" on the top floor of the new facility at Teuk Thla; and creating better job opportunities and scholarships abroad for our graduating students.
We have recently formed partnerships with Agnes Scott College, in Atlanta; Union College, in Schenectady; Northeastern University, in Boston; and the international exchange program for college students, AIESEC. We have begun an exchange program with Agnes Scott through their new initiative in Women's Global Leadership and with Northeastern University through their Co-Op program. We hope to have similar exchanges with Bard College and Bowdoin College.
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