Background of Dining for a Cause

The Delaware Kenya Association envisions a united community where Diaspora Kenyans and friends of Kenya collaborate responsibly through social entrepreneurship to improve their lives and impact Kenyan villages. We empower this vision with our value system of: unity, expansion, collaboration, dynamic and results.

“Dining for a Cause” is an event where Kenyans and friends share a meal together to raise funds to support different development projects such as HIV/AIDS orphans education, AIDS widows micro-enterprise businesses, supply clean drinking water to villages, and provide access to technology to schools in Kenya, and hence the cause.

This event was conceived by DEKA in 2004 after organizing the first ever country-based team to participate and support a local annual AIDS walk in Wilmington , Delaware . The debut event was held on December 11, 2004 in Newark , Delaware and it featured two speakers, Matthew Meyer, Esq., Co-Founder and President, Ecosandals, and Mrs. Grace Nyatome, a community health professional based in Jersey City , New Jersey . The proceeds from the event were donated to the Child Crisis Center , a program of the Medical Mission Sisters Health Program in the slums of Korogocho, Nairobi , and Happy Life Children’s Home in Roysambu, Nairobi that caters to abandoned babies.

With the success of the last four events, DEKA is embarking on this annual fundraising this year to raise funds to transform a donated home into a model youth entrepreneurship center serving bright but disadvantaged youth. Through this annual fundraising, the Kenyan Diaspora in the U.S. with the help of our American friends, organizations and businesses will be embarking on a mission of impacting villages and bringing hope through empowering the communities that we plan to assist. In addition to the wider social benefits that arise from successful multistakeholder partnerships, we hope to realize advantages and value through our visible and active involvement in the partnerships that the youth entrepreneurship program will help to transform. These can come from:

• Consumers gain by increasing market competition

Supporting research : Curtain, R. (2000), “Towards a Youth Employment Strategy.” Report to the United Nations on Youth Employment.

• Provides goods and services to the community
• Revitalization of the local community
• Promotes innovation and resilience
• Allows disadvantaged youth the ability to succeed regardless of their background

Supporting Research : OECD (2001), Putting the Young in Business: Policy Challenges for Youth Entrepreneurship, The LEED Programme, Territorial Development Division, Paris .

• Promotes social and cultural identity
• Builds a stronger sense of community
• Gives youth, especially at-risk youth, a sense of meaning and belonging

Supporting research : White and Kenyon (2000). “Enterprise-Based Youth Employment Policies, Strategies and Programmes.” Draft Report to ILO, Geneva .