
Tina Beattie is crowdfunding
Weʼre raising £9,000 to send £300 each month to the Byseee school project in Sierra Leone, providing a holistic education for girls and support for poor families.
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Catholic Women Speak (CWS) is raising funds to support Byseee Preparatory School for Girls and Day Care Centre in Freetown, Sierra Leone. We currently send £300 per month, which allows the school to run a feeding scheme as well as providing regular support for teachers' salaries, school uniforms and supplies and maintenance. Our funds have helped to dig a well which is providing fresh water for the school and the local community. The feeding scheme is our latest project, providing regular meals for under-nourished children, who often arrive at school hungry. We'd very much like to increase our monthly contribution to £400 which would allow them to offer the children two meals a week.
The school, which comes under the auspices of St Peter the Rock Parish in Calaba town in Freetown, is run by Yema (Gertrude) Jusufu and her sister Edita Fofana, who are both members of CWS. When asked to explain the puzzling spelling of the name "Byseee", Yema wrote that their late mother was asked to start a girls' school by parents in the community. She had six children - three girls and three boys - and she used the initials of each of her children to name the school:
Bernadette - Yema - Sydney - Edward - Elis - Edita = Byseee
Byseee school offers a wide range of educational and care facilities to women and children, particularly orphans, girls from broken homes, and single mothers. It follows the formal school curriculum but extends this to develop the children holistically and spiritually. The aim is to help them to recover a sense of personal dignity and self-esteem after the traumas of war and amidst the ongoing challenges of poverty, violence and abuse.
The holistic education and support offered by Byseee School, which is rooted in the Catholic tradition but informed by the particular challenges of gender-based inequality and violence against women and girls, expresses the ideals and visions of our global Catholic Women Speak network. While we are not a fund-raising or charitable enterprise, we seek to express our commitment to the promotion of the full human dignity of women and girls by offering practical support to Yema and Edita.
Thanks to a generous donation from Ursuline High School in Wimbledon, London, we have recently been able to provide computers to the school so that the older girls can gain essential IT skills before going on to high school.

Here is a short video we made of the children, staff and parents in the school: Byseee School and Community Project
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Updates
23
1 month ago
Tina Beattie
1 month agoHere is the latest news from the Byseee School and Community Project. Please keep in your thoughts and prayers the family of little Fuwad Kanneh, one of the kindergarten children who sadly died in early August. Please also remember Yema Jusufu, who has been in poor health recently and who carries a heavy load of responsibility for the school and the local community. Thank you to all who so loyally continue to support the project. Every donation counts, and we are making a real difference to children's lives.
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2 months ago
Tina Beattie
2 months agoShare this update to help us raise more
3 months ago
Tina Beattie
3 months agoThank you to all supporters of our CWS Byseee Project. Your generosity makes a great difference to our ability to send a regular contribution of £300 monthly to the project. If you have any ideas for fundraising or for donors who might be willing to support us, we'd be very grateful for your suggestions. We're currently quite short of the money we've pledged every month. We appreciate your support greatly and hope you will continue to donate as and when you can to enable us to keep funding the project. Thank you, from CWS and Byseee.
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Tina Beattie started crowdfunding
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Supporters
154
Celia Wexler
Sep 4, 2023
Yema, So sorry you lost one of your little ones! -- love, celia
£120.00
Mary Hanrahan
Sep 1, 2023
Keep up the great work.
£20.00
Ann and Maureen
Sep 1, 2023
Glad to be able to contribute to this important initiative
£20.00
Mary Kennan
Sep 1, 2023
Great work Tina
£25.00
Andrew Humphrey
Sep 1, 2023
£10.00
Rachel Caseby
Aug 30, 2023
£20.00
Celia Wexler
Aug 15, 2023
Yema, you are looking well. Love the videos of the children!
£150.00

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Crowdfunding is a new type of fundraising where you can raise funds for your own personal cause, even if you're not a registered nonprofit.
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About the fundraiser

Tina Beattie
CWS is an international forum of Catholic women committed to awareness-raising, theological education, solidarity and dialogue to promote the dignity and equality of women and girls in society and the Church. We support the Byseee school and community project in Sierra Leone.