
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.
- Camber, Rye
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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
19
1 month ago
Tina Beattie
1 month agoThank you on behalf of the Byseee School and Community Project to all who so generously support it, and to those of you who have reinstated your monthly donations after they were cancelled by a technical glitch. Your donations are very much appreciated. A huge thank you to the staff and students at Ursuline High School in Wimbledon, who raised enough funds for the school to buy computers and equip an IT room so that the girls going on to high school can learn essential IT skills. Here is a montage of photos sent by Yema this month.
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2 months ago
Tina Beattie
2 months agoThis is for all who so kindly set up a regular monthly donation. My sincere apologies but I was making a small alteration to the JustGiving page, and I didn't realize that it switched off the option to make regular monthly donations. I'm so sorry for the inconvenience, but if you've set up a monthly donation would you mind setting it up again? It helps enormously to know how much is coming in regularly every month. Thank you on behalf of CWS and Byseee for supporting the project. Here is the latest short with updates and news. Tina
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2 months ago
Tina Beattie
2 months agoThank you to our supporters for your generosity. Your donations ensure that we can meet our commitment to send £300 every month, which provides the children with one lunch a week plus contributing towards school supplies and salaries. We are grateful to Ursuline High School in Wimbledon for raising funds to buy 10 computers, so that the older girls can learn essential IT skills before they go to high school. We are currently developing a new website. To see our Byseee Project page please go to https://www.catholicwomenspeak.com/byseeeproject.
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Tina Beattie started crowdfunding
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Supporters
132
Mary Kennan
May 22, 2023
Great work Tina
£25.00
Anonymous
May 2, 2023
Hope and the children are well! -- Celia
£125.00
Alison Concannon Kennedy
May 1, 2023
£10.00
Rachel Caseby
May 1, 2023
£20.00
Ann and Maureen
May 1, 2023
Glad to be able to contribute to this important initiative
£20.00
Mary Hanrahan
May 1, 2023
Keep up the great work.
£20.00
Rebecca de Saintonge
Apr 24, 2023
£30.00

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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.
The page owner is responsible for the distribution of funds raised.
About the fundraiser

Tina Beattie
Camber, Rye
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.