
KangaUSA is a project of Expanding Opportunities, a 501c3 nonprofit organization in the USA and a registered NGO in Kenya.
In 1999, Expanding Opportunities was formed to “encourage self-sufficiency through educational and charitable projects nationally and internationally”. Aina Moja, www.ainamoja.com, a small business venture, was established as a means to raise money for the organization while providing moderate incomes for some African business people and artists. The business expanded its online venture to include 1st African Clothing and later KangaUSA. Aina Moja means “one of a kind”.
One hundred percent of the profits raised through sales at Kanga USA, are used to help fund the projects of Expanding Opportunities. Currently the projects include: Street Children Fund, with a feeding program, children’s home, and girl’s rescue center; Books for Kenya; Distance Learning Centers; STEMS, an educational support project; Friends Across the Ocean, Artisan Support and Camp Forest. Learn more about the projects of Expanding Opportunities, how to sponsor a child and how to volunteer in Kenya at the website, www.exop.org. If you wish to make a tax-deductible contribution to our organization, please click here. Your support is greatly appreciated.
About the Founder
Expanding Opportunities’ executive director, Beverly Stone, grew up in a small, safe Massachusetts suburb. Even in elementary school, Beverly dreamed of leaving her quintessential American life to be a missionary doctor in Africa. Although she entered college as a pre-med student, still expecting to fulfill her dream, Beverly’s plans changed and she became a teacher. Her eventual geographical destination remained, however, and in 1996, Beverly, accompanied by her eleven-year-old son, joined a project called Teachers for Africa, and spent a year teaching at Tengecha High School in Kericho, Kenya.
Beverly’s students were, like most Kenyans, impoverished. They lacked even simple school supplies like erasers and pencil sharpeners. She wrote about her impressions during her first year in Kenya in a short story, Five Shillings, describing the street children she encountered and their heartbreaking situations. Beverly decided she had to help. And so, in 1997, Beverly started a feeding program to give twenty of Kericho’s street kids one meal a day, thus helping the poorest of Kenya’s poor.
Since 1997, Beverly has started several other support programs, including the STEMS an education support project in 1998, a rural distance Learning Center in Rabondo and the Friends Across the Ocean cultural exchange program in 2000. The feeding program that originally supported Kericho’s street children inspired a small orphanage called JWHS, a children’s home and now a girl’s rescue center in Isiolo, Kenya. Expanding Opportunities brings North American interns and volunteers, who live and work in Kenya during trips called Service Journeys.