Most of us remember two-maybe three-projects we did in third grade, few of which we would say impacted our lives in any significant way. However, this is not the case for Jessye Kass '13. She remembers doing a project in the third grade on the country of Zimbabwe, and since then she has been "obsessed with the idea of going to Africa," she says. Today, not only has she traveled to Africa on multiple occasions, but she has also helped found the Attukwei Art Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that helps children in Ghana express themselves through art.Kass is a rising junior who is double majoring in Anthropology and African and Afro-American Studies with a minor in Social Justice and Social Policy. She is the founding president of the Anthropology Club, as well as the undergraduate department representative for the AAAS department.

She explains that her first opportunity to travel to Africa arrived with her Brandeis acceptance letter. Kass says that she "ended up picking Brandeis because of the midyear acceptance, which meant that I entered in January instead of August. So basically I had a semester to do whatever I wanted." She began to look into programs in Africa that would allow her to teach English without a degree but her options were limited because she didn't know French. Eventually, she decided to participate in a program in Ghana with an organization called Projects Abroad, which organizes international trips for students and others interested in volunteering abroad.

So in summer 2009, she packed her things and headed off to Ghana for the 6-month program where she taught English at an orphanage. "One of the crucial moments for me was teaching a toddler how to walk. The project of working with him for a few weeks and finally seeing him walk, ... even though it was hard, made it harder to leave and made a difference in my life," Kass remembers.

Her experience was so powerful that upon returning to the United States, she knew that she wanted to go back to Africa. "When I got to Brandeis, I started as a midyear and was obsessed with Africa; ... [I] talked about it all the time. When the summer [of 2010] came around, I decided that I wanted to go back," Kass says.

During Kass' second summer in Africa, she traveled both to Ghana and to Kenya. In Ghana, she worked at the same orphanage as she had the previous summer, raised money for tuberculosis vaccinations for the children and took the kids on field trips, allowing her to become more personally involved with her work.

During her time in Kenya later that summer, she was part of a program called International Volunteer Headquarters, where she was placed in a medical clinic to volunteer.

"I was working in the maternal and infant ward in the medical clinic and was faced with a patient who was 16 years old, pregnant and HIV-positive," she says. "And she did not know that she was HIV-positive, and I had to be the one to tell her. And going through that experience, telling her that she was HIV-positive and seeing her face and her reaction and how that destroyed her inside really made me want to do something."

As an Anthropology major, she explains that she wanted to find a way to help that wouldn't impose her own Western influence too much. "So I came up with the idea of a support group. It was just simple and could be something that dissolved after I left or something that stayed after I left. It was up to them," Kass says.

She started to organize a support group, put signs up, called patients who were HIV-positive and raised money through family and friends. And in the first meeting at the St. Therese Medical Dispensary, where Kass worked during the day, 25 people, most of whom were in their 40s, attended, as well as some younger group members. Though she would prompt questions in English, the discussion took place in their native tongue, Kiswahili, a language that she had been learning.

"It was all for them," she says. "I was just there to provide snacks and a place for them to talk. About halfway through, there was a lull in the conversation so I decided to add volleyball. So we set up the volleyball net in the back of the clinic. And seeing these people who were so sad [when] everything in their life was a mess at that point, with a smile on their faces just playing around in platforms, in skirts and holding babies and playing volleyball, it was just really fun and a good day."

"I really didn't know what I was doing," she admits when discussing facilitating the support group. "It was sort of figuring out what I was doing in the moment and taking a chance, and I was able to get them to all be talking and laughing. I'd ask them questions and sort of [leave] it up to them to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. And doing that was more effective than me just prompting questions." The support group continues to meet even after her departure, and she continues to receive updates from Elizabeth, one of her HIV-positive patients. This experience, she says, got her "on the track of creating things and of creating sustainable change."

Upon returning to Brandeis as a sophomore after her second trip, she wanted to continue organizing programs to create lasting change in Ghana after seeing the success of her support group.

Serge Attukwei Clottey, whom she met in Ghana at the orphanage where she worked, discussed his idea with her of creating an organization that would bring art to poverty-stricken children. Kass took an interest in his idea and has been working to help start the Attukwei Art Foundation these past two semesters.

Kass, who serves as vice president of the foundation, has been working on getting the initiative started by creating its website, getting it registered legally and opening a bank account for the project. While she has been working from Massachusetts, Clottey, who serves as founder-president, has been working on the organization in Ghana.

"We want to provide cathartic means for children to express their story through [an] art medium: children who were victims of child labor, sex slavery or living in poverty-stricken areas, or living on the streets or in an underprivileged place. ... The idea is just to give them an outlet for art," Kass says. The organization goes into schools and runs art programs that allow children to express themselves creatively.

Kass received $4,000 from the Sorenson fellowship, a Brandeis fellowship that funds summer internships, and will use the money this summer to fund her trip to Ghana to help strengthen the organization. "I will be working this summer to sort of get the NGO from where it is now, where it's sort of like a baby ... just fluttering around, to actually be a strong NGO," she says. Though she has been working from Brandeis until this point on this specific project, she says, "It's definitely difficult [working from here], which is why it's crucial that I am going this summer."

For this coming summer, she says that they will be doing outreach, working with children at schools and working to fundraise with partner organizations.

"I'll also be teaching memoir writing to children in a group home. I'll be working with children on the street doing painting and sculpture and will be doing hands-on projects while making sure the NGO is strong enough to sustain itself," she says.

Since the website went live just a month ago, Kass and Clottey have already accepted two interns-one who will be joining them in Ghana this summer and one next fall.

"It's crazy, I'm not a volunteer anymore; I'm in charge of the volunteers. I'm picking them up from the airport, bringing them to the hostel. ... It's just been such a cool process, learning how to be in charge of these things and find legal registrations and partner organizations," she says.

"This NGO is not about creating change in the world, it is about providing a way for children to experience the cathartic nature of art. ... Balancing my desire to create social change and study and practice real anthropology has been a battle, because anthropology does not include sustainable change, or any change. It is about observing and writing, not changing. They don't want ethnocentric Western ideologies imposed on indigenous communities," Kass explains.

"I do think that art ... [can be] cathartic and can be great for people. I think I can help make a difference in their lives and in their emotional selves, but I don't think that this project at least is going to change Ghana or issues of poverty. Our tagline is helping relieve poverty through the arts. We aren't relieving poverty, we are relieving some of the hardships of poverty in the sense that we are giving them a way to have happiness when otherwise things are really difficult," she says.

Though she does not know for sure what her future holds, she says that "I do see myself moving there after graduation, maybe not permanently, but for at least 5 or 10 years. Whether working on that or a different NGO or other project there, ... I think that Ghana will always be my home country."

For now, she is looking forward to this summer. "I am excited about the progress of this project, and this summer will really cement whether or not it's going to be successful. But so far we have been incredibly successful, so I have high hopes for continuing for 10, 15 years," she says.