Connecting nations through awareness

As a group of 22 international first-year students at the American University of Paris, we have established our own NGO: Senergy.

The objective of this organization is to relocate its base to the French-speaking Senegal, which we hope would allow us to raise awareness on Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) amongst the youth through two annual week long seminars.

We hope on our reconnaissance expedition in the near future, to locate a school from where we can launch our mission.

From this point on, our team would be divided into several groups with a rotating leadership.

However, we would be managing ourselves in a non-hierarchical fashion, holding monthly or weekly meetings depending on our need to do so.

For this purpose, we designed posters and radio broadcasts so that our target audience, the youth, would be able to identify with our mission.

We hope to make such an impression in Senegal that some of the youth might want to become activists themselves and teach their peers the facts that we shared with them. The sharing of knowledge is not the only thing we hope to achieve as we would also want to have some fun.

Therefore, soccer would play a vital role in our mission. We want these youth to have fun too and if soccer was not something that they enjoy, we also have an artistic aspect to our very well rounded program.

With comic books that we hope we would produce soon, we could entertain these people. These books could be also reused in our further expeditions in New York where the spread of AIDS is as much of a problem as in Senegal.

By connecting young people from France, New York, and Senegal, we would be living up to our name: Senergy.

The simple fact that there has been a 2% decrease in AIDS infection cases in Africa thanks to similar NGOs like ours would be our utmost reward.