By Merritt Frey, Executive Director

Are you setting goals for 2023? Me too! I’m also setting goals for you. :) Over the last five days of the month, we’re going to help you out with a series of ways you can Resolve to be Involved with Mali Rising — five easy ways to help others. The five ways: Connect, Volunteer, Share Give, and Celebrate. We are on Day 2 here so we’re asking you to resolve to Volunteer!

This will take a little more time than Day 1’s resolution, but it will be more fun. We ask that you consider volunteering for the Notes of Encouragement Campaign.

We have the easiest-entry project ever for you - write notes of encouragement to our students in Mali! We provide instructions and you write short notes (and add photos, stickers, etc. if you like), scan the notes and send them to us. Learn more and sign up here.

We will be delivering a new batch of notes to students when they return to school in January, so we need your help to hit our January goal of 500 notes!

Notes are just short messages to encourage our students as they work hard in school. Your notes will:

1) let our students know someone is rooting for them, which is wonderful because our kids face a lot of barriers to education that make life tough,

2) will be exciting to receive for a young person in a small, remote village, and

3) provide a fun way to practice their English skills - one of 8 subjects Mali middle schoolers have to master.

Thank you for resolving to be involved!