We will be having a celebratory donation to the Children’s Dream Fund. Team Captain Meredith Jones would like to invite ALL team members, sponsors and supports to attend this meeting to help celebrate the accomplishments of our team effort.

The meeting will be at 6:00pm at Tangerine in the Hilton Bayfront in downtown St. Petersburg. Dinner and drinks are available for purchase and the meetings usually run until around 7:15pm.

This week our guest speaker is , Ali Halverson, who will be doing a presentation on the aid project she’s working on to benefit AMAP, a school/orphanage in Tanzania. Ali visited AMAP April of last year as part of a five week volunteer trip thanks to sponsorship of her home town of Belleair. Below is a short synopsis of her background and glymps into the presentation:

“After graduating from Clearwater Central Catholic High School, I attended the University of Tennessee on a soccer scholarship. After having both knees reconstructed with three surgeries, the doctors told me that I could no longer put my body through the rigorous training demanded at that level. I hung up my cleats and returned to Florida, completely unsure of what to do next.

I took online classes and began traveling- something I could never do while playing soccer. I spent a total of four months backpacking on my own throughout Europe. For so long soccer monopolized all of my focus and drive. After traveling, my eyes were opened to a whole new world of possibilities. Everyone sees the commercials about the poverty in Africa, and everyone hears the statistics. But it’s hard to truly grasp statistics that have to be said with a point. What does millions of people even look like? It’s hard to imagine, and even harder to believe you can do something about it. I wanted to see the faces and learn about the people behind the numbers and pie charts.

With the overwhelming support of my hometown, Belleair, I was able to raise funds and take a five week volunteer trip to the small town of Bagamoyo, on the east coast of Tanzania. The experience was life changing. Somehow, I got the feeling that these children were teaching me more than I could hope to pass along to them in five short weeks. I decided then and there that I didn’t want it to be five short weeks. If real change is going to happen, it must be bigger than you or me. It must be something sustainable. But first, it must be something that people can believe in. It is my goal to get down to the human aspect of these basic issues that so many in Sub-Saharan Africa are faced with on a daily basis. Taking small, deliberate, steps towards changing the lives of real people, that’s how tangible change begins to take hold. That is something we are capable of.”