Alumni Profiles
Health in Kenya
By Greer Bautz
Tiffany Cheng, Ed.M.’06, watched the three- and four-year-old
Kenyan children chant: “Children’s rights! We have the right, to
be LOVED! We have the right, to be FED! We have the right, to be
EDUCATED!” Although her eyes were tearing, her vision was finally
clear: She had traveled to Africa as cofounder of the nonprofit
Dignitas Project to help give some of the world’s most needy
children the most basic of rights — education.
For Cheng, the journey to Kenya took “a lot of soul searching” and the support of a “vast Harvard network.” After earning her B.A. from Wellesley College, she returned to where her education started, the Oakland, Calif., public schools, as a college admissions counselor helping students who did not have the opportunities she had. Looking to further her work in community- based schools, she applied to the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s School Leadership Program because of its emphasis on “entrepreneurship and nonprofit leadership.”
Wanting to take advantage of crossdisciplinary courses, Cheng enrolled in Stacey Childress’ Entrepreneurship in Education Reform at Harvard Business School. “It was a life-defining moment for me,” she says. “My master’s program cohort experience cemented my initial focus on community schools, but I hadn’t figured out how I could use my entrepreneurial spirit to make an impact.”
After graduation, Cheng stayed in Cambridge as a research associate for the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a joint venture between the Ed School and the Business School. She started to think seriously about how she could use what she’d learned about school leadership and community building in large public education districts to better schools in impoverished countries. Through writing cases for PELP, she gained access to Harvard’s network, including alumni from the Harvard Kennedy School and the School of Public Health who had spent time in Kenya, one of the most underserved countries in the world. These connections helped Cheng realize that what communities in Kenya needed most were fully comprehensive schools that students could use as their personal community base, with education and a health center in one space.
“My dream is to have one entrance — school to one side, health center to the other — and the culture of health becomes part of the main discourse,” she says. “When you struggle to eat every day, you don’t necessarily think much about a nagging cough.”
With this idea in mind, Cheng cofounded the Dignitas Project, with the goal of providing organizational capacity to empower local leaders in underserved areas, specifically outside the United States. Their first major project is to start a new school in Kenya. Last summer Cheng went to Nairobi to meet with schools, orphanages, health care facilities, and microfinance organizations in the city’s poorest slums, Kibera and Mathare. Armed with information and start-up money, Cheng spent the first part of this year meeting with community leaders in Kenya and observing model schools in Ghana. She is also looking for a local school leader.
“The crux of everything we do is finding impassioned indigenous leaders,” she says. The goal is for the school to open its doors January 2009.
Given the journey so far, it’s easy to imagine Cheng realizing her goals. It’s also easy to imagine that she’ll be back in Cambridge, reciprocating the role of alumni mentor in the Harvard network she credits with helping take the Dignitas Project from entrepreneurial vision to reality.
“Common humanity is to want the best for our children,” she says. “Africa is the first step. Maybe Southeast Asia is next.”
— Greer Bautz is a freelance writer living in Waltham, Mass.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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