Sylvia's Children

Sylvia Allen is a member of the Rotary Club of North St Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale. For the past 40 years, she has served as President of Allen Consulting. Her marketing and public relations firm has produced more that 10,000 events during that time, raising millions of dollars of sponsorships for her clients each year. She was on the faculty at New York University for 20 years and has taught seminars on sponsorship, public relations and sales around the world.

In 2003, Sylvia Allen went with a non-profit organization on a humanitarian trip to Uganda, Africa. While she was there, she was asked by Geofrey Kawuma, head of the Mbiriizi Primary School, to be the school’s Grandmother. With 1,000 children in the school, of which 250 are orphans due to the AIDS crisis, she was honored to accept the responsibility. Out of this Sylvia’s Children, Inc. was born, a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to improving the lives of her ‘grandchildren’; to give the children a fighting chance. (www.sylviaschildren.org)

Since then, she has raised over $2,000,000. These funds have developed the school from four buildings to 26, built a chicken farm and pig farm, a6,000 sq. ft. medical clinic and four bed hospital, plus planted 650,000 coffee tree seedlings and 100,000 mango trees.  In that period of time, over 2,000 children (of which 25% are orphans) have been given an opportunity to come out of poverty with 150 currently attending high school and another 100 in college plus 49 who have already graduated and are teachers, nurses, plumbers, beauticians, etc...