T R A I L B R E A K E RS
Kayce Anderson story by Kate Lapides photos by Ami Vitale
2022 For the Good founder Kayce Anderson works for a more equitable world where every girl can realize her dreams and potential. In October, Glenwood Spring’s resident Kayce Anderson, PhD, was honored with the University of Colorado’s prestigious George Norlin Award, which recognizes alumni dedicated to professional excellence and service to humanity. Among the small group to receive it since its inception in 1930 are a Mercury Seven Astronaut, a 10-time Grammy winning jazz musician, a former Supreme Court Justice and a beloved, pioneering physician and Everest mountaineer. Anderson was selected to be part of this rarified group for her work directing For the Good, a non-profit NGO she founded that works with disadvantaged communities in Kenya to keep girls in school.
on the barrier that lack of access to sanitary pads creates to school attendance for millions of girls around the world. Nine years in, For the Good has evolved to address different, larger challenges in a more remote and underserved region of Kenya called the Loita Hills, partnering with Maasai communities there to find solutions to the biggest barriers to girls’ education locally. Since 2019, their core programs have focused on activating local leaders to advocate for girls’ education, training young Maasai women interns to identify and enroll out-of-school children, and opening secondary schools in a rural 650-square-mile region that previously had just a single affordable high school.
Anderson is deeply honored by the award –– and conf licted about being singled out. She believes it’s only thanks to a vast village of support and privilege that she’s in the position to receive the honor at all. And because it was, in fact, her very awareness of the ways that access and privilege create the opportunities that often lead to such recognition for some while creating nearly insurmountable barriers for others that motivated her to start For the Good back in 2014. The organization’s entire raison d’être is working to reduce those barriers so that other girls around the world might have similar opportunities to realize their own agency, dreams, and potential –– no matter where they are born or the circumstances of their childhoods.
The work has had an impact: increasingly, local parents are embracing education for their daughters; over 900 local children have been enrolled into primary schools since they reopened after Covid; and four new secondary schools have been launched since 2021, with another two in planning stages. In 2020, during Kenya’s Covid-school closures, the organization was able to quickly pivot their programming to research and adapt a low-cost off line digital learning platform called Kolibri to the Loita Hills, where few households have access to internet or electricity. The program helped nearly 400 students from 17 different schools stay connected to learning. For the Good is now working with local educators to permanently integrate similar digital technology into classrooms, expanding resources for teachers who often have only a handful of tattered textbooks to work with. The technology will ultimately offer students new access to a vast library of engaging content including interactive math and science lessons, literature featuring girl protagonists and stories written in Kimaa- the native language of the Maasai.
“Many of us in the Global North are incredibly fortunate to have opportunities given to us by the circumstances we are born into and our upbringings,” says Anderson. “I am not exceptional in my desire to do good in this world; there are so many people with equal passion to have a career in which they can be of service to others. I feel lucky to be able to do this work. And in large part I’m able to because thanks to a lifetime of privilege and support from others, I’ve been given a chance to pursue my dreams.” If Anderson’s name sounds familiar, it may be because she was featured in MTN Town’s 2017 Women Who Rock the Rockies issue for her work founding For the Good. Back then, the organization focused 46
What is more telling than numbers are the dramatic impacts these programs have had on the lives of individual girls. Take Najma, a bright and animated 14-year-old from one of the few local Muslim families. When she was 12, Najma used Kolibri during the school closures to study for the KCPE, Kenya’s secondary-school entrance exam that determines if and where a child can go to high school. She passed
Iss ue 6 2022 | m ou n tai nwom e n m aga z i ne.co m