Gala overview and how you can help

Hello everyone!

The gala was an unbelievable moment in my life. The HUB ballrooms were PACKED, with , members of the education, architecture, Ethiopian, business, and general miscellanious community of Seattle, all getting together to celebrate the first major milestone of the school's progression!

The evening was catered by PanAfrica Market. Wonderful Ethiopian food. http://panafricamarket.com/wp/

I sat in between Mike Weiss, the national sales director of Nordstrom, and a couple who represented another local firm. Chatted with them about leadership and how opportunity will often pave the way to success for highly driven people.

The evening kicked off with an AMAZING performance by students from the UW Ethiopian community performing a dance. Music provided by DJ Andre (my friend Maria's friend). My two friends Melon Feleke and Naomi Belayneh were among the dancers... I was amazed at their talent and proud to call them my friends.

Then came the speeches/presentations by 1. Haddis and David 2. The UW School of Architecture (as soon as I'm able, I will upload pictures of their accomplishments to this blog) 3. Mike Weiss, on leadership 4. Sharon Sutton (presenting the work the school of architecture did) 5. Ellen Taussig, the founder of the NW school and Yonas Seifu, one of my life's heros.

It ended with a rousing inspirational speech by Jim Diers, the former Seattle Director of Office Neighborhoods, on how to work together as a team to accomplish these goals. He came up with a great acronym, that summed up how you can help (We're getting many emails regarding this).

Community- Who do you know? What is your network? What are the skills within this network? Do you have ties to the media? We need you on our team!

Collaboration- Are you good at teamwork? Are you unsure of how your skills would work with this project but still are passionate about helping gifted students get the education they deserve? Contact me for more information. Everyone has a gift. Everyone can contribute.

Construction- We have the general design of the school (thanks to our lovely team of student architects). Our next goal is to help make this design a REALITY. In order to do that, we need people with construction skills; people who have the ability to plan out construction and construction management. This includes knowledge interior detailing (i.e. plumbing, wiring, etc) to interior finishing (drywalling, painting, etc) to the actual construction (groundbreaking/layout, etc).

Operations- We need people who can help us plan how we're going to run this school once its in operation. How will compensation plans work? Insurance? Hiring and internal management structure. Come aboard, we need your skills!

Finances- Are you good at fundraising? Are you good at planning finances? Are you an accountant? Do you know people with money who are passionate about projects like this?

We need your help! We can't do this alone, and time is running out for many of these kids that need a place to go to school NOW. There is simply too much riding on this for this to fail. There's a whole COUNTRY of kids with leadership potential that don't have a place to go to school, and we can't afford to fail them.

For more information on how to get involved, please email me at lkumelody@gmail.com. Or visit our website, http://www.ilacademy.org/, sign up for our newsletter, donate money (tax deductible) to the cause, tell all of your friends!

Thank you all for coming last Wednesday, and I look forward to collaborating with you all in the future.

Sincerely,

Laura Umetsu
Project Manager
International Leadership Academy of Ethiopia