Mid-Summer 2025

Every quarter we hold a Trustee’s meeting as part of the management of SDCF. The most satisfying element of the meetings is the quarterly updates from our team in Liberia, full of detail, positivity and hope. We cannot share those reports in full for privacy reasons but here are some highlights below to allow you to see the benefits of your support, whether that be sponsorship, attendance at SDCF events, one-off donations or Legacies.

The images in the slideshow feature:

Brewerville: refurbishment of Cassava grinding hall/bakery
Brewerville: Installation of Solar Panels)
Brewerville: Refurbished toilet block
Esther and Otto: Our 2 Celia Reuter University students & laptop presentation
Tappita: Children on the SDCF Vision Scholarship
Tappita: Schoolchildren, including beneficiaries of the Feeding Programme
Tappita: Farming for education & sustainability
VOS: Joshua, a blind student with specialist laptop
VOS: Comfort with her new shop

SDCF broadly contributes support in 3 areas:

Brewerville is a single school and the surrounding communities in Monrovia. Over 100 children are enrolled at the school as a direct result of the sponsorship programme. Sponsorship (starting at £5 per month) gives us the certainty to enrol children and is our most important income source.

We continue to invest in the school itself, with solar panels as an example, allowing the school to extend opening hours for the benefit of all. One long-held objective has been to allow for women’s education after school and this is facilitated by solar panels. This is very important as it allows the women to grow, supporting the education of their children at the school.

We also invest in community facilities such as the Cassava grinding facility and bakery and the toilet block. Such basic amenities contribute to food provision and good health, hygiene and safety. As we see in our own very different country, if children are safe and fed they are likely to attend and do better at school.

Tappita is the spiritual home of Sean in Liberia, the upcountry area where he first taught the poorest children in a desperately poor country. The Salesians work in the area and SDCF has, in the last number of years, worked alongside the school and the community. This currently takes 3 principal forms:

The Feeding Programme. This pays for up to 50 children to receive regular meals (at least 3 times per week) in order to incentivise and facilitate attendance at school. Our funding for this programme cannot be guaranteed as it depends on the income we generate from Events and donations. At the end of this academic year we really wish to renew the programme for next year, the benefits are clear for all to see.
The Sean Devereux Memorial Farm. This is converting wasteland into productive farm land in order to feed the community and, at the same time, train the young children in this important vocational work. This commitment from SDCF has enabled the purchase of tools and a mini-tractor, allowing for the clearance of the scrub.
The Sean Devereux Vision Scholarship. This programme is directly supporting the education of 14 children in the St Francis Catholic High School, children who would not attend school otherwise.

We are delighted to once again be actively working alongside the Salesians in Tappita.

VOS is the acronym for Volunteers of Sean: In many ways this is our most challenging work as it directly supports the education of approximately 100 children but spread throughout many schools in the greater Monrovia area. Our team in Liberia have to travel far and wide to support and assist the children who can often be in groups of 2 or 3 in far flung schools. Additionally, the team do a significant amount of outreach work in the communities, looking for those in need whose family circumstances may work against school attendance.

In recent months that outreach work can be illustrated in two examples which we are currently supporting:

Blind children. Due to poor sanitation and other health challenges, loss of eyesight is a recurring issue and often leads to children being lost to their families and begging on the street. Our VOS team has recently worked alongside some families and enabled their visually impaired children to enrol at our schools. Specialist support, including laptops and software (JAWS) has been instrumental in this work and Joshua is one such beneficiary. A year 11 pupil who is pictured above, his own words summarise say it all:
"thanks to VOS, the laptop has helped me with assignments and my average has improved". Joshua is currently writing a book entitled, “A new life to begin”, a title that could be a summary of all that we are trying to empower our Liberian friends to achive.
The Walk for Sean 2025 (see Events) is specifically to raise £5000 to support more blind children.
Business and Enterprise: Comfort , who is visually impaired, has developed her own small enterprise selling from home a small range of diverse domestic items including soap, doughnuts and rice. She is a parent of a young girl who is on a VOS sponsored programme and an example of how “seedcorn” investment can encourage and support sustainability

There is so much more we could include, from the development of SD Alumni Associations, safeguarding initiatives at the schools, recruitment of our next two Celia Reuter University students to sports days and teacher training.

Every single penny of your support, whether through sponsorship, event attendance, donations and legacies is being invested in getting children into education, from age 4-21. The supporting activity of agriculture and commerce is just that, efforts to allow the community to grow and allow their children to be educated.

The needs are always greater than our resources but SDCF does make a huge difference to the lives of so many. Please help us to further maintain Sean’s legacy for many more years to come.

Thank you