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Pages and promises
December graduate collects books for Africa.
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A self-described "bleeding heart," Keegan Kautzky has always been at
the forefront of social issues.
In high school in Perry, Iowa, he founded Youth Action, Inc., a nonprofit
organization that offered young people opportunities to take a substantive
role in identifying community needs and established a source of funding
for youth-based community-specific initiatives to address them.
A year later Youth Action became the largest student-run organization
in the state's history with almost 5000 teenagers donating over 17,800
hours to community improvement projects across the state.
As impressive as that was, a program he started at Iowa State as a senior
could develop into his biggest endeavor yet.
Pages of Promise is a non-profit organization that Kautzky and Kevin Geiken,
a senior performing arts major, founded in the spring of 2004. The group
collects used textbooks to send to schools in developing African countries.
"Pages of Promise is an off-shoot of my time in Africa," said
Kautzky, who spent four months on the continent researching the intersection
of poverty, hunger and public health. "Their schools were appalling.
The windows were broken. It's a ridiculous situation."
What struck Kautzky most however was the textbooks used by the African
college students.
"They had one textbook per class even though only one half of one
percent of the population actually attend college," he said.
When Kautzky returned to Iowa State he decided to do something about the
textbook shortage in Africa. It seemed logical to him and Geiken that
an appeal to college students to donate their used textbooks instead of
selling them would work.
"We appealed to students that it was better to donate their books
to a good cause rather than selling the book or throwing it away,"
Kautzky said. "Many of the books are bought back at such a small
price that it's pretty meaningless to most students. And the donation
can make a huge difference in Africa."
Apparently a lot of Iowa State students agreed with Kautzky.
In its first semester of seeking donated textbooks on campus, Pages of
Promise collected and sent almost 12,000 books (9.5 tons) worth an estimated
$280,000 to schools in Africa.
The group works with a St. Paul, Minn., organization to ship the books
to secondary schools, colleges and libraries in several African developing
countries.
Due to the program's success last spring, students at other colleges have
taken up the charge. Similar drives were held at Simpson College, the
University of Northern Iowa and St. Cloud State (Minn.) this past December.
Interest to start similar programs came from colleges throughout the Midwest
and from as far away as Texas and New York.
"We don't have the outside sponsorship necessary right now to expand
the program much further," Kautzky said, "so we had to put them
on hold until we can establish a funding source.
"It was unfortunate that we had to turn these colleges and universities
away."
Even though Kautzky graduated in December with a bachelor's degree in
political science, he plans to continue to work with Pages of Promise,
establishing similar programs throughout the nation.
But first he will being working for Refugees International, an advocacy
organization based out of Washington, D.C. after graduating from Iowa
State.
Around LAS
January 24 to February 6, 2005
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