Archives for January 2017

Friends of Ngong Road has added an educator to its board of directors. A native of Iowa, Sally J. Kenney earned a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Iowa, a B.A. and M.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.  From 1989-1995, she held a joint appointment in Political Science, Women’s Studies, and Law at the University of Iowa.  She served on the faculty at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs from 1995-2009 where she also directed the Center on Women and Public Policy. She joined Tulane University in 2010 as the first Newcomb College Endowed Chair, the executive director of the Newcomb College Institute, and a Professor of Political Science.  The Newcomb College Institute is an interdisciplinary, academic center whose mission is to educate undergraduate women for leadership.  In that role, she has pioneered a service learning summer program to bring Tulane students to NRCF’s annual camp.  Last year, she led three students.

Sally’s research interests include gender and judging, judicial selection, feminist social movements, women and electoral politics, the European Court of Justice, exclusionary employment policies, and pregnancy discrimination. Her latest book is Gender and Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter (2013).  She has close relationships with the Kenyan Women Judges Association.  Her current research focuses on sexual assault on campus and women’s leadership.  She is also studying Swahili.

Sally has been to Kenya four times, first in 2011, as a sponsor of Sharon Akoth.  In the intervening years, she has begun sponsoring three more children and has gotten to know many NRCF students through her participation in camp in 2015 and 2016. Sally and her husband Norman Foster have no children of their own.  Last summer, when she met former child warrior Emmanuel Jal, who runs a program similar to NRCF for Sudanese orphans in Kenya he said, the Sudan has a proverb that whoever takes in an orphan will never be lonely in old age.  Sally reports, “I now feel as if I have 400 children, and I am so lucky to be involved with this great project.”

In the Illumini Podcast, Steve Kotvis interviews Sally about how volunteers bring their unique talents to Friends of Ngong Road and Ngong Road Children’s Foundation. Sally also describes insightful findings to research about the value of sponsor connections with the children in the Ngong Road Children’s Foundation program.