Family Ties 

By Kristen Loschert

January 2004

When Christine Lacy’s son told her he wanted to build a school in Dissan, a small village in Mali , West Africa , Lacy didn’t ask why. She simply asked, “What can I do to help?”  Members of the Lacy family have raised more than$10,000 for a village school and started a non-profit organization to build schools in other parts of the country. “We’re a close family so when we get involved in something we all jump in,” says Lacy, a training coordinator for the Count of Summit Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities in Ohio .

Lacy’s son, Scott, first visited Dissan as a member of the Peace Corps and returned as a graduate student. During his second trip, Scott organized a chapter of the Cleveland Browns fan club to share his love of the team with his new host country. News of the club spread quickly to other Browns fan clubs, whose members wanted to support the village. 

That’s when the Lacy family got involved by designing a t shirt for the villages club, which they sold to raise money for a school Christine supervised production and distribution of the shirts and tracked the funds raised. In October 2002, the family traveled to Mali to present the first $6,00 they had collected. Scott returned to Dissan in September to dedicate the school.

“It was exciting to think we could do something that would make a permanent impact in that village and thank them for taking such good care of our son” Lacy says, “they embraced him and that’s a nice thing for parents to know” 

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