DAI Announces Winners of Gunning Service Awards for 2015

November 24, 2015

DAI is delighted honor the two winners of this year’s David H. Gunning Award for Community Service. They are Caity Campos, who founded and runs a nonprofit for at-risk youth in South and Central America, and Katie Prowse, who works for an education charity in Zambia. Matt Woodhouse, a trustee and founder of Katapult Kilimanjaro, a U.K. charity that promotes sustainable development in Tanzania, was selected as the winner of an “honorable mention” prize.

The Gunning Award was created in May 2013, after DAI Board Director David Gunning’s retirement, to honor his extraordinary service to the firm. A continuous presence on DAI’s Board from its inception in 1970, Gunning was a steady advocate of the company’s social mission. In that spirit, the award was established to recognize DAI employee service in the community.

Each Gunning Award winner receives $5,000 for donation to the social service organization of his or her choice. Honorable mention winners receive $1,000.

Caity Campos founded Global-7 (G-7) when she was just 16 years old after a short stint living in Argentina. She began G-7 to help break down barriers such as the lack of extracurricular opportunities and insecure career paths for young people in South and Central America. In the seven years it has been in existence, G-7 has raised an average of $16,000 per year—all of which is spent on programming—and has designed and implemented 18 pilot projects that are now locally driven and self-sustaining after two to four years. In Nicaragua, for example, G-7 has enabled 28 women to attend university.

With the award money, Caity—who earlier this year was named a runner up for the prestigious Andrew E. Rice Award for Leadership and Innovation by a Young Professional in International Development—intends to expand G-7 into Colombia, focusing on the growing numbers of young Colombians displaced by conflict related to narco-traffickers.

Katie Prowse has been a Treasurer Trustee of School Club Zambia (SCZ) since 2013. SCZ was founded in Zambia in 2011 to address the huge financial and technical gaps in the support available for the country’s 5,000 registered community schools. Katie not only helped SCZ obtain charity status in the United Kingdom, she has also personally helped raise funds. This year she walked 250 kilometers as part of “A Long Walk to School—Footsteps For Futures” benefit, which raised more than $22,000 to construct a workshop to teach students carpentry skills. Katie will use her award money to further fund SCZ’s vocational education programs.

In 2014, Matt Woodhouse helped set up Katapult Kilimanjaro, a U.K.-based charity that seeks to build capacity and resilience in local organizations and communities in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania so they can address social, economic, and environmental issues. Working alongside local partner KEDA (Kilimanjaro Environmental Development Association), Katapult supports project design, research, and monitoring and evaluation, as well as fundraising and marketing in the United Kingdom. Matt says the Gunning Award will help fund a livestock distribution project that provides dairy goats and associated technical assistance as an income-generation source for local communities.

“I am thrilled by the activities of these young people,” said Gunning. “It would be easy to become cynical when dealing day after day with poverty and misfortune. Instead, these men and women use their own talents and resources to attack those problems head on.”

To see photos of the work Caity, Katie, and Matt have been doing, check out this Facebook album.