Donating money is the quickest way to help out Expanding Opportunities, but man-power is also invaluable. Expanding Opportunities facilitates Service Journeys to its Kenyan orphanage, the Joseph Waweru Home School. Come and volunteer for several weeks or several months while you learn about East African culture! Volunteers are also needed in Brooks, Maine, USA, where EO's North American headquarters are. To get involved, contact us!

Expanding Opportunities' executive director, Beverly Stone, grew up in a small, safe Massachusetts suburb. Even in elementary school, Beverly dreamed of leaving her quintessential American life to be a missionary doctor in Africa. Although she entered college as a pre-med student, still expecting to fulfill her dream, Beverly's plans changed and she became a teacher. Her eventual geographical destination remained, however, and in 1996, Beverly, accompanied by her eleven-year-old son, joined a project called Teachers for Africa, and spent a year teaching at Tengecha High School in Kericho, Kenya.

Beverly's students were, like most Kenyans, impoverished. They lacked even simple school supplies like erasers and pencil sharpeners. She wrote about her impressions during her first year in Kenya in a short story, Five Shillings, describing the street children she encountered and their heartbreaking situations. Beverly decided she had to help. And so, in 1997, Beverly started a feeding program to give twenty of Kericho's street kids one meal a day, thus helping the poorest of Kenya's poor.

Since 1997, Beverly has started several other support programs, including the STEMS microloan and education project in 1998, and the Friends Across the Ocean cultural exchange program in 2000. The feeding program that originally supported Kericho's street kids has now inspired a small orphanage called the Joseph Waweru Home School, which currently houses twelve boys. It's here that Expanding Opportunities brings North American interns and volunteers, who live and work at the orphanage during trips called Service Journeys.

Expanding Opportunities qualified for non-profit status in the United States on June 1, 1999, and for NGO status in Kenya shortly after. The organization is run by a board of directors, which meets regularly in the midcoast-Maine, USA region where the organization has its North American headquarters and with distance members through the internet.