Open Schools Milestone Newsletter #1 – March 2022
The official Open Schools Newsletter – Quarterly Newsletter #1
inside this issue:
- Where it all began
- Uganda doors of opportunity.
- Praise and prayer.
This year we celebrate a milestone birthday at Open Schools Worldwide and what a beautiful journey it has been. As we celebrate this milestone, we will use our newsletters to take a walk down memory lane, to remember some of the shaping moments along the way and to dream about the future and what it might hold.
This month we are going back to where it all began.
It was an unlikely friendship formed by two men on opposite sides of the world that sparked the initiative that now delivers life-changing learning and brings hope to marginalized children in developing countries worldwide.
Dr. Alan McIlhenny and Dr. Phillip Renicks first crossed paths at an ACSI Conference in Kenya, where Dr. Renicks was the organizer of the event and Dr. McIlhenny was presenting a paper. At this point in time, they were both on different paths, unaware that God was already planting the seeds of what He would grow in the future.
Starting his career teaching Mathematics in one of the top schools in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Dr. McIlhenny eventually moved to the Seychelles and later Nepal where he saw varying levels of poverty and the need for a different kind of education for those who couldn’t attend school. While he was working for the Tearfund organization, he spent time in multiple countries, and this opened his eyes to the educational needs of multitudes of marginalized children around the world.
TWO MEN, ONE VISION: WHERE IT ALL BEGAN!
In this newsletter we invite you to take a stroll with us down memory lane as we share how Open Schools began many years ago.
