“We restore young people, try to give them hope after the vulnerability of dropping out of school, going to the street, separating from their parents. So, we try to show them that there is hope after this…[we] restore them to come to terms with life.”
—Florence Kaluuba
Mirembe Community College/Community Restoration Initiative
An accredited technical training institute joined to a youth homelessness NGO
Meet the caregiver
Florence Kaluuba is a lifelong educator. She grew up with her grandfather, who was a chief over three villages in the Northern regions of Uganda, during the period of colonial rule by the British Empire (1894-1962). Seeing her natural intelligence early on, Florence’s grandfather enlisted her help to manage his estate and keep records of his extensive cattle herd. Florence also watched her grandfather care for his communities: he would daily open his home to feed anyone who was hungry, he built a local chapel for area Anglicans, and he paid for private school for dozens of his neighbors’ children.
As a young woman, Florence attended a teacher training college in Kampala, where she excelled. She got married and started teaching in some of Uganda’s most elite schools. Later she started her own private preschool and was employed at a YMCA teacher training college.
While working for the YMCA, she noticed that even though the teacher training program was designed to be affordable, many of the young women who were students dropped out before completing. Either they could not find childcare to attend class, or they could not afford exam fees. She decided she would start her own teacher training college that would fully accommodate these neediest of students, and Mirembe Community College was born.
New strategies
As Mirembe grew, Florence embraced opportunities to make it accessible to the poorest students. She partnered with Plan International to house and educate former sex workers at the college, and she received loans from Kiva International to expand technical training into tailoring and catering. She also noticed the homeless youth in her neighborhood, and decided to start a related NGO, named Community Restoration Initiative (CORE). This would be a transitional space for homeless youth, providing skills and support to help them attain a sustainable living.
A mother to many
Today, Mirembe Community College and CORE are linked programs through which Florence uses her gifts as an educator to take care of the most vulnerable young people in her community. At CORE, she provides food and shelter and counseling through the traumas of severe poverty and abandonment. At Mirembe, she provides accredited degrees, on par with the best technical colleges in the country, for young people to pursue sustainable professions. As she once told us,
Managing these young people, actually love is the most important thing…when they come here, they feel rejected, and they want to see whether we have the hearts to accept them. So, we first show them that we accept them as they are, then we restore their hope in the society. They have lost hope in mother, father, the community, the police, so we tell them they are beautiful people. It is loving them.
To learn more about Community Restoration Initiative/Mirembe Community College and support their work, visit their website.