If only there were more families like the Clarkes of Downingtown!

Whereas most families like to spend their summer vacation at the beach, Kellianne and Stewart Clarke and their four children will be in Uganda, building a school library and purchasing books to fill its shelves in the impoverished, East African nation.

Their two-week trip is scheduled for mid-June, and they will be ambassadors for the nonprofit organization Teach the Children.

Heather and Dickson Senkunda, Kellianne’s sister and brother-in-law, launched Teach the Children in 2007 as a way to give the children of Uganda, where Dickson once emigrated from, the opportunity to get a quality education.

The organization – based in Round Rock, Texas, where the Senkundas live – enables Ugandan children to become something better and dream something bigger than their current circumstances allow.

Kellianne, a 36-year-old native of Bellevue, WA is a world traveler, mostly due to her husband’s job as the Vice President of Procurement at Siemens Healthcare, which employs more than 800 people in Malvern.

The couple moved to Chester County in 2002, though spent the past four years living in Germany and China before returning to the county in June 2015.

According to Kellianne, who has been involved in her community since a youth, their four children – Averi (15), Owen (12), Sawyer (10), and Violet (7) – have always had compassionate hearts. Thus, Teach the Children was the perfect vehicle to further instruct them on the importance of giving to those less fortunate.

“When we were living in China, we took a vacation to Vietnam,” said Kellianne, who joined the organization’s Board of Directors in 2011. “We were in this tiny fishing village on the water, and it was cold out and Averi wanted to give her coat away.

“Right then, it struck me that my kids have an innate compassion for others, and if we didn’t give them concrete experiences to help them foster those senses, then shame on us.”

In addition to funding their trip to Uganda themselves, the Clarkes must raise $500 per person.

“We’ve had family meetings to discuss what the kids can realistically do to raise the money,” said Kellianne. “And we have a jar in our house that’s a visual representation of the need to give, and they’ve worked hard to earn money by babysitting, pulling weeds, and doing odd jobs for friends and family.”

“The kids have invested themselves in the money they’re contributing to the jar.”

For the Clarkes, it was important to do more than just write a check to help fund the library. They wanted to be the ones building it, the ones spreading the message of education and enlarging the organization’s reach.

“Studies have shown that education is what helps to improve poverty and address human rights issues,” said Kellianne. “A library is symbolic of that. It’s the key to changing the most basic parts of a society. It will offer hope to a community.”

Click here for more information about Teach the Children or here to contribute directly to the Clarke’s Uganda trip.