Phase 1
June 2025 - $154,000
Gem Legacy’s Board of Directors and Executive Team have a dream to grow Gem Legacy’s initiatives to impact more lives in East Africa by empowering youth and eliminating financial obstacles to education. Our discovery: by operating the initiatives ourselves, we exponentially increase our capacity and reach with more efficient financial stewardship of Gem Legacy resources. In the following pages, join us for a tour of our biggest dream yet…
Gem Legacy Campus: Gem Faceting School and College Dormitories.
For large-scale gifts and questions about naming rights and agreements, please contact rachel@gemlegacy.org
If Gem Legacy were to increase capacity of both programs as currently operated, it would add an additional $40,500 to our annual budget:
For $47,200 annually, we can operate the Gem Legacy Campus, which adds housing for Gem Faceting students and makes both programs available to students from any region. In addition, we believe this cost is well invested in holistic student support including educational oversight and career preparation that will exponentially improve graduation and employment rates, ensuring these two initiatives leave a quantifiable legacy.
increase in lives impacted annually by education
Our dream: Gem Legacy Gem Faceting School and College Dormitories supports our vision to help fill the gap
for mining communities in key ways to result in generational impact and holistic life improvement.
increased annual student capacity
increased annual student capacity
Gem Legacy uses Arusha, Tanzania as its home base from which to operate and supervise initiatives around East Africa. As the area with the greatest depth of contacts and assets to ensure our programs continue to best support mining communities, Arusha was the best location for the Campus to be built, in addition to being the “gem center” of East Africa.
While both the College Scholarships and Gem Faceting School initiatives could be expanded without building the Campus, we feel that the Campus exponentially increases the impact of those initiatives on individual lives long-term, and therefore the value of each dollar spent from your contributions.
We would have been relying on increased sponsorship from our donors to expand both higher education programs anyway, so instead we ask you to make our annual operating costs possible, which runs the Gem Faceting School and houses students from both higher education programs.
Gem Legacy has committed to stewarding resources well to make the Campus as sustainable as possible by implementing solutions such as solar panels instead of generators and traditional electricity and rainwater harvesting instead of relying solely on purchasing water.
It is common practice in Tanzania to build a wall around property to define boundary lines and avoid disputes, as well as for safety and security for the students living on Campus.
The increase in our annual budget means that the scholarships and training opportunities are available to the most in need from mining regions who wouldn’t otherwise have access to higher education – expanding their capacity of education and earning power, in turn impacting their life holistically.
The Campus fully supports Gem Legacy’s nonprofit operating system. All of the students residing in the dormitories and attending the Gem Faceting School will be on Gem Legacy Scholarships.
College Scholarship students are often recruited when speaking to parents during Gem Legacy’s Miner Toolkit deliveries or are past graduates of the Kitarini Primary School. They then attend our Annual Career Fair before applying to Gem Legacy’s Scholarship program.
Some students attend our Annual Career Fair, some young adults hear about our program in the city, and others will be found through the government school system’s vocational training program for students whose grades do not meet the requirements to attend higher education.
Some colleges and all internships do not have provided housing, necessitating Gem Legacy to provide housing. To date the Gem Faceting School has only welcomed commuting students and the housing will allow Gem Legacy to welcome students from any region.