Gelila Assefa Puck Changes Ethiopia’s Future

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They say that charity begins at home, and though Gelila Assefa Puck, 43, has made Los Angeles her home for well over 20 years (and is involved in several philanthropic endeavors here with her superstar husband, Wolfgang Puck), when it came time to launch her own charitable organization, the Dream for Future Africa Foundation (DFFAF), her heart turned back to her original homeland, Ethiopia.

The idea for Dream for Future Africa actually originated with another philanthropic project in which Assefa Puck was involved, The Ethiopian Children’s Fund. “I had been on the board of a friend’s organization since 1998, when the group founded a school in Ethiopia,” explains Assefa Puck. “When the first children we enrolled in 1999 were getting ready to graduate in 2010, it was a huge milestone, and though some were headed to university, others were not. I thought, maybe I can take on the commitment to extend their education.”

The first place she turned was her extensive address book, where she found the phone number of Andy Stein, founder and executive chairman of The Orphaned Starfish Foundation, whose mission is to provide computer- training programs to disadvantaged youth in communities around the world. After visiting the school himself, he agreed to provide funding and support to extend continuing training to the first class of graduates. “I went to Ethiopia and cleaned up two of the existing classrooms at the school,” says Assefa Puck, “and that’s where we started the computer-training program.” Then the real work began.

Assefa Puck leveraged every contact she had, including Wallis Annenberg and her charitable foundation. “Wallis had heard me speak about the project at a Children’s Institute, Inc. event (another charity Assefa Puck is involved with) and asked me to come in and present my ideas to her board.”

Assefa Puck—whose mother was an Ethiopian Airlines flight attendant who flew her to LA as a teenager to visit her aunt for the summer; she liked it so much, she decided to stay to finish high school—came fully prepared, bringing along blueprints, estimates, and projections; they even pinpointed the location of her proposed campus using satellite imagery during the presentation. After that meeting, Assefa Puck had her first seed money.

When the project broke ground two years ago, she took her husband and two young sons——Oliver was 5 ½ years old and Alexander was 4 at the time—— to the groundbreaking ceremony for the new campus. ““I am doing this so that I can live as an example to my children,”” she explains. ““We belong to the Los Angeles community and try to do a lot here, but I want my children to be connected to their roots by seeing what I do and staying engaged with it.””

That connectedness is at the heart of Assefa Puck’s personal mission. She is always asking herself, How will my children, and others, see Africa? Will they know it for its poverty, droughts, and wars—all the negative things—or will they see its beauty and understand its culture in a positive way?

Two years after the groundbreaking, The Vocational Training Center is ready to open in the village of Aleltu. To celebrate, Gelila and Wolfgang hosted a star-studded, red-carpet gala at Spago Beverly Hills in October honoring Vogue Italia Editor-in-Chief Franca Sozzani. Sozzani has used her position as a public figure to address issues ranging from AIDS to anorexia and is a UN Goodwill Ambassador on behalf of Fashion 4 Development, which encourages the fashion industry to adopt sustainable practices in the developing world.

Read more at http://la-confidential-magazine.com/living/articles/gelila-assefa-puck-dream-for-future-africa-foundation#ZzIHTJsblZAv1e8F.99

Gelila Assefa Puck Changes Ethiopia’s Future