Locations, Staff, History

StandProud was founded in Loveland, Ohio, USA in 2000 as a means to find international support for a Congolese organization in Lubumbashi in southeastern DR Congo that was helping Congolese youth with disabilities to access treatment they needed to obtain greater mobility and dignity.  That organization, l'Association Congolaise "Debout et Fier" (ACDF) was itself composed of disabled youth who had been helped in 1998-1999 to access orthopedic equipment with private funding by Jay Nash, an employee of the United States Agency for International Development.

Since its modest beginnings supporting ACDF’s activities based in a garage in Lubumbashi, StandProud has built upon the success of its model—in which former beneficiaries of the program take responsibility for caring for new beneficiaries—and moved one thousand miles to the west to set up a larger center in the nation’s capital, Kinshasa—a city of an estimated population of 15 million. At various times StandProud and ACDF have established temporary rehabilitation centers in three other cities in eastern DR Congo—Kalemie, Butembo and Bunia—and still maintains an active center in Goma. To date, over 5000 individual disabled children and youth have been assisted through the program.

About StandProud's Chairman and Founder

StandProud's chairman, Jay A. Nash, is a graduate of Amherst College and of the University of Illinois´ doctoral program in Linguistics. Mr. Nash first began assisting disabled people in the developing world when serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Democratic Republic of Congo – an activity that he later continued when working for Catholic Relief Services in Angola and the Dominican Republic. He resumed spare-time work with disabled Congolese youth upon returning to the Congo in 1998 to work for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and in 1999 helped them to organize themselves into a charity (ACDF) designed to assist other poor,disabled young people to obtain free orthopedic equipment. In 2000, he founded StandProud in the United States to serve as a funding source for the Congolese organization.