The season of giving extends well beyond the holidays for a Bernardsville’s Katie Meyler, founder of More than Me. It’s a charity that Meyler established to improve educational opportunities for young girls in the African nation of Liberia. Recently, financial giant Chase awarded the organization $1 million to help fund her efforts.
The mission of More Than Me is to help young get off the street and into schools in one of the poorest places on our planet, says Meyler.
“We provide tuition, school lunch, things like healthcare for girls who are sick,” said Meyler. “The main goal is to empower these girls through education.”
So why did she choose Liberia. Meyler’s repsonse: “There’s a saying that says nobody ever chooses Liberia, Liberia chooses you.”
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Meyler’s introduction to country began after she graduated from college and was sent there to teach adult literacy. When she got there, she saw girls who were clamoring to go to school but had little means to do so.
“I started to learn that school wasn’t free for these kids and if they weren’t in school, they were on the streets working,” she said. “For girls working on the streets, they were extremely vulnerable to being sexually exploited so I started putting kids in school with just my own salary at the time.”
Meyler shared her students’ stories through social media tools like Myspace. Soon afterwards, friends and family from New Jersey were wiring money to help support the school. Meyler also caught the attention of a tax attorney working with Lawyers Without Borders in Liberia. As it turned, the lawyer was a fellow New Jerseyan from Montclair.
“She saw me and said ‘Katie, you should just make this all legit, I’ll do the paperwork for free.'” But Meyler was reluctant to to start a charity on her own out of fear. “I went to my best friend and said I don’t think I have what it takes, I didn’t go to an Ivy League college, I’m just a normal girl,” she recalled. According to Meyler, her friend’s curt response to her was, “get over yourself, it’s not about you,” which, in turn, became the inspiration for the charity’s name.
The three-year old charity is slowly growing from the days when it was just Meyler, who just recently started receiving a stipend. Meyler is taking a very cautious approach to how the money from Chase will be used.
“So now we will be able to open up our own academy. We’ve been planning on this but now we have the funds to do it,” said Meyler. “As a board, [we’re] determining the best way to position these funds so we can bring in more so we can be a sustainable long term organization.”
For more information, visit the website of the More Than Me Foundation at morethanme.org.