Donna Wiederkehr

Donna Wiederkehr flips through a stack of photos of children—some smiling, some looking curiously into the camera—and stops at the photo of a wide-eyed six-year-old in a pink dress.

“This is Fabiola, she’s number one in her class,” Wiederkehr says, beaming as though Fabiola were her own daughter. “All she wants to do is learn.”

Wiederkehr continues to flip, occasionally stopping to share a child’s story. They are all abandoned or orphans—and now live in Rwanda in a home (not an orphanage) built by Calm, a charity that helps widows and orphans in the war-torn country. Wiederkehr learned about the home in March 2006, and by April, armed with $4,500 she had raised and 300 pounds worth of supplies, she was on a plane bound for the tiny country.

“For them, I was this angel,” says Wiederkehr, who has since revisited the house and hopes to return twice each year. “For me, it was an instant connection.”

After that first trip, Wiederkehr made supporting the home—and a second one that opened this year—her personal project. She spends most of her free time encouraging friends, neighbors, and co-workers at Campbell Mithun to get involved, as well as organizing money and goods destined for the homes.

“My personal philosophy is everybody grab somebody,” Wiederkehr says. And she has grabbed the giving spirit of her neighbors and colleagues, who do everything from buying cows so the kids can have fresh milk to donating money for a future home. But she is most touched by the support of the kids in her Minneapolis neighborhood, who last year raised enough money at a lemonade stand to send two of their African counterparts to private school for a year and who often donate toys from their birthday parties to the homes. “What that means—what those kids are learning,” Wiederkehr says, her voice trailing off, at a loss for words.

“We are making the tiniest dent, in the tiniest people, in Africa’s tiniest country,” Wiederkehr says. “But to those children, this is their whole world.”