Follow Along as Danville Nonprofit Travels to Uganda

A local nonprofit, The Gretta Foundation (TGF), will be making an important trip to Uganda on November 14. Supporters are welcome to follow the trip on Facebook to see updates from TGF's founder Meg Styles, a Danville resident.

Meg founded The Gretta Foundation in honor of her mother and global nursing legend, Dr. Margretta “Gretta” Styles. The mission of TGF is to address crippling nursing shortages in disease-burdened nations by supporting in-country nursing scholarships to impoverished persons.

TGF's itinerary is packed with meetings with major ministries and nursing organizations along with traveling throughout Uganda to visit nursing schools and affiliate hospitals. TGF is also excited to travel to a hostel in Hoima which cares for girls that are refugees from Rwanda, Northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. TGF will be meeting with future Gretta Scholars.

About The Gretta Foundation

While providing over 80 percent of all patient care worldwide, nurses are the most impacting healthcare professionals. 

But where they are needed the most, there are so few.

Africa has 24 percent. of the global disease burden but only 1 percent of the healthcare workforce. With numbers like that, it’s not hard to see that nursing shortages undermine all global health initiatives like fighting the advance of HIV, TB, malaria, improving maternal health and decreasing child mortality.

TGF’s nursing scholarship model is putting more nurses on the ground and changing the lives of its scholars.

Many of TGF’s Gretta Scholars are conflict survivors, orphans, or children of families who have lost a father with a mother caring for many children living on subsistence farming.  One had been abducted at age 13 by Joseph Kony’s Lords Resistance Army. She had escaped after eight years being held captive. When found, she was pregnant with her five-year-old in tow.

All of TGF’s scholars are educated in-county where they get an education that is relevant to health dynamics in their country. Uganda is TGF’s focus. Their scholarships pay for tuition, books, room and board, medical insurance and a small stipend. Many scholars send money back home to help support younger siblings. After graduating, Gretta Scholars are bonded to work in country a year for each year of scholarship assistance. This is important to help address brain-drain or the migration of nurses to more industrialized countries like the US.

To date TGF has eight graduates and 22 still in nursing school. TGF’s work is incredibly impactful. In addition to empowering and changing the lives of the scholars and those they support, but most nurses can see an average of over 70 patients per day. The lives cared for, and saved, over a career dedicated to care and cure, is inestimable.

The trip will be very interesting and TGF would love to have you ‘join’ them by following their blog and their updates on Facebook.

To learn more, please visit www.grettafoundation.org or contact us with questions atinfo@grettafoundation.org or call 415-391-3139.