NC State’s Goodnight Scholars program will host Derreck Kayongo, the co-founder of The Global Soap Project and 2011 CNN Hero at 6:30 p.m. tonight in Talley Student Union’s Stewart Theatre.
Kayongo and his wife Sarah started a nonprofit that repurposes partially used soap from hotels into new bars for needy populations suffering from poor sanitation access.
The Global Soap Project has donated over half a million bars of soap to over 20 countries including Kenya, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq and produces about 30,000 bars of soap per week.
“We hope to offer our students a wide variety of professional development, service opportunities, cultural opportunities—just to maximize their time here at NC State and help them prepare for their careers and also help them understand their role in their communities both here at NC State and when they graduate,” said Allison Medlin, the director of the Goodnight Scholars program.
According to Jason Perry, the program coordinator of the Goodnight Scholars, working with Kayongo is done primarily through a national speaker agency that identifies and matches speakers to those who want to work with them.
“He’s got a lot of great energy, and I think that is not just going to show in his presentation but when he’s willing to talk with the audience and answer their questions very candidly,” Perry said.
Kayongo will deliver his presentation and then have a section for open questions collected from the audience and from Twitter.
“He has his own presentation which talks about his story from being a Kenyan refugee all the way to where he is now and recognized as a CNN Hero and founder of this major nonprofit organization,” Perry said. “The rest of the program will be a Q & A—I think that’s important. The presentation, no matter how enigmatic of a speaker he is or any speaker can be—when you can set up an opportunity for the audience to actually volley questions at him and at any speaker and actually engage in that conversation is something you want to incorporate.”
The speaker series can help inspire students especially along the lines of social entrepreneurship, according to Medlin.
“What really shows in Kayongo’s case is that he had these ideas about ‘oh, wait a second, this is how we could solve a problem and how we could connect these two issues of waste and hotel soap and helping sanitation needs in third-world countries,’” Medlin said. “The fact is that he actually went and did something about it, so he didn’t just have a great idea and stop there, he actually pursued it.”
Learning to do interdisciplinary work and communicate with people outside of one’s major is also a point that the speaker series addresses, including in the choice of the speakers.
“We want it to be folks who embrace an understanding and importance of that interdisciplinary approach and just not engineers just on this one track where they’re just working with fellow mechanical engineers,” Perry said. “You’re working with people not even just within STEM disciplines but outside STEM disciplines as well, whether that’s the arts, business, marketing, so on and so forth.”
In the future for the Goodnight Scholars speaker series, a speaker will be hosted once every semester. Kayongo will also receive the CSLEPS Role Model Leader Award today, which he has already accepted.
“It’s really rewarding to be able to have a major program that benefits not just our students but the entire campus community and we’re really excited about that—to give back,” Medlin said.
