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Our Story

About Us

Change the World of One, Inc. (CWOO) is a nonprofit organization that implements humanitarian development projects, cultural exchange programs, and environmental conservation projects locally and globally. We focus on sustainable endeavors that empower people and address worldwide needs in healthcare, water, sanitation, income generation, environmental conservation, literacy, and education.

Our goal is to bring people together who want to change the world and focus our combined efforts to carry out individual sustainable projects that help to change the world, one piece at a time. We know that one person is not able to change the whole world. But one person can change the whole world of another person or community. The more WorldChangers that we bring together, the more change we can enact. This way, person by person, project by project, heart by heart, we are changing the world together. 

Our Story

Jasmine and some of the village children who were part of her daily life in Asiri

Jasmine (Staff) Keefe knew she wanted to live a life of adventure characterized by meaningful service to others. After university, she decided to embark on this journey by joining the Peace Corps in order to serve others and step out of her own culture to gain a better sense of the world. She served as a Natural Resources Management Advisor from June of 2011 through November of 2013, living as the only non-indigenous person in the small rural village of Asiri in Ghana, West Africa. Here, she dove into the culture with gusto, learning as much as she could while connecting with the locals and working tirelessly to serve these villagers she so came to love. She learned how to pump all of her water out of the ground and carry it on her head uphill to her home so she could use it as drinking water and to bucket bathe, handwash her clothes, and cook. She came to understand how the locals used the land to hunt, trap, fish for, and farm all of their food. The local women, men, and children showed her how to cook over a fire, keep babies clean without diapers, eat soup with her hands, ride a motorcycle, speak the local tribal language, gut, cook, and eat anything they could catch from porcupines, bush rats, bats, and monkeys to giant land snails, boa constrictors, and crickets. She mindfully studied the intricacies of an ancient tribal culture rife with juju and ceremony and how that has been changed by the complicating influences of missionaries, technology, and modernism through access to the internet.

 

She loved the way the villagers lived in a communal culture, taking care of each other, their lives and families indelibly intertwined. She spent her days in a variety of edifying and productive ways: outside with the villagers at their family farms with a machete in hand helping to work the land, in the traditional birth attendant’s home learning how to deliver babies, in front of groups of students or farmers teaching them advanced farming methods or about HIV/AIDS, attending day-long church services and funerals while wearing traditional clothes, planning and carrying out sustainable community-driven projects that improved local agriculture, education, health, sanitation, income generation and food security, or sitting under the hot equatorial sun or the soothing clarion stars at night while sharing fufu with rat-head stew and discussing life with those who had graciously welcomed her into their lives with open arms. There was something new to learn, understand and experience every day in this raw edge-of-life world where survival wasn’t guaranteed but faith, community, and the endless bounty of the natural world were.

Jasmine and some of the ladies of Asiri carrying water
Jasmine and the widows of Jamera when she returned to Ghana in 2015

During the course of her service, she contemplated further extending her Peace Corps service, but realized that in order to continue helping in such a salient way while expanding her reach and project-funding opportunities, she would need to do so under a nonprofit organization. Thus, she developed the concept of Change the World of One (CWOO), an organization that would someday be a platform from which other World Changers could operate to put into effect their visions as well. Jasmine incorporated the organization in 2015, then returned that year to Ghana to establish the Ghanaian side of the organization and lay groundwork for future projects. During the years after that while starting her family with her loyal and dedicated husband, through CWOO she designed and implemented individual projects, lasting initiatives, a virtual cultural exchange program, and a scholarship fund using grants and donations. She developed a network of volunteers and foreign nationals on the ground who also endeavor to make meaningful, sustainable change in their communities. She continues to work consistently in Ghana, though her efforts have expanded to include projects in Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Madagascar, with plans for future expansion. In 2019, CWOO officially became a tax-exempt organization, and has continued working to change the world from the ground up, piece by piece, every day.

These days, Jasmine still runs Change the World of One, with the help of a very small team of committed individuals. She does this from home while homeschooling her children and caring for her family. With the unique blend of perspectives, experience, and knowledge of those on her team, Jasmine is on the path to change the world person by person, project by project, heart by heart.

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Together, we can change the world.
Today, let's start by changing the world of one.