Marymount Sailors generally love to help out, but Kevin Kilroy ‘15, is an incredibly dedicated volunteer of “Wells Bring Hope.” This organization focuses on “drilling wells to bring safe water and sanitation to rural villages in Niger, West Africa.” They have chosen Niger because according to the 2012 UN Development Index, Niger is the poorest country in the world. A huge issue that people in Niger face is the lack of clean drinking water; contaminated water kills innocent victims, often infants and young children. Women and girls must walk many miles to retrieve the water, preventing them from having time to receive an education or go to work, like men do. One answer to this issue is simply to provide water, which is what Wells Bring Hope does! Kevin Kilroy discloses her inspiration and work with this organization.

Kilroy started at Wells Bring Hope at the end of seventh grade. She remembers “reading Gill Garcetti’s, co-founder of Wells Bring Hope, book about his trip to places in West Africa with and without safe water,” she said. “The book is filled entirely with pictures and quotes from people living or who were living without clean water.” She shared with me that she was incredibly surprised at the difficulty of these people’s lives. The summer of her seventh grade year, she decided to search for information about Wells Bring Hope to “present to [her] parish at every mass,”she said.  She describes her experience of fundraising for a cause as “an outpouring of respect and support from my community. [I] raised enough money that weekend to drill five wells and people . . . said that it was eye-opening [to have] someone so young [open] to them a world they had never known.”

Since then, Kevin continues to speak on behalf of Wells Bring Hope and bring the organization donors. In Kilroy’s sophomore year of high school, she started speaking at several conferences in California and abroad. That summer, she was invited to speak at an impact philanthropy conference in Switzerland where she spoke on a panel regarding the next generation of philanthropy. (She was the youngest on the panel by at least ten years!) She explained, “It was eye-opening to talk about my story [and the values] my parents and Marymount have instilled in me, and then [to] see people from France, Kenya, England, come up to me afterwards and congratulate me on the work I have accomplished.”

Her action as a young person is inspiring and hopefully her words will inspire Marymount girls to go out and find a cause they are passionate about, and thus raise money and awareness for the cause. Kilroy’s mission is to “encourage the next generation to get involved in philanthropy and to share with adults that our generation is ready to face the challenges our communities and our world are facing.”

As an advocate for her organization, Kevin does a handful of public speaking. “During my first experience speaking publicly, way back five or six years ago, I was extremely nervous,” she said. “I could have given up that summer, decided not to do it, had my dad speak for me, but eventually I realized that it would have been selfish of me to do that. If I had given up simply because I didn’t want to speak to a fairly large group of people, I would be putting my own needs in front of the very people, a world away, that I was trying to help.”

These experiences changed Kevin. “From then on, I have always tried to think from a less self-concerned perspective,” she said. “I think this experience has given me the maturity of someone much older. And that, I believe, is what charity can do for a person. Using your free time — your ‘me’ time — is something that takes a lot of effort for people our age, but I also think it’s the most rewarding. During a span of four years where everything is about what you do, where you go to college, what you get in school, who you hang out with, taking a moment to think of others is an easy and rewarding way to keep yourself sane.”

Thank you so much to Kevin Kilroy for her time and service! To learn more or to donate money, visit their website at wellsbringhope.org.