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Making a little do a lot of good
s Br ody School of Medicine students, Mary H. and Brian Dawson traveled to Uganda on a medical mission, and what they saw there changed them forever. Soon after graduation in 2006, they founded a nonprofit organization, ChooseAneed, that to date has raised close to $100,000 to pay for several small medical and health-related projects mainly in Africa.
When they aren’t raising money for water wells or supplies for health clinics, they both hold down day jobs. Brian is an emergency room doctor at Lenoir Memorial Hospital in Kinston and Mary, the daughter of retired College of Business professor Rick Hebert, is a third-year family medicine resident at Pitt County Memorial Hospital.
Typical ChooseAneed projects include $1,500 to equip a maternity ward at a rural hospital, $800 for a water well in Uganda, $3,140 to build and equip a classroom in Sudan, or $2,700 to buy two goats for each of 25 “guardians”—often the grandmothers and widows of orphaned and vulnerable children in Kabondo, Kenya—so the children will have milk. We caught up with Brian to learn more about their charitable work.
How did you start ChooseAneed?
“Mary and I have been on several trips overseas for different purposes, some medical, some church related, and some related to college. On each of these trips our eyes were opened to the vast differences in the way we live in the developed world and the way others must live in the developing world. We saw many problems that I call ‘needs.’ Many of these problems were small things that I thought to myself ‘I could help with that.’” We were in a cafe in Uganda and we sketched out the concept of ChooseAneed on a napkin as a way to bring these kinds of giving opportunities back home.”
 What makes ChooseAneed different from other charities?
“We have seen people dying for lack of clean water, food or basic health care. It is our belief that the barriers involved with foreign aid do not excuse us from a human, societal, or religious obligation to do something, no matter how small. We believe that what we CAN do is choose a specific need that we see, or someone else shows us, and then work to meet that need in some small way, financially or otherwise, through our knowledge or gifts. The goal of ChooseAneed is to help make those of us who can do something more aware of these specific needs, and then to help facilitate the meeting of those needs.”
Tell us about one of your recent projects.
“On our last trip to Africa, Uganda, we learned that the community we were staying in had worked for over two years on an idea for a community cow project. They had drawn up papers, had meetings, identified needs, identified responsibilities, and created a budget and five-year plan for the cattle and how they would be used. They were only lacking the money to buy the cattle. Here was the answer to our desire to give responsibly and in a way that did not make us the rich Americans and them the poor beggars. They knew about cattle and they knew how to use them to better their community and they had a plan in place. We simply provided the capital to make the project a reality. We have since learned that the herd has almost doubled in size.”
What’s next?
“Completing our medical training—and the birth of our son—has taken a lot of our time recently, but Mary will finish her residency in June and we will be able then to devote more time to our work overseas. I can’t wait to get back there and help the people.”
The board of directors of ChooseAneed, which is organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, includes several individuals with ECU ties. The board selects projects to promote to donors at the organization’s web site,
www.chooseaneed.org.
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