Juli Kamin
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Getting Kids on Their Feet
Building new lives in Romania, Kenya, Israel, and around the world.
Watching the evening news, when something upsetting is beamed into our living rooms, most of us mourn quietly and briefly before we turn off the TV, go to bed, and eventually forget about it. Not Juli Kamin. In the early 1990s, when the Landmark grad learned of the brutal atrocities Romanian orphans had suffered in state-run institutions during dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime, she decided to do something about it.
While participating in Landmark’s Advanced Course, Kamin created an organization that is known today as Cherish Our Children International (COCI). COCI is a nonprofit organization that aims to alleviate the suffering of children—regardless of ethnicity, nationality, or health—and to ensure that these children are raised in a loving, family-oriented environment. More than a decade later, COCI has helped get many Romanian orphans on their feet, but also provides a nurturing living environment for orphaned children in Kenya’s slums, arranges tutoring for Serbian orphans, and funds a soccer program in Israel that brings together Jewish and Arab children. Today, Kamin helms a 26-person-strong board of directors. COCI is thriving in several countries around the world and has partnered with other like-minded organizations to maximize the number of children it can help.
Through her participation with Landmark, Kamin realized how important it is to walk the walk, and how vital it is to be a catalyst for change so that others are inspired to take action. “If I look at my life and the children whose lives I’ve touched in countries around the world, it really makes me see the enormous difference that each of us can make with young people,” Kamin says. “We are turning around the lives of kids that either would have died or would have had absolutely no life. Now, they have a life and they’ve got a future.”
See more articles about Grads Making a Difference.
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