Alumni

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The 2020 recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award is Annie Coppedge Kariuki, Class of 2004. After graduating from Whitefield, Annie studied child and family development at the University of Georgia, and she also studied at Atlanta Technical College to become an Advanced Emergency Medical Technician before moving to Kenya full-time in 2012. In October 2012, Annie started Neema House Infant Rescue Center in Kenya. With the goal of helping children grow up in loving families, Neema House is a transitional care center for babies who have been abandon or removed from their families due to various circumstances, and Annie and her team have connected more than 200 babies with loving families. Neema House has also been able to intervene early in countless cases to prevent babies from ever having to be removed from their families in the first place. They aid by empowering women and helping them with business startups. They don’t believe poverty is a reason that a child should ever be separated from the family God knit them into, so they are constantly working hard to keep families together.