With Nelson Mandela’s death this past December, we’ve surely lost a tremendous leader. Thankfully, there’s a leader on the rise: our very own Matthew Manning.
He is a recent graduate of DePaul University who took to heart DePaul’s emphasis on keeping the students conscious of Vincentian values when preparing them for the “real world.” During his first year at DePaul he started a non-profit organization named W.O.R.C., which stands for Worldwide Orphanage Relief Coalition. Manning created this organization independently after he took a trip to Ghana a year prior to starting the non-profit.
Along with a few friends, Manning traveled to the northern most part of Ghana to a village that most native Ghanaians haven’t even seen, where poverty struck hard on the people. Despite all the poverty, Manning and his friends received a warm welcome from the villagers. “I was genuinely happy, which was the first time in, at that point, maybe ten years,” he said.
Calling them his sons and daughters, Manning developed a bond with the children in the village. “I fell head-over-heels in love with all of these kids,” he said.
Manning was aware of the evident signs of malnourishment in the kids but admired their unrelenting happiness; the kind of happiness he was longing back home.
“A child can walk around and be in their own world; It’s a brilliant way to live,” Manning said. This “brilliant life” of the children in that Ghanaian village lead to Manning’s realization that we should not let go of youthfulness because it makes us who we are. “You can mature and still be what makes you young and alive,” he continued.
He wanted his children to not let go of their spirit through the remembrance of their socio-economic situation. And like the proactive leader he is, he acted upon his dream of making that happen.
W.O.R.C aims to aid children around the globe by assisting with the resources needed to live in their harsh environments. It was a combination of having learned responsibility at a young age, being humbled by his children in Ghana and learning the importance of service through DePaul’s Vincentian values that enabled him to create W.O.R.C.
The topic of the Vincentian value was brought up in a discussion I recently had.
“The idea of the Vincentian value is great in creating an enriched community at DePaul but I feel like it fades after we leave,” Byron, a friend of mine, said.
Byron’s words struck the thought of how we, as DePaul students, don’t use our Vincentian rooted education to create moral communities and spread peace out in the “real world.” It’s amazing to see that a community as rich as DePaul’s can be amongst such communities labeled as “Chiraq” to outsiders.
It makes it hard to believe that leaders, such as Matthew Manning, could have come out from such a place. “We all move in different ways and move in different steps,” Manning said. “But aslong as [we] are conscious of what [we’re] doing and know the blessings [we] have [we] are exactly where [we] need to be.”
For the sake of our community and for the sake of a peaceful world, we should all try to incorporate the Vincentian value in our lives beyond DePaul’s campus.