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Givers and Receivers:
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Alumni Spotlight:
> Lindsay Cottrell
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> Alumni Recognized
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> Jean Lakin
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> Betty Remington
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Spring 2009
Alumni Spotlight
Lindsay Cottrell
 The toughest part of her job is saying no, Lindsey Cottrell admits. “But we have to say no so we can say yes later.”
Cottrell, (M.H.S.A. ’09, at right in back of photo) is talking about her work as co-founder and assistant director of The Olevolos Project, a nonprofit program that’s building an orphanage and a primary school in the small Tanzanian village of Olevolos, not far from Mount Kilimanjaro. She and fellow University of Michigan alumna, Dory Gannes, launched the program in 2006, after they’d both done volunteer work in the region and discovered the high number of children who had been orphaned by disease—chiefly HIV—and had scant hope of a healthy or productive future.
“Our long-term goal is to give one hundred children a place to call home and a chance at a normal childhood,” says Cottrell, who spends several weeks every year in Olevolos. Over the summer, she and Gannes helped build a nursery school, part of an overall effort to develop a sustainable education system in the village. “We’re both big believers that you can’t just give an orphan food and expect them to benefit. We need to meet their educational, nutritional, emotional, and physical needs too.”
Cottrell worked on the Olevolos Project throughout her two years as an MHSA student in health management and policy at UM SPH, and now that she’s a health care consultant with Deloitte & Touche, she’s doing the same. Her two passions, she says, are “the health care business and being able to try to give these kids a chance at life. Ideally I’d like these two passions to collide. I’m hoping to one day be part of a philanthropic company like google.org or Nike.”
Cotrell’s SPH training has proved crucial to the Olevolos Project—particularly the quantitative skills she acquired in areas like accounting, finance, and law, which are highly applicable, even in a foreign country.
But nothing she learned in graduate school or elsewhere has made saying no any easier, she concedes. The need is so great, and the resources so scarce, that all too often Cottrell and Gannes find themselves having to parcel out help in bits and pieces, or worse, withhold it altogether. “What’s so hard,” Cottrell says, “is that we have this goal, but in order to get there we have to say no a lot. There are so many people who need so many different things.”
It’s definitely the worst part of the job, she says. The best part—the thing that keeps Lindsey Cottrell going back to Olevolos again and again—is “just playing with those kids. It’s amazing how receptive they are to love, once they just have a little attention.”
“We’re both big believers that you can’t just give an orphan food and expect them to benefit. We need to meet their educational, nutritional, emotional, and physical needs too.”
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