Forty Under 40: Sarah Elizabeth Fennel

The suffering she witnessed while volunteering at a children’s home in Cape Town was just too much to ignore. Back in Fayetteville, all she could talk about was what she’d seen on her trip.

“I came home and told everyone about it and a lot of people said, ‘What can we do to help,’” she said.

In 2006 she founded Restore Humanity and started raising funds. By 2010 she had enough to build and furnish an orphanage in Nyanza Province in western Kenya.

With the help of Juanita Opot, the mother of a college friend, Fennel houses 17 children and provides a variety of services for another 150. Restore Humanity also focuses on educational opportunities both in Kenya and in the United States. Fennel does all this on contributions raised in Northwest Arkansas.

She travels to Kenya twice a year — six to eight weeks in the summer and six to eight weeks in the winter. Her next goal is to raise enough funds to build a medical clinic in the same province as the orphanage.

While Fennel loves Kenya, it is the generosity of Northwest Arkansas, where she is from, that makes her overseas work possible.

“It makes me really proud of this community,” she said.