About The Fund

Our Mission

The mission of the Somarela Fund is to advance humanitarian work in southern Africa and cultivate global citizenship among youth of diverse backgrounds from the United States and southern Africa through cultural exchange and service-learning trips.

Through community service and cooperative experiences we hope to take down barriers between advantaged and disadvantaged youth. We will discover the strengths of those different than each other and offer our services as members of a global community.

We see a world where youth of all kinds inspire one another through their diverse strengths. Where they can help each other overcome their own fears and weaknesses and recognize in themselves how important a role they can play in the lives of others. We see a world of opportunity for Batswana AIDS orphans who otherwise might face a life of despair and/or death.

We will cultivate relationships with local social service organizations like Bana Ba Letsatsi through direct funding and by providing community service trips to better these organizations and their surrounding communities.

About The Somarela Fund

The Somarela Fund was founded as a living memorial to J. Player Crosby's dedicated work on behalf of the people of southern Africa.

Somarela was started in the memory of J. Player Crosby, who flew airplanes in southern Africa for environmental groups after a very successful career in international finance. He died suddenly seven years ago of a heart attack while flying his plane. Many people who knew him donated money to continue his mission of helping people. He was a beloved and adventurous man, extremely active and generous to a fault. His family decided to donate the money to a cause in Botswana where he and his wife had planned to move full time. He died less than two weeks before their departure date. The Somarela Fund is a registered 501(c)(3) organization that seeks to continue the work that J. Player Crosby was unable to realize.

Mr. Crosby’s family went to Botswana with vague ideas of how to continue his efforts, but left with a very specific one: support a young Irish woman named Emily Cusack to build a community center called Bana Ba Letsatsi (literally “Children of the Sun”) to support the families of AIDS victims in the city of Maun. Botswana has the second highest rate of AIDS in the world, with nearly 30 percent of the adult population infected by the virus. This means that many parents die, leaving young children to literally live (or rather try to live) in the streets.

For the last seven years the Somarela Fund (which means stewardship) has helped Bana Ba Letsasi (BBL) grow from a one-woman operation to a full-fledged community center serving nearly 300 children with significant aid coming from the European Union and the United Nations. Somarela has supported several other similar initiatives, but this is by far our most significant cause.