BCA is ecstatic to have Derreck Kayongo as our speaker for the October Breakfast. His story truly embodies the American Dream. Please Join us on October 2nd and 3rd to welcome Derreck to the great city of Philadelphia.
Derreck Kayongo and his family fled a civil war in Uganda and settled in the U.S. when Kayongo was just ten years old. Now a successful entrepreneur, Kayongo is a renowned expert in environmental sustainability and global health. Kayongo is the founder of the Global Soap Project: a program which takes donated, melted, purified and reprocessed hotel soap and redistributes it to vulnerable populations around the world.
Kayongo’s Global Soap Recycling enterprise has recently expanded to Hong Kong. A franchisee operation has opened a factory to reprocess soap called the Soap Cycling. Today the Global Soap Projects distribution operation is active in 32 countries and has given away more than two million bars of soap to refugees, including people affected by humanitarian disasters like the 2010 Haitian Earth quake that left over 100,000 people dead.
Currently, there are 1,500 hotels that are members of the Global Soap Project Recycling program in the United States alone and the list of participating countries is continuing to expand.
The Global Soap Project earned an endorsement from the American Hotel and Lodging Association in 2013. Kayongo was among CNN’s Top Ten Heroes of the Year in 2011 and he is currently at work on a book on how he found his calling in life as a refugee in America which is scheduled to be released in 2014.
Kayongo’s Global Soap Project has been designated for a Day of Recognition by the city of Atlanta on May 5th of each year as Global Soap Project Day. On April 8th 2014, Kayongo was one of the elite TED TALK speakers at the esteemed Memminger Auditorium in Charleston, SC. http://tedxcharleston.org/speakers/. Kayongo is a graduate of the prestigious Fletcher school of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.