Alhassan Susso, who teaches in the Bronx, is funding a teaching prize in Gambia, his home country, after the State Department cancelled a grant programme.
Alhassan Susso is a teacher at a high school in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx who has won numerous awards, including a national teacher-of-the-year prize in 2020. He has just been recognised again, this time with an award of $25,000.
That money will now go to self-funding a project he is passionate about — a teacher-of-the-year prize in Gambia, where he is from — because his hopes for a grant from the State Department appear to have been dashed.
For months, Susso had been preparing to submit an application for something called a public diplomacy grant through the U.S. Embassy in Banjul, the Gambian capital. Then, last month, the webpage with information about the grant programme disappeared, Susso said.
He had heard about the Trump administration’s plans to lay off nearly the entire staff of the US Agency for International Development, more than 9,700 employees. He figured that USAID had something to do with administering the public diplomacy grants.
It did not. But a State Department spokesperson told me by email that there had been a comprehensive review of all State Department grants, including the public diplomacy awards, “to determine their alignment with the administration’s priorities.” The spokesperson also said that embassies are not offering new public diplomacy grants at the moment.
Susso described his reaction as “disappointment.” He also said that spending his $25,000 prize to keep the project in Gambia going was “a no-brainer.”
He had already put a lot of his own money into it. “The truth is, I took $45,000 out of my retirement” last year to underwrite a nonprofit he set up, the Namie Foundation. Named for his grandmother, Namie provided the structure for the teacher-of-the-year award in Gambia. The first-year budget was $75,000, “and we worked hard to raise the rest from friends and family,” he said.
This year, he was counting on a public diplomacy grant to cover the teacher-of-the-year prize.
By coincidence, the $25,000 for the prize in Gambia was the same amount he received as one of six winners of the Flag Awards, which recognize teachers in New York City “who inspire learning through creativity, passion and commitment.” The awards are administered by a foundation started by the financier Glenn Fuhrman and his wife, Amanda Fuhrman.
“Could I have used the $25,000 for the benefit of my family?” he said. “Of course. I have three young kids who I need to think about, setting them up for a successful future, including college.”
He also has his own future to think about.
Susso, 41, is legally blind in one eye, and the vision in his other eye is impaired, the result of retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable disease. His sight was already deteriorating when he left Gambia as a teenager, though he did not know why until he was diagnosed in the United States.
Some of the $25,000 would have gone to “setting myself up for stability in case of complete vision loss” if a public diplomacy grant had come through, he said.
Susso decided to start The Gambia teaching prize after a visit in 2019. What he saw was troubling, he said, citing a UNICEF report that found that 88 percent of children there were not being taught reading and 91 percent were not learning math.
He modeled the Gambian teacher-of-the-year prize on the one he had won in 2020, the Award for Teaching Excellence from the NEA Foundation. That programme provides state awards, then five awards from among the state winners, then the top honor. Similarly, the Gambia teacher prize recognises outstanding teachers from each of seven regions. One of the seven is then chosen as the national winner.
As things stand now, Susso’s prize money will cover this year’s award in Gambia. Last year, apart from funding the prize, the Namie Foundation also provided a grant of $1,000. It covered the cost of the fuel for a minivan that picks up 15 visually impaired students and carries them to a special school.
“Disability is stigmatised” in Gambia, he said. During his visit in 2019, “my message was, if I was living in this country, I would not be where I am. People who are disabled can be successful if they are given the proper support.”
The New York Times
