Hi, SSA and Absolutely Art fans! My name is Cortney Casey, and you may be familiar with me as the co-founder of MichiganByTheBottle.com and Michigan By The Bottle Tasting Room. As a huge SSA fan myself, it is my privilege and honor to work as Stephanie’s social media manager. As such, she’s tapped me to be your “virtual cruise director” and resident cheerleader while she’s in Ethiopia.

I’ll be helping Stephanie communicate messages to you while she’s there, and coordinating the giving campaign that will extend throughout her journey. Stephanie and her team have set a goal of raising $10,000 to support children’s education in Ethiopia Jan. 7-23. This amount would cover the operating expenses of a school for an entire year. With your help, I’m confident we can achieve or even surpass that goal! We’ll keep you posted on the progress, and when Stephanie returns, she’ll be drawing randomly from all of the donors to determine the winner of an SSA prize pack.

We’ll also be promoting selected artwork, merchandise, gift certificates and other items daily via Stephanie’s social media, with 100% of proceeds from sales of those featured items donated to Ethiopia Reads. If you’ve been considering purchasing Stephanie’s artwork, this is an excellent time to help out others as you do.

I hope you’re as excited as I am to follow Stephanie’s travels in Africa, seeing another part of the world through her eyes and the eyes of her fellow artists and learning about the great work they’re doing while there. Stay tuned for blogs and photos from Stephanie as she makes her way across Ethiopia!