Walking with Melissa

At the end of 2015 Melissa launched a Non-Profit Government Organization (NGO) called Walk with Me. She partnered with Tying Vines at this time realizing that in order to implement her growing vision and maximize time and effectiveness she would need help with the administrative side of a nonprofit. “I’ve challenged their tag line ‘supporting new growth’ to the max… from business model to full implementation of projects.” 

Walk with Me is dedicated to helping refugees living outside the sanctioned camps who receive no help from the UN (approximately 80% of all refugees live in these peripheral camps). Melissa calls these camps some of the “largest open-air prisons in the world”. Initially Melissa’s focus was on the refugees’ medical needs. However, since launching the first clinic in 2015, Melissa expanded Walk with Me’s scope to creating education programs, counseling centers, and vocational training courses. From the first clinic launched in Jordan the work is now in 5 countries: Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Thirteen 40 ft. containers have been shipped to various locations and camps. Two of them were designed to be mobile medical clinics (and filled with medical supplies). One was outfitted as an educational center, one was filled with general relief supplies, and one 40 ft. container was filled with food supplies. 

Author Brian de Francesca, in his digital article “The Greatest Humanitarian Aid Initiative in History” published in Middle East Medical refers to Melissa as a “true Warrior Angel”. His life was changed when he travelled to one of the camps and saw for himself what it is really like there. “Their reality hit me like a freight train at full speed-this was real, sad and not acceptable in any way at all.” Or as his guide Jamal said, “You do not really understand, until you breathe their need.”