Three years ago, Elizabeth Dennis went to Kenya in East Africa to celebrate the establishment of a school built in honor of her late father, Archie Lee Dennis Jr., a Monroeville pastor and gospel singer whose missionary work took him around the world.

Standing beside a mud hut in Nakuru, the fourth largest city in Kenya, seated in the expansive East African Rift Valley, Ms. Dennis felt disheartened. The Wilkinsburg woman, who is called "Niecy" by family and friends, was discouraged by the conditions of life in this urban center of the mostly rural western Kenya highlands.

She and her brother had traveled to Kenya to dedicate a school, which they hoped would reflect the values of their father -- a strong work ethic, education, and faith in God's ability to help people transcend seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

But those obstacles seemed formidable.

"There is barely any electricity, no running water, and malaria is rampant there," recalled Ms. Dennis, a vice president in the human resources department of what is now Bank of New York Mellon.

It was there, by the mud hut, that she met Matrine Shanduka-- a high school student long-resigned to the inescapable reality of her surroundings.

"She looked at me and asked: 'What good is education if it doesn't change my condition?' " Ms. Dennis recalled. "I found myself replaying her words and I realized that we needed to have a program that goes beyond a school."

Ms. Dennis, who throughout a 25-year career with the former Mellon Bank grew a passion for helping place job applicants in positions where they could pursue a long-term career, said she saw a similar opportunity in Kenya.

She envisioned a school-to-work program based on five tenets: education, exposure, empowerment, experience, and employment.

"I knew this is what I wanted to do because I felt that all the years I have spent at Mellon prepared me for this," said Ms. Dennis. Her passion for workforce development, she explained, crested in the early 1990s, when she worked with Sudanese and Bosnian refugees, placing them in jobs within the Mellon Bank structure.

After several trips to Kenya, where she pitched her idea to a number of government and nongovernment organizations and corporate leaders who "bought into in the program," Ms. Dennis returned to Pittsburgh in May 2006 and founded Workforce Development Global Alliance Inc.

The main objective of the nonprofit organization is to promote self-sufficiency and to develop employability in disadvantaged primary, secondary, and post-secondary students.

One way to achieve that is to show young boys and girls in rural Kenya that they can overcome the often perilous circumstances of their birth, Ms. Dennis said.

So far, her organization has partnered with a number of corporations and nongovernmental organizations in Kenya to pair students with professionals in various fields, many of whom rose out of humble beginnings.

The students, she said, get a chance to interact with other high-ranking Kenyans in companies and organizations such as Junior Achievement Kenya, General Motors Kenya, and UPS Kenya.

In November, on her seventh trip to Kenya, Ms. Dennis will lay the ground work for a leadership summit in April 2008. The goal of the summit is to build a leadership development institute in Nakuru in 2009.