Congratulations to our 2026 Freestarter Award recipient, Erna Grasz
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Founder and Global Board Chair, North America
About Asante Africa
Asante Africa Foundation is a global alliance of four member organizations — Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the USA — united by one mission: to educate and empower rural East Africa’s youth to confidently address life’s challenges, thrive in the global economy, and catalyze positive change. Those young leaders are now being recognized on the world stage: the King’s Trust Global Sustainability Award, Amal Clooney’s Women’s Empowerment Awards, Michelle Obama’s Girl Opportunity Alliance. They are active participants in their own futures.
Our 2026–2030 strategic ambition is to equip 250,000 young people with market-aligned skills — but more than that, to place their hands on the levers of power. These are the young entrepreneurs, educators, and community leaders who are already reshaping their villages, their economies, and their governments from the inside out. When we invest in them, we don’t just change a life. We change who’s in the room when the next generation of decisions gets made. That is our model. And it is working.
Erna Grasz
Erna Grasz is a Systems-Electrical Engineer turned Systems Entrepreneur for Global Impact. She co-founded Asante Africa Foundation with Kenyan educator Hellen Nkuraiya and Tanzanian entrepreneur Emmy Moshi — then walked away from 25 years as a senior executive across medical devices, defense research, and semiconductor capital equipment to build something that would outlast her.
What began as a two-village project is now a federated global alliance across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the USA — over 350,000 young lives directly reached, 500+ schools engaged, and a generation of East African youth rewriting what’s possible. That conviction — that sustainable impact belongs to the people closest to it — is what drove Erna’s most deliberate move: stepping from founding CEO into Global Alliance Board Chairperson, and appointing Geoffrey Kasangaki, a seven-year veteran of the organization, as Global CEO. The mission didn’t just scale. It is now led by the very people it was built to serve.
Erna’s own leadership has been recognized with the Jefferson Award for Public Service, a Distinguished Engineering Award for Innovation in Developing Countries, and the Drucker Prize Medal for Reimagining Education in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Brilliance and talent exist everywhere. Opportunity must too.”_ — Erna Grasz
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Each quarter, The Goble Family Foundation honors a FreestarterTM with a financial donation of $10,000
— plus a whole lot of love. If you see a FreestarterTM here, it’s because we deeply believe in what they are doing. We hope you, too, will be inspired by their bravery, out of the box thinking, trail blazing, perhaps sometimes wacky, work and ideas. And, perhaps, even choose to join them.
To nominate a FreestarterTM in your life, please fill out the nomination form below. Please note the restrictions of the Goble Family Foundation’s mission to provide educational opportunities, ethical storytelling and human rights through our grants.