Planning a birthday party for her daughter should be pretty easy for Kali (Pettijohn) Nelson ’07, considering she recently pulled off an event for almost 800 at the Midland Theater in Kansas City, Mo. Kali was the event coordinator for the Global Orphan Project’s seventh annual Big Event, which is an event to celebrate the Project’s work around the world and this year, to kick off its initiative in Kansas City, Mo.

Kali’s parents, Mike and Beth Fox, founded the Global Orphan Project in 2005, and Kali has been volunteering and/or working for the group ever since, and for the past four years, she has been paid to plan the Big Event. Kali worked on the event for about eight months. “It’s a lot of planning and orchestrating and a lot of work,” she said with a laugh. At this year’s event, Toby Mac, a Christian recording artist, performed.

The Big Event is more of a celebration of the Global Orphan Project rather than a fund-raiser, Kali said, but the 2012 event did raise over $100,000 to support the GO Project’s new initiative – Adopt KC. The GO Project supports 50 villages in 17 countries around the world, with more planned in the coming months. Kali estimates the Project currently serves almost 5,000 children.

Kali explained that in many third world countries, even if one parent is still living, it is very difficult for them to support their children, so the GO Project works to keep families together.

The GO Project builds schools, churches and homes for children, but they are all staffed by natives of the country. One of its efforts in the past few years is making the children’s homes self-sustaining.

“When I was younger, my stepdad encouraged me to find something bigger than me to make a difference,” Kali says. “And I took that to heart.”

Kali, from Parkville, Mo., spent her first year of college at Kansas University, but her neighbor, Dr. Dennis Rogers, professor of music and director of percussion studies at Missouri Western, kept encouraging her to consider Missouri Western. “He always spoke so highly of it,” she said. “We love Dennis so we checked it out and I loved it.”

She liked the small class sizes and the relationships she was able to develop with professors. “It was what I needed and what I got. They were all very helpful and they truly wanted you to succeed.”

Kali met her husband, Derek ’07, at Missouri Western, and both graduated with degrees in speech communication. Derek, from northeast Iowa, was an offensive lineman for the Griffons.

One of her projects as a student was to develop a public relations plan for a nonprofit group. She selected the GO Project, and created a plan for holding a 5K fund-raiser. That turned into an event that she has coordinated for the group every year since. “It’s cool when your senior project turns into reality.”

And for Kali, that reality is something very close to her heart.