This site was born out of my intense desire to help others; to be a credit to our human society. To have made this place we call Earth a more love filled environment. My
desire to help others is the direct result of the values my fantastic parents Joseph G. Smith, Sr. and Maxine Smith instilled within me from my own birth to this very moment. Everything that we do should be done to honor God. I was taught that to honor God is to make yourself increasingly a better person but also helping and serving others.

My parents knew and intelligently shared with me the insightful truth that to whom much has been given, from whom much is required. This truth from them is what I and we THE OMAHA DREAM TEAM are sharing with you now. The tangible manifestation of this truth is what we invite you to take part in.

OMAHASFINEST.COM is your portal into the efforts, activities, ideas and events of THE OMAHA DREAM TEAM in our quest to change Omaha, to change Nebraska, to
change Africa, to Change the world. Each person and each organization represented on this Ambassador Trek are wholly dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering and the total eradication of poverty. We understand that our fate is tied together. Our lives are intertwined and only our ability to work in concert with one another for the
betterment of our shared world are we given the opportunity for a peaceful co-existence.

THE OMAHA DREAM TEAM knows that Douglas County; Omaha, Nebraska is a great community, with great people residing here. But we also know and refuse to accept the negative realities of social life in a city which is home to one of the richest people on earth, Warren Buffet, yet is home to the largest percentage of Black child poverty in the nation where 6 in 10 Black children languish in entrenched poverty. Our city can do better. Your support of our Ambassador Trek and of THE OMAHA DREAM TEAM is your support of our noble quest to build a school in a remote village of Mali, West Africa which currently has none. 50% of all students at the school must be female as per the agreement between our respective organizations and the particular village in Mali.

It’s important for you to know that 72% of all the world’s illiterate people are women. 72%. This is unacceptable and we intend to do something about it. And with your help we will. The best way for a woman or any person to know and defend their rights is to have an education and the foundation for any education is literacy.

Here in Omaha we have unique opportunities but unique challenges. We have a portion of our young people who have given up before they’ve even gotten started. We have young people who have no vision. Who have no believe in their own ability to succeed in spite of the very real and difficult personal challenges they do battle with each day. We, THE OMAHA DREAM TEAM stand at the ready to do battle against the forces of complacency, bigotry, apathy, illiteracy and negativity. The youth members of our team are blessed with the opportunity to witness with their own eyes the joyous reality of their very real ability to be a blessing in the life of others. They will be blessed to experience the construction of a better world and they will do so with their bare hands as we, THE OMAHA DREAM TEAM will be on the ground, making the breaks which will make the schoolhouse which will serve to enrich and elevate the lives of their brothers and sisters in a village that most have never heard of nor would not have had it not been for them. Taking a stand against poverty, economic injustice and social deterioration is a demonstration of our individual and collective power to do what makes our hearts most happy. We have the power within ourselves to do anything. Our youth have the power within themselves to do and to be anything, of their own choosing and at the time of their choosing. YOU have the power within yourself to do anything. JOIN US!

The success of this Ambassador Trek is inevitable as all things done for the benefit of others and the glory of God are ensured. I look forward to sharing with you the incredible experiences of each member of our team and the citizens of Mali whom we will fellowship with. Thank you. God bless you.

To your Health, Wealth & Happiness,

Joseph G. Smith, II
Founder & CEO
www.omahasfinest.com

Ambassador Trek Outcomes and Results

A truly changed person

Ambassador Trek will not be the same as when they left. The youth and adults taking part in this may or may not have even traveled beyond the borders of the United States. This will be my very first trip overseas and while I can’t speak for the rest of our Dream Team specifically I’m confident that this will be the first long term travel for the youth who are taking part. And never before has anyone of us ever contributed to a good and noble effort as this.

Our team will be working alongside 25-30 Malian villagers doing the very real physical labor of construction the school building in the often above 100 degree Malian heat. We will dig the latrines. We will share our food and we will fellowship with our Malian brothers and sisters. Having done and experienced all that we will have done we simply cannot be the same.

The youth making the trek as an Omaha Dream Team member will return to their own schools and complete what is their own circle of friends and be different. They will have a sharpened mind, a dedicated spirit and a bright burning passion and capacity for doing good radiating outward from within. They will become the new trendsetters as they communicate and live the message of integrity, empathy, dignity and love and brotherhood, and this is how we reach our youth in the city of Omaha.

Young people must come face to face with the realities of life for the development of a proper perspective. Our young Dream Team members will come to know first hand just how very blessed they are and see for the first time that there is another way, a different thought pattern that will yield different and greater results than that which they’ve adopted now. They will bear witness to the physical manifestation of the saying, “Anything is possible”.

An established connection between Africans and African-American

The shared and sacred history of Black people of the world has been distorted, manipulated hidden and in many cased destroyed as the result of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade has resulted in the creation of our Black Diaspora. A Diaspora is the forced spreading of an ethnic population. Black people originating out of Africa as all other people did were forcefully removed from their homeland and taken captive to every part of the globe. This is why today there are African-Americans, African-Cubans, African-Asians and African-Ukrainians even exist. The result of this forced migration has resulted in far too many of us being estranged from one another and just not knowing who it is that we are, where it is that we come from, what it is that we’ve done and what it is that we can do.

This Ambassador Trek will be the catalyst for change, the spark that ignites the fire within the soul of all our Omaha Dream Team members but will especially our African-American members and even more especially our youth members. This experience, unlike any other will be for them more than an eye opener and more grand and beneficial of experiencing culture shock. It will be an in-your-face lesson and acknowledgement that there is more to learn, more to do and more of themselves that they do not yet know.

The Omaha 360 covenant will be lived, experience and realized

The difficult and arduous tasks of improving our community and carving a better world out of the one we have now requires each person in the community to do their part. We must do more than be disciplined and productive members of our community we must actively, routinely reach out to our brothers and sisters to help them in their own unjust pursuit of becoming a more disciplined and productive person. This is in essence what the covenant, brought to us by the Omaha African-American Empowerment Network seeks to accomplish as written in the manifestos stated goals and objectives.

Our Omaha Dream Team is a body of individuals representing a cross-section of our city and serve as members of a plethora of social, civic and, government, financial, political and academic organizations all with general theme, belief or objective being worked toward. That objective is to not just reach out to the youth of our city but to activity pierce the conscious minds of our youth and assist in the instillation positive social values, knowledge and wisdom. The successful completion of our Omaha Ambassador Trek to Mali, West Africa will do just that and more.

Our Omaha Dream Team will live, experience and communicate the ideals of the covenant as we go about the business of building community support, raising money and preparing for the journey. Our young Dream Team members will hone their communication skills, organization and event planning abilities. They will learn about the importance of and the acquisition sponsorship, what it means and how to go about achievement this important financial blessing.

A large step toward gender equality

An important note and benefit of the Omaha Ambassador Trek is that once construction of our school house is complete and students begin taking class is that of those students one half of them or 50% must be girls. This is especially important as it goes to the heart of our beliefs as a team. We are building a school but we are also are building a new world where all people have genuine access to an education where the opportunity exists to forge themselves into whatever their own desires, abilities and actions will have them to be. Of all the worlds illiterate people 72% are women and many are in developing nations like Mali. An educated woman who has a child is 50% more likely to have that child grow to reach age 5 and longer. In their 2001 report the World Health Organization had estimated that 91.6% of Malian girls and women have had some type of forced female genital mutilation performed. This unfortunate reality is something our Omaha Dream Team seeks to mitigate and reduce as we know that a person whom is educated is much better able to defend themselves, their country and to know their rights and value as a free human being.

The birth of a new Omaha legacy for our friends, our families and our futures

Our Ambassador Trek to Mali will be the first of its kind to have originated and taken place from our state. The Non-government organization we are coordinating our efforts with, Build On, has completed many Ambassador Treks but none from our state and we seek to do the first in what we envision to be yearly ventures to a foreign nation in which Omaha youth will live and work with our global neighbors to build upon the good works done by so many before. the Ambassador Trek program is certainly one in which our young people will flourish and come to know the true greatness that lies within just below the surface that is capable of doing wonderful things their minds have yet to dream of. The history that is to be made in our city, in the nation of Mali and in the minds of the young participants and in their families is certainly to be unrivaled by anything else.