1965, the NCNW enlisted the help of several northern women with backgrounds in cognitive science, community services, and professional training, and also poorly skilled volunteers, to assist its Freedom Schools and also other emerging initiatives then under Office of Economic Opportunity, which the NCNW had fought to establish in Mississippi. The following are among NCNW's recent overseas activities: Keeping observer membership first at United Nations in order to reflect African-American women's voices, Providing technological, training, microcredit, and economic empowerment projects in Benin in collaboration with national women's groups. Youth from Uganda, North Africa, and the United States are participating in a three-nation educational exchange. Senegal is developing a small company incubator. In Eritrea, we are collaborating on the establishment of a big microcredit initiative that will provide business loans and coaching to over 500 women. The National Council of Negro Women organizes its work with partners in 34 states as such an overarching framework for 39 national and regional advocacy organizations for women of African origin in the United States and overseas. Social contributions The NCNW also produced several cookbooks. Their first one, The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, was published in 1958 and was edited by Sue Bailey Thurman. It took over a decade to produce and fundraise for, and includes research and contributions from African American women across the country. The goal of the cookbook was in line with the goals of the NCNW, which include to further world peace, further integration, and also hold on to and value African American heritage as a unique cultural form. This cookbook is not organized by the genre of the food, but by the calendar year, starting with “Hopping John” for Emancipation Proclamation Day and ending with “Hot Apple Punch” for Christmas. One of its goals was also to include recognition and appreciation for African American heroes and heroines throughout history, such as George Washington Carver, for example, who gets one of his own recipes in the cookbook for "Carver Commemoration Day." Moreover, the idea behind this cookbook was not just the sharing of traditional African American recipes, but the inserting of African American's accomplishments into the mainstream idea of history in the U.S. that consists largely of the recorded the accomplishments of white men. In The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, Sue Bailey Thurman set out to show how history resides in the social and cultural products of