Sonny Tai will always have his Marine instincts. For this, the people of Kibera, a Kenyan urban slum, can be very thankful.

“Coming from a Marine officer background taught me bias for action,” Tai said. “Bias for action means given a choice between doing nothing and doing something, you always go with doing something. So that’s what I did.”

Tai, a political science graduate from the University in 2009, spent three years overseas as a Marine officer.

He was inspired by Rye Barcott, also a former marine officer who started a charity, called Carolina for Kibera, to benefit the urban slum. Carolina for Kibera provides free health care to 43,000 people in Kibera each year, Tai said.

Tai read Barcott’s book about starting his charity, “It Happened on the Way to War,” while stationed in Afghanistan, and wanted to go and volunteer at the nonprofit clinic. Tai raised $4,236 for supplies, but when he tried to help out in a hands-on fashion, his lack of significant medical expertise rendered him somewhat useless.

He could have continued volunteering, “bringing paperwork up and down floors,” doing next to nothing. It just wasn’t in his nature.

Tai started With Love From Kibera, a nonprofit website that sells Kiberan-made jewelry, in April. In Kibera, Tai said, sending a student to college costs about 40,000 Kenyan shillings, or $375.

He found this out from Judy, a janitor at the clinic Tai worked at. Tai happened to see some of the jewelry Judy was making. Judy was using recycled materials to make necklaces and other accessories. Tai was inspired by this and would help her to make some items, as he tried to learn himself (“I’m not as good as she is, but she’s been teaching me,” Tai admitted).

Tai found that Judy’s dream was to send her son to college. And he thought that he knew some friends in America who might be interested in the jewelry. The market in America, Tai figured, would be much more willing to purchase jewelry many Kiberans simply cannot afford.

With this in mind, he took some pictures of the jewelry and Judy, as well as Judy’s home, and posted some items for sale on a website of his current school, the Chicago Booth School of Business.

“Within about four days, I got $800 worth of orders for the jewelry,” Tai said. “So I said to myself, ‘Maybe we can help more than just Judy with this.’”

Tai got in contact with Carolina for Kibera and began organizing the production of this jewelry from recycled materials to produce more and sell online. Tai said about five women now are contributing jewelry to the site to sell, and he has “70-80 pounds” of merchandise with him now in America, and wants to sell it before having people with Carolina for Kibera import another shipment.

Tai said he essentially started the project on his own, and it takes very little of his time now to oversee it, as it is a relatively small-scale nonprofit. This allows him to ensure that the proceeds are put to as good a use as possible.

Still, he said, to make the full impact he desires, the website will need to generate more traffic.

“I think they’re cautiously optimistic in the Kibera community,” Tai said. “Right now, I haven’t generated a lot of sales.

“They basically loaned (the merchandise) to me, so you’re taking a leap of faith, saying: ‘You take this stuff back to the United States to sell it for us, and we’re counting on you.’”

Eliot can be reached at [email protected] and @EliotTweet.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of the founder of With Love, From Kibera. His name is Sonny Tai, not Sonny Kai. The Daily Illini regrets this error.