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Project 78: Passing the Torch - Guatemala
Give students in Comalapa the tools to serve families in their own communities while learning valuable skills along the way. Through our partnership with Long Way Home, they will build ten stoves, ten water tanks, three latrines, and a retaining wall, each one meeting a real need for a local family.Read more
Project 78: Passing the Torch - Guatemala
In Comalapa, Guatemala, some of the best teachers are still students themselves. They attend the Hero School, a recognized leader in sustainable building that locals know simply as the "tire school." These young people have spent years learning to build what their community needs with their own hands, and this year they are handing that knowledge to a new group: students from the public schools around them.
Long Way Home, the organization behind the Hero School and our partner for a third time, started from a clear belief about how real change happens. A community moves forward when it is equipped to solve its own problems with the materials already at its feet. In Comalapa, that often means turning discarded tires and plastic bottles into walls, water systems, and homes built to withstand earthquakes and the heavy rains.
By the time a Hero School student is ready to mentor, they have built real things for real families. The work climbs with them through the grades. Early on they make improved stoves that draw smoke out of the kitchen, where breathing it in has long sent young children to the local clinic. Next come water tanks that hold clean water through the dry season, then compost latrines that manage waste without wasting water. In the upper grades they stack tire retaining walls, flexible enough to ride out a tremor yet strong enough to keep a hillside from sliding onto a home. Now they teach all of it.
For Project 78, Mite’s Giving Community is backing another round of the Hero School’s student projects, but this time the knowledge and reach are going farther.
Students from both the Hero School and local public schools will form teams, each one led by a Hero School mentor who has already built the project at hand, and together they will complete ten improved stoves, ten water tanks, three compost latrines, and one retaining wall. Every build serves a family with a real need. The retaining wall alone will protect 77 families’ homes while clearing 600 tires and hundreds of pounds of plastic from Comalapa.
The real reach of this project goes beyond the numbers. It is an effort to pull the public schools into the work, so that government-run classrooms start teaching their students how to improve their own communities. Along the way, those students learn something just as lasting: what it means to serve the people around them.
1% Funded
$160 of $16,000
People served
500 served
Project category
Education
Location
Comalapa, Guatemala
In Comalapa, Guatemala, some of the best teachers are still students themselves. They attend the Hero School, a recognized leader in sustainable building that locals know simply as the "tire school." These young people have spent years learning to build what their community needs with their own hands, and this year they are handing that knowledge to a new group: students from the public schools around them.
Long Way Home, the organization behind the Hero School and our partner for a third time, started from a clear belief about how real change happens. A community moves forward when it is equipped to solve its own problems with the materials already at its feet. In Comalapa, that often means turning discarded tires and plastic bottles into walls, water systems, and homes built to withstand earthquakes and the heavy rains.
By the time a Hero School student is ready to mentor, they have built real things for real families. The work climbs with them through the grades. Early on they make improved stoves that draw smoke out of the kitchen, where breathing it in has long sent young children to the local clinic. Next come water tanks that hold clean water through the dry season, then compost latrines that manage waste without wasting water. In the upper grades they stack tire retaining walls, flexible enough to ride out a tremor yet strong enough to keep a hillside from sliding onto a home. Now they teach all of it.
For Project 78, Mite’s Giving Community is backing another round of the Hero School’s student projects, but this time the knowledge and reach are going farther.
Students from both the Hero School and local public schools will form teams, each one led by a Hero School mentor who has already built the project at hand, and together they will complete ten improved stoves, ten water tanks, three compost latrines, and one retaining wall. Every build serves a family with a real need. The retaining wall alone will protect 77 families’ homes while clearing 600 tires and hundreds of pounds of plastic from Comalapa.
The real reach of this project goes beyond the numbers. It is an effort to pull the public schools into the work, so that government-run classrooms start teaching their students how to improve their own communities. Along the way, those students learn something just as lasting: what it means to serve the people around them.