Grass-roots community
Compassion Beyond Borders' funding of scholarships and schools through local grass-roots organizations is an exceptionally cost-effective way to educate girls, but it is far more than that. Funding neighborhood groups that support the education of girls builds grass-roots community.
In India, CBB educates communities of poor children, rather than giving scholarships to individual girls. In Mexico, CBB's funding goes to a community center that builds solidarity among mothers who have been forced out of their traditional peasant existence into finding refuge in an abandoned garbage dump of Juarez.
In Uganda, CBB funds a meeting place where mothers with AIDS can plan their activities and give support to each other. In Kenya, CBB's scholarships for girls orphaned by AIDS are administered through groups of the community's women.
Learning to care for others
Compassion Beyond Borders has funded the Gateway to Heaven Center in Kenya, an orphanage that is administered by its older girls, aged 10 to 15, with oversight by the home's director and her associate.
The older girls cook for the younger ones, feed the infants, clean up, wash the clothes, mop the floors, and sleep with the younger girls so there is always someone with them to care for their needs. At a young age these girls survive by living in a community that they themselves cooperatively manage. Caring for one another is the only way of life they know.
Love and education
When the Gateway To Heaven center opened a new nursery school, built with funds from Compassion Beyond Borders, its Kenyan director named it the Queen of Love Academy.
When CBB appointed a new project director in Guatemala, herself a poor woman receiving scholarships for her daughters, she named the project “Study with Love”.
Now, why did two women working with the poor almost halfway around the world from each other both connect love to education in naming their projects? Surely it is because they understand that learning must be combined with caring to be useful to their community.
