BOSTON (WBZ-AM) -- Each month, “WBZ Cares” highlights a worthy non-profit organization and tells the story of what that organization does for the community. This month WBZ is profiling School the World, a non-profit organization committed to solving extreme poverty through the power of education.
WBZ Cares features School the World. With the belief that education transforms lives, the non-profit is committed to building schools in Central America.
“So that they are empowered to be able to lift themselves out of extreme poverty,” said School the World’s CEO Kate Curran.
Kate Curran founded the Boston non-profit 10 years ago. In that time, she's built 100 schools in Guatemala, Panama, and Honduras.
“We just visited a school that we did 10 years ago and I was there to open, to start a new middle school because there were enough kids willing and able to continue their education past sixth grade, past Primary School, to justify hiring teachers to go there and begin 7th, 8th and 9th grade. And I discovered while I was there that the dropout rate had been reduced from greater than 50-percent when we first started to down to 3-percent, which is truly transformational,” stated Curran.
By providing these much-needed schools, education programming, and teacher and parent training, the non-profit is transforming entire communities for generations to come.
“In Guatemala nearly 70-percent of the children are chronically malnourished. Intuitively we all know that education is transformational, right. None of us would be where we were without education. But statistically we know that education increases income, it delays the age of marriage, it reduces the number of children that a woman has, it makes it that much more likely that she's going to vaccinate her children, it reduces crime and violence, increases civic participation. It does so much literally that it really is the best return on your investment,” concluded Curran.
WBZ NewsRadio1030's Shari Small Reports