MOre about Btcv...

BTCV was formed in July 2007 during a school refurbishment project in Rwanda when volunteers from around the world traveled to Butare to restore a primary school that had been all-but-destroyed. The Ecole Primaire Catholic de Butare was devastated emotionally and physically by the genocide of 1994. All of the classrooms in each of the school buildings on the small campus had bullet holes in the walls, broken windows, damaged or missing doors, and leaking roofs. Teachers and students were without a functional setting for learning, not to mention a lack of desks, supplies and resources to provide an education for the beautiful young minds that will shape Rwanda’s future. Many of the children attending the school are orphaned as a result of the genocide and live on or near school grounds with classmates and faculty. This is now the only “family” they know. It was hard for the BTCV founding members to believe that this had been the state of education in Butare for over a decade. Amazingly the student's spirits were strong and their thirst for learning was intense! The founders and their friends assembled a volunteer team to raise funds for a restoration project that would Be The Change this community needed. The volunteers spent two weeks working at the school. They learned much while interacting with students, faculty, community members and hired skilled workers from the area. Six classrooms were fully restored and completely outfitted with desks and supplies.

Lives were changed… theirs and ours.

The Rwanda Project ignited a passion in four people who would become BTCV's founding members - Brian Anderson, Dominique Anderson, Cristi Cook and Jimi Cook (pictured here).  Building schools became a mission for them and the official inaugural BTCV project was completed in October 2008 on Tonle Sap Lake in Siem Reap, Cambodia. BTCV built The Floating Learning Center - a school on a boat - which served a floating community of 160 families with no consistently accessible educational facilities prior to the BTCV project.  Today the school has been given a permanent location thanks to years of dedicated service by teachers and staff.  BTCV continues to maintain this relationship.   Be The Change Volunteers (BTCV) officially received its status as a charitable organization in 2008 exclusively for charitable and educational purposes under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service Code.

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