A group of motivated young students from St. Andrew’s College in Toronto travelled to Kenya this summer to build a school after fundraising $30,000.

The old Olegarine school in the Maasai Mara, Kenya. With two dark classrooms, bricks for seats and crowded desks, up to 120 packed the building each day.

St. Andrew’s invited Marc Kielburger, Executive Director of Free the Children, to kick off the year’s schoolbuilding effort, giving a boost to the efforts of the core team. The entire school came together to organize and to support their activities. Events included dress down days, selling custom student-made calendars, and a “Sit-in for the children of Africa” with mini-workshops in Swahili and on Free The Children development projects. In January, Louise Kent visited St. Andrew’s on the Leaders Today Be The Change speaking tour to congratulate students on their accomplishments and on inspiring others to create the positive change they want to see in their world.

After a year of hard work and fun, St. Andrew’s College achieved—and exceeded!—their goal of building a school in Kenya. They raised more than $30,000, which funded the construction of a school, all its furnishings and a teacher’s salary in a rural community in Kenya.

With their great success, St. Andrew’s was even able to fund other components of the Adopt a Village campaign. They were able to build both a well with clean water and a sanitation system at the school, and they helped provide alternative income projects to the parents of each child in the classroom. With schoolbuilding, clean water, sanitation and alternative income projects, St. Andrew’s truly Adopted a Village and changed the lives of hundreds of people.

Maasai school children met by the students of St. Andrew’s College.

You would think they had done enough. But St. Andrew’s students still were not satisfied—they wanted to travel to Kenya to build the school themselves!

Students and teachers from Grades 9 to 12 continued to fundraise, this time for the cost of their own trip to Kenya. Reaching their personal fundraising goals, 30 students and teachers travelled to the Maasai Mara of Kenya in the summer of 2006. The group continued down the path they had set out on over a year ago, digging the foundation of the school with pickaxes and shovels and laying the bricks one by one. The students from St. Andrew’s College shared stories, laughed and cried with the people they had been working the whole year to support: the children and families of the Maasai Mara.

St. Andrew’s College is already planning their next mission—a Volunteer and Leadership trip to Ecuador!

Interested? Your group has the opportunity to raise funds for schoolbuilding in China or Kenya and to travel there with a Leaders Today International Volunteer and Leadership trip.