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Meet the Board
Meet the Board
MARA CONSERVATION
encouraging empathy for other life
MLP Team in Morocco
Advisors in Morocco
Our Values
​Every child deserves access to quality education and knowledge resources, and hence opportunities.
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Education is the most powerful tool for changing our world for the better.
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When women have meaningful opportunities in life, they turn them into blessings and benefits for their families, communities, and entire nations.
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Sustainability and a harmonious relationship with nature are more important than ever. A healthy environment is the foundation for life. We have much to learn from communities who live close to nature.
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We find these values to be virtually universal. Collaborating cross-culturally on them builds bridges of peace across the world.
Our Mission
To uplift disadvantaged communities through access to quality education and rich, enjoyable learning resources; sustainable livelihoods that empower women; and environmental stewardship through community engagement and our own best practices. To work in a respectful, collaborative manner that builds trust and friendship.
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We are part of the communities where we work. We begin our programs as collaborative pilot projects, learn what works, iterate, and then build them to be expandable, scalable, and community run.
Why Maasai Mara, Kenya?
In terms of education, the Maasai Mara of southwestern Kenya is one of the most disadvantaged regions of East Africa. Only 11% of young people enroll in secondary school, and the area has the highest dropout rate and teen pregnancy rate in Kenya. When families can't afford to send their children to school (which often happens), girls are usually the ones to drop out and may be forced into early marriage. Girls also drop out because of a lack of sanitary supplies. Many girls in the area still go through FGM if they leave school.
We transform the most disadvantaged public schools in the Mara, both primary and secondary, by setting up quality resources including libraries and science labs and providing literacy and writing opportunities. We also help teen girls stay in school through scholarships and by distributing sanitary kits. We firmly believe that children in the poorest regions of the world should have access to the same advantages that children in more privileged places have. Rather than create new schools, we've found that outfitting the most needy public schools with meaningful resources changes this trajectory for the greatest number of young people.
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Our holistic approach in the Maasai Mara also addresses women. Most adult women here lack literacy and marketable skills, as they did not have opportunities for education when they were young. And yet, they hold their families together through the hard work of domestic life. We run a co-operative Women's Work Center as a platform for sustainable income-generating work for women through beadwork arts, sewing, capacity-building training, and delivery of their family's millk by electric motorcycle. When women make an income, they use it to uplift their families; and day after day, we witness tremendous joy and self-confidence blossom in these women. We also address their family health challenges through clean water and sanitation facilities.
One of our core values is a healthy environment, and we incorporate that into all that we do. We curate libraries that include environmental learning materials, support tree planting, and use clean renewable energy in all our development projects. In turn, we believe that this Maasai community has much to teach the rest of the world on living in balance with nature and co-existing with their incredible wildlife heritage.
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Why Rural Morocco?
In our legacy program in Morocco, well known in the country as Morocco Library Project (MLP), we continue to boost learners at rural schools and villages through libraries and support for English literacy. We found that the communities where we work, especially in Amazigh areas in the south, had little access to learning and knowledge resources. Libraries were non-existent, and we also discovered a widespread thirst for learning English among the young generation, encouraged by the teachers who support them. Today, after 10+ years of helping teachers nurture a culture of reading and expanding youth access to the wider world, our program has evolved to a national short story competition for rural youth with published books and cultural preservation through indigenous stories.
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MLP was founded in 2014. Our earliest principles were to ignite literacy and a love of learning in rural Amazigh communities in close collaboration with highly motivated teachers and to build a bridge of friendship between Morocco and the U.S. We are still doing this today.
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