United World Schools

The United World Schools Project 2018 – 2023

In line with our mission statement identifying ISY as a community of compassionate global citizens, and our vision to develop lifelong learners who will be a force for positive change in the world ISY set out eight strategic themes early in 2018. One of these strategic themes establishes service learning as a means to engage as global citizens. Service learning encourages students to work with the community, identify real needs and then provides our students with the opportunity to research, plan, reflect, discuss, and learn from their service experiences.

ISY wanted to create a school wide initiative in this area and after investigating various options has decided to partner with the charity United World School (UWS). UWS is an organization that works with communities to develop schools. They build a school, train teachers from the local community, provide instructional materials, and support the school for ten years. After ten years, the goal is to turn the school over to the local community. UWS has worked in Cambodia for 10 years and has almost 100 schools there. It also works in Nepal but more recently has started working in Myanmar.

In the 2018-2019 school year, the ISY Community raised the first year requirement of $30,000 USD through a series of charitable events.  These included a sponsored sports day, an ongoing ice-bucket challenge, a family fun night and a charity brunch hosted by Byblos Pub and Grill.  ISY also had some generous individual sponsors who helped us reach the target.  The first year $30,000 paid for the initial cost of building the school and hiring the first local teacher.  The next 9 years of this project required ISY to raise $10,000 a year.

This project continued all the way through the pandemic and included fund raising events that were entirely online.  ISY managed to raise the required funds each year despite the many challenges of virtual school.  In the summer of 2022, Dr. Gregory hedger, the Director of ISY and his son Max canoed the Mississippi River to raise money for the project and did fantastically well.  You can read about their exploits on Dr. Hedger’s blog.  In January of 2023, United World Schools informed ISY that the project had been so successful that they felt they could hand over the school to the local education authorities fully 5 years before the initial planned date.  This effectively brought this project to a close, ending 5 years of a wonderful partnership.