December 3, 2025 • 35 mins
He literally built schools from trash, and it works. 👀Meet Matt Paneitz, founder of Long Way Home, who turned 550 tons of waste and 35,000 used tires into sustainable classrooms in rural Guatemala. Discover how his team built the Hero School, where sustainability, community, and education collide, proving that you can build schools from trash that last for generations.
If you believe in green innovation, conscious design, the circular economy, and education for change, this episode will move you. 💚
⏩ Jump to your favorite parts
00:28 - Welcome to the Conscious Design Podcast
00:39 - Meet Matt Paneitz: Turning Trash into Schools
01:00 - The Origin Story: From Peace Corps to Trash Schools
01:38 - Building with Trash: The First Steps
03:33 - Challenges and Innovations in Sustainable Construction
06:20 - Creating a Sustainable Campus
12:49 - Durability and Resilience of Trash Buildings
24:07 - Integrating Sustainability into Education
30:53 - Future Plans and Community Impact
32:14 - How to Get Involved and Final Thoughts
About Matt Paneitz & Long Way Home
In 2002, Peace Corps volunteer Matthew Paneitz arrived in San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala. By 2004, he founded Long Way Home (LWH) to fight poverty through sustainable construction and education.
From 2008 to 2025, his team turned trash into classrooms, building the award-winning Hero School Green Campus, a replicable model for eco education. Matt earned degrees in Sustainability and Education and is now pursuing his Doctorate at Antioch University.
🌐 Learn more: https://lwhome.org | https://lwhomegreen.org
🔗 Connect with Matt Paneitz & Long Way Home
Website: https://lwhome.org/
Website (Long Way Home Green): lwhomegreen.org
LinkedIn (Long Way Home): https://www.linkedin.com/company/lwhome/
LinkedIn (Matt Paneitz): https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-paneitz/
Instagram (Long Way Home): https://www.instagram.com/lwhome_org/
Instagram (Matt Paneitz): https://www.instagram.com/mattlwhome/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lwhomeorg
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LongWayHomeOrg
Get the “Conscious Design” book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KNMN9BT
Learn more: https://www.consciousdesignhaus.com/
Want to turn visionary ideas into market-ready, sustainable products? 👉 https://www.petermanfirm.com/
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💬 Question for you: Would you live or study in a school made from trash? Tell us below!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:06):
Hello and welcome to the Conscious Design podcast.
I'm your host, Ian Peterman, andI help turn product ideas into
sustainable businesses. Join me for another episode
where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy.
Today, I'm really excited to have Matt Pennites.
He's ASAP fellow and executive director at Long Way Home, where
they are turning trash into schools.
(00:28):
Welcome to the show. Great to be here.
Thanks for this opportunity. Yeah, I'm excited to dive into
how you built schools from trash.
Let's start a little bit towardsthe beginning.
Everybody loves the origin story.
So how how did? You get into this.
Field How did this start as A and turn into turning trash into
(00:50):
schools? Right.
Well, you ever seen The Goonies where he's like, you know,
starts and won the 3rd grade? No, I'll go slightly beyond the
3rd grade. So I was in the Peace Corps and
so that was the first time that it was ever introduced to
Guatemala. I don't think I'd ever even
heard of Guatemala before the Peace Corps.
And then so I did my Peace Corpsservice in the town where we are
(01:13):
operating the school that we both out of trash.
So that's where I was introducedto the concept of building out
of trash. We were running our NGO.
We had built a City Park. We started accepting trash
bottle bricks instead of like a fee to get into the park.
You know, the fee was like $0.25but there were local
neighborhood kids that couldn't afford that $0.25.
(01:35):
I was the trash and on the streets because there's trash
everywhere. Put it in this plastic bottle
that will make a fence out of itthat you can get in for free.
So you know, 10,000 bottles later and I started talking to
the Co founder of Long Way Home and said, hey, I'm thinking
about building a school. And he goes you ever heard out
of building out of trash? Like no, never heard of a
(01:56):
building out of trash. And then he busts out this book
called Our Ship volume 1 and it's about how to build the
tires. Now both of us had some
construction experience, which is kind of why we starting the
NGO together and put the book onthe ground, got some dirt, got a
couple of tires and got after itstarted practicing and we went
(02:16):
well people loved it, we enjoyedit.
We somehow enjoyed, you know, using the sledgehammer for 8 or
9 hours to pack dirt into a tire, right?
And then we decided to build an entire 20 building complex out
of that trash. Amazing, that is a lot of trash
to turn into something useful. Yeah, yeah.
(02:39):
Well, in Guatemala there's a notown system waste management,
right. And so, you know, while we're,
you know, wanting to build stoves, water tanks and other
basic infrastructure where, you know, didn't have much of a
budget to work with. So we were like, can we take
some of this trash, offset some of the materials, claw costs
that'll also allow us to clean up some of the streets and
(02:59):
decontaminate the air, water andsoil.
And so all those things converged and we came up with an
idea. I love it.
And when when did you start? I know you start, you know, and
then you started construction onthis major kind of timeline
light wise. Could you outline like when did
you start? And obviously you're up and
(03:21):
running like it's a usable. Yeah, so Peace Corps was 2002
and 2003, but I moved back to the US, decided to try to live a
normal life. And that didn't really work
because I was still have this feeling that I wanted to go
back, that I'd left it unfinished.
Bought a 1988 Volkswagen Jetta with a windows didn't work
(03:42):
Kerouac style and drove back. And then you from 2005 to 2008,
we built a City Park grass soccer field, the first grass
soccer field in the history of that town, so that all these
people from the town started coming to the City Park and you
started really getting to know everybody playing ball like
seven days a week. You want to integrate into a
(04:05):
society the thing, you know, playing soccer worked out pretty
well because you make friends atall levels, right?
And then in 2008, we decided that we would try out the
concept of building with trash. So we did a tire house.
Then we did a house out of superAdobe or what other people call
earth bags. And then in 2009, we bought 2
(04:25):
acres of land. And January, we were digging out
the foundation for the first setof buildings.
Amazing long term rate. Have you built all the buildings
that you want to, or do you see this is more like an ongoing
project? So we built like about a week
ago, we finished the last campusbuilding, right.
(04:48):
So it took us, you know, going on 17 years to build the all of
the buildings. That is not because we're like
terribly slow builders. It was because there was a
process involved of first of all, we had to learn how to do
it. We've done some construction in
our lives. We've never built with tires,
so, and there wasn't a lot of information out there on how to
(05:11):
do this outside of the airship book, right?
And then we wanted to build withearth bags.
Many have to get books about that.
In addition, we were also training locals, right?
Because we were a couple of people from the United States
living in Guatemala in the middle of nowhere and needed the
support and the contribution in the collaboration of all the
(05:33):
locals, But of course, none of the locals that ever built the
trash. So we're taking, you know,
people who had experience building with cinder blocks and
going, hey, can you think outside of the box?
We're all going to learn how to do this together.
And so, you know, the basic principle still applied, you're
still, you know, trying to Plumbthings and level things.
But there is a lot of work to bedone to figure out how it
(05:55):
exactly all works together, right?
And so we were working it all together and getting to know
everybody in the town. And yeah, we are in it.
So, but on the campus also, there is a bunch of different
types of buildings. We've experimented with bamboo,
we've experimented with Ubuntu blocks, eco bricks, we have
domes, we have barrel bulbs. Because the campus itself is a
(06:19):
menu of options for infrastructure for the local
community. If you walk into the campus,
what you will see is options, right?
So you could build a house for afamily.
If it's a barrel bulb sitting over tires, you could do one
that's columns where in between the columns you have earth, you
have Ubuntu blocks or Adobe. We also you would see compost
(06:42):
with trees and stoves and retaining walls.
So, you know, we were practicingwhile building the campus and
building the classrooms for whatwe would later be implementing
in the community. Right.
I love that idea. That's something that I've
there's a interior design company that they built their
(07:02):
offices in a way to kind of showcase and have their
designers be able to play with aspace because it's, I think
that's one of those things you don't, you don't actually sit in
it, especially if you're going to build a home or something,
you know where you're going to live, work.
You should be able to experienceit and see what might work the
best for. And it's hard to, it's hard to
do that from a picture, right. So I love the idea of building
(07:26):
this. It's a school, but it's also
this way to go see a bunch of different construction methods
that aren't they aren't the typical brick and mortar or 2 by
4, right? They're not just a standard kind
of construction options. So I love that idea of being
able to actually see, touch, feel, check out what is it
actually going to look like whenyou're done?
(07:47):
Right, right. And because we turned it into a
showroom, and it's not like a lot of people in Guatemala were
building out of trash whenever we started.
So people from all over the country and really all over the
world have come to this campus. And what we've done at our
campus is certainly influenced other practices at other
campuses around the country because kids take and schools
(08:11):
take field days to come to our campus, talk to our teachers,
talk to our builders so that they can have some ideas on what
they might implement at their schools as well.
And because they're not even looking at a picture, they're
actually coming to physically see it and feel it.
And then they'll usually be involved for a couple of hours
or a couple of days or a couple of weeks.
(08:33):
You know, they walk away with a much deeper understanding and
the possibility of implementing it at their schools.
So you've. Obviously used a lot of
different methods. You see it have 20 buildings
right on this on this campus. What are I guess, Are there any
that you started and then decided to reject because it
just didn't work out? Or have you been able to find a
(08:56):
way to make everyone you've tested work?
Yeah, the first one we did out of tires did not work right.
So if you can imagine takes a good 1520 minutes to pound one
tire with dirt. The first building 1 of the
rooms would have let's say 250 tires, but we over packed the
(09:16):
tires and so as it got 10-11 courses tall, it started to get
unstable right? Because we'd like kind of hockey
puck did, rather than leaving a little bit of space within the
tire so that it could comfortably sit on top of the
one below it. So as we got pretty much all the
way finished, we had to tear theentire thing down, which meant
(09:39):
using picks to work the dirt outof the tire and then had to
start over from scratch, right. And another occasion, we built
another building out of a more like Cobb right or Adobe.
And we went eco brick and then Adobe and then eco brick and
then Adobe. And usually in Guatemala in
(10:00):
February doesn't rain, right? It never rains.
And then as soon as it never rains, we didn't tarp the
building. It rained one night and it was a
two-story building in the entirething came crashing down in the
middle of the night because the cob on the top turned into mud.
And the entire thing, you know, there were no students, there
was no people. And you know, we still hadn't
(10:21):
really opened the campus yet andstill all under construction.
But yeah, that entire thing failed as well.
And as we've had a lot of failure, in fact, we probably,
you know, probably 90% of what we did, we did wrong, right?
Because we didn't really know what we were doing.
But we learned from our mistakesand dusted ourselves off and got
right back at it. Yeah, there's nothing, nothing
(10:42):
like having some good heavy rains to test your test your
structure with. One, as far as like
replicability goes, we found that it's a lot easier for
people to replicate tire buildings because there's more
room for error, right? You can like, you know, with the
tire that is, you know, a good 2foot wide, you can move it in,
move it out, you can plaster forwhatever the difference is in
(11:04):
the wall thickness. But whenever you're doing earth
bags, it's more technical, right?
And there's less room for air. So we've encouraged people to
work more with tires than we have to, say, work with earth
bags. Right.
Just don't pack it too much thatway.
So outside of the tire ones, what would be your second most
(11:25):
popular that you've people find that it's easy to work with?
The eco bricks because basicallyyou're taking cob and then a
plastic bottle filled with trashand then cob and then a plastic
bottle filled with trash and you're going up and all you have
to do is stay Plumb. Now we prefer the methods that
(11:46):
use the most trash. Earth backs don't use that much
trash, right? And so, you know, a big
important part of this is to clean the environment and figure
out what to do with all the trash that we find on the
ground. So the eco brick one is one of
our favourites. Also the Ubuntu blocks, because
what we do with an Ubuntu block is we basically, you know, build
a column, build a column. An Ubuntu block is like all of
(12:09):
the plastic or some of the random rubbish that we couldn't
get into a bottle. We put it into a little
compression machine that's manual, we compress it down, we
get some baling wire, throw it around it and it basically turns
it into a cinder block, right? And so it's like, that's another
really good way to get rid of loose weird shaped plastic that
(12:33):
needs to go into a wall, but that doesn't really fit into
anything else that we've done. So we're trying really hard,
like I said, to get rid of as much rubbish as we possibly can
and then plaster it up and then keep it out of the waste stream.
Right. And how so you've been building
these for a while. So durability you're seeing
(12:53):
these structures withstand monsoon seasons and heavy rains
and things like that. Have you had, what is your
experience been like looking at buildings that are, are not
brand new anymore? They've they've sat there and
been used for a long time now. Yeah.
So whenever we were building thecampus, we lived on the campus,
right? So our approach was like build a
(13:15):
class ring and then live in it and then build another one and
then live in it and open. So that saved money.
It kept us kind of in the belly of the beast all the time to see
all what's going on. And I'm not sure if you're
aware, Guatemala has a lot of earthquake activity.
There's been a lot of ruptures of this volcano called Fuego
(13:36):
that's even kind of famous because of how high it shoots
lava into the air. And so we get, you know, in a
month you'll get 10 tremors. And when you're living in the
building and you get that level of tremor, instead of running
out of the building, we're goingto kind of ride it out because
sometimes the tremors are so strong they'll wake you up.
(13:57):
And so, you know, now we're intoalmost 2 decades of tremors and
the buildings really haven't changed that much.
You'll see the occasional crack in the plaster, right?
But because of the way that the walls function, the rubber
absorbs the movement of the trimmer and so the wall doesn't
(14:19):
have a way to crack. It's not going anywhere.
And because we'll backfill a lotcan't actually fall when we use
opposing forces when we're doingthe barrel valve domes and then
the connected to the different wall structures that we have.
So in a conceptually, the buildings have already fallen,
right? And so with all of the natural
(14:42):
activity in the area of the monsoon, the earthquakes, we're
shocked even ourselves that the buildings have not changed
hardly at all. They're still in about the same
condition as when we started. Hey, it's your host, Ian.
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(15:03):
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(15:54):
That's amazing because that's even, you know, that's something
that modern builders deal with not so well sometimes, sometimes
especially that much and that's a lot.
That's a lot of earthquakes to be dealing with along with heavy
rains. It's a very strong, tough
environment for Ridgewood, what normally would be a very rigid
structure. But like you said, I think
(16:15):
that's the absorbing those shocks is that's great.
Great to even able to achieve that so well, because that's
keeps keeps all the trash out. Otherwise it's it defeats the
point. Well, and we did this because in
1976 there was an earthquake, and that earthquake killed a lot
of people, right? And so people had built their
homes out of Adobe, and then they put Adobe tiles basically
(16:39):
on the roof. And those tiles are really
heavy. And then the earth shook.
And then all those tiles fell inside of the house and those
roofs fell on top of people. So that's why we were trying to
use tires so much, so we could come up with an alternative to
that, so that people could see how it's done.
They could see that over 15 to 20 years how it performed in the
(17:02):
exact same environment and potentially decide to use it
themselves rather than risking what might happen if your walls
are built out of Adobe or even cinder block.
Cinder block will crack. Right.
Yeah, No, bricks are not good for earthquakes.
They're riches. So what have you done for
knowing that the roof, the roof side is so key?
(17:24):
I What have you done for roofingto help make sure that that's
not a concern anymore? Yeah, so like with the roofs, we
tried bamboo trusses. Right.
And the world. Knows that bamboo is strong and
durable and the bamboo trusses are in the same shape they were
whenever we started. They perform really well and
(17:47):
earthquakes and we do a lot of rounds, round shapes, right?
So arches and domes because architecturally they say round
is sounds. And so, yeah, our buildings,
it's difficult for a barrel ballto fall in, right, because it's
already pressing out and the domes are already pressing out.
(18:09):
So they both perform really wellin those conditions.
That's awesome. So you've been able to have you
had to use any lumber then or you've you been able to use like
tree lumber be have you been able to just replace that
completely with bamboo and otherother materials then?
Yeah, it's not so easy to get lumber.
We've used some because we will frame out some interior walls or
(18:33):
you know, but one mall is prettydeforested and lumber is really
expensive. However, bamboo, you know, grows
back quick, and they have a lot along the coastal areas, and
it's not expensive. And if you treat it then it
lasts a really long time. So most places where we might
(18:53):
have used wood, yeah, sure, we use a lot of bamboo.
Wood is faster or so sometimes we're like, all right, we're
going to make a door frame. Let's make the door frame out of
wood because wood is much easierto work with than bamboo.
But no, we haven't built any structures using wood.
That's awesome. I think that's super important,
(19:14):
right? Thinking, thinking about what's
actually there and what what I mean, it goes even back to, you
know, the trash, right? Use what's?
Trying to figure out what you can use that's actually locally
there and rather than importing from some other country some
expensive material to try to tryto build out of.
It sounds hard to do, especiallyif you're modeling it for people
(19:37):
to be able to easily copy elsewhere in the country.
Yeah, we'd like to have zero impact on the environment, but
that's not, it's not exactly a reasonable thing because we
could build everything out of urgent materials that we find on
site. Conceivably we could grow our
own trees, we could plant strong.
(19:59):
It would take a 75 years to do this if we did it that way, but
it is possible to do so. Then we start having to make
decisions, right? So we think about the emission
effect on whenever we go get tires because we use a large
flatbed truck that we drive along the Inter American
(20:20):
Highway, which is about 25 milesfrom our sights, and we pick up
tires at little mom and pop tireshops.
Now, those mom and pop tire shops would otherwise be
throwing their tires into a ravine, right?
Or they'd be burning them or they don't really have a good
way to dispose of their rubbish or their trash.
(20:41):
So we are not perfect in the sense that, you know, there are
some emissions related, plus we use some cements, we use some
conventional materials or we're trying to use cement
responsibly. Our barrel valves are made out
of cement or concrete. And so we try to use the least
(21:02):
amount that we possibly can. However, we think that it's the
best use of that material because if used properly, it can
last a really long time. And then this is always what
we're dealing with. What is the most reasonable move
to put on one of these buildings, Right.
So we're constantly talking about it, thinking about it,
(21:23):
discussing it, getting advice and trying out the ideas.
I love it. Yeah, there's obviously it would
be great if there was magical material that you could just
plop in the ground and in three days you had all all the
components to build out. That would be great.
But it's just not especially in.I'd love that you're using this
as an example for like people come and see this.
(21:45):
So this is also people that they're just going to build a
house for themselves. They need something that they
can actually do and not just this.
Yeah, it's perfect, but good luck doing it on your own that
no one's going to do that. They're that's cool.
I saw it, but I'm not going to do it.
So this, like you said, the practical kind of this practical
side of, OK, you're going to have to make some decisions
(22:07):
because you have to make it thisdoable repeatable path that
someone will actually go do not necessarily this perfect
laboratory setting basically where you have everything.
So it's a, there's those decisions to make and not any
people. Some people, a lot of people
(22:28):
really kind of worry about like,oh, we'll have to make it
perfectly sustainable. Otherwise it's not doing and
it's it's really hard to do thatrealistically.
Yeah. And you know, we have some
partners, like one of them is called the Natural Building
Collective and they work out of South Africa and they do their
work with 95% natural materials.And so by partnering with them
(22:52):
and collaborating with them, we do learn from what they do and
use Adobe bricks where we can tomake an arch, use earth back
bricks where we can to make an arch rather than forming it out
of concrete. There are places that we've
learned how to spend a little bit more time because that's
what the difference is. Concrete dries fast, right?
(23:14):
You can walk in a concrete floorthe next day pretty much you can
use the door of an arch of a concrete doorway pretty much
immediately. So, you know, it's a balancing
act. How fast we want to spend 17
years or 34 years building a campus?
Or do we want to be able to use the doorway tomorrow so that we
can access our tools quicker so that we can move along with the
(23:36):
campus? We're constantly balancing.
Best way to go about doing this?Yeah, looking forward like build
this campus, you just finished your last building.
Is this, do you see doing this again?
Is this something that you guys are are thinking about building
another campus? Kind of what's your guess?
What's next for you guys since you've built this one out?
(23:58):
So chapter 2, right? That was a really, really long
chapter 1. And so the next chapter for us
was so like what we saw in Guatemala, what we thought and
we were quite wrong about was that if we built all these
structures that the people around us would pick it up and
that they would build it too. And that did not exactly happen.
(24:21):
Right now if you go around Guatemala, something you will
see are a whole lot of tire retaining walls, because tire
retaining walls are way cheaper than rock and concrete retaining
walls, and they last a lot longer.
So they're super popular, So popular that at the beginning
people weren't giving us tires. Right now they're selling the
(24:45):
tires to us, so we've kind of shot ourselves in the foot on
like being able to get our. You created a whole new market.
We. Created an entire market out of
the tire thing and so good and bad.
But so like the next step for uswas in order to make sure that,
you know, we didn't do it and then it was kind of forgotten.
(25:06):
We started integrating what we learned into the lesson plans
because we have 178 students that go to our school that had
been attending our school for pretty much the last decade.
And So what we saw is school could be boring.
We've all heard of this, that the teacher stands there and the
students receive the information.
And we're like, we're not going to put all this effort into all
(25:27):
these amazing buildings and thenuse a normal education model
that kids are not totally engaged by.
So we came up with an alternative model and that's
where you get the name Hero School, right?
So the same buildings and the same concepts that we use while
building the campus we integrated into like let's say
(25:48):
math class. Now in math class, instead of
doing something abstract, we usemath to decide how to build a
ventilated stove for a family, right?
What are the dimensions? What's the design?
In social studies class, you're supposed to do a survey based on
the state mandated curriculum. But now we do a survey and we go
(26:11):
out into the community and find out which families, because
there's a lot of poverty in the area, which families are cooking
over open flames and doors, right?
And then in art class, we model the project.
So by integrating these conceptsinto the curriculum, the
students are now going out into the community and building these
(26:34):
projects. And now that we're of, we're
seven or eight years into reallyintegrating these projects into
the curriculum, Our students have gotten really good at this.
It's really amazing to see a group of 6th graders identify a
family that needs a stove, walk into that family's house, get
(26:54):
permission from the family to doit, go back to the classroom and
decide how they're going to do it, and it's divided up between
all of the major courses. And then go out and actually
build that stove or that water tank or retaining wall or dry
compost the tree or a classroom.So the students are super
(27:16):
engaged by this process. They're so excited to be doing
something of real value for their community.
Does wonders for their self esteem.
And then the next chapter, now that we've kind of integrated
that chapter and the next chapter is provide the local
public schools with our lesson plans because we want all of the
(27:38):
public schools and the whole area to all be doing the same
poverty fighting techniques, right?
So if you're, you know, right now we've got 15 kids in our 6th
grade class, but there's another256th graders in the town.
We're going to hand them our lesson plans.
The teachers are happy to receive the lesson plans.
And so we're going to work with the other public schools and
(28:01):
start fighting poverty on a massive scale.
I love that. And I think the practical side,
right, that was always anybody who was bored in school was
usually because they're like, what do I do with this?
What's the point of what's the point of learning all this right
now? So I love that you're
integrating, integrating that and it's it works.
(28:22):
It's amazing what happens when you actually engage kids and
you're trying to teach them. If they're engaged, they learn
and it's did elsewhere. But at least you're working, at
least you're helping the area you're in get there.
I think that's needed all over. Right.
And what we're doing is creatinga replicable model because we
could create a curriculum that wasn't proved by the Ministry of
(28:44):
Education, but then it would kind of stand alone and it
wouldn't be able to be integrated into the other public
schools education systems. But by following their standard,
now they can use our lesson plans.
And we've written it in such a way that it applies not only in
our town, but it applies throughout the country and even
potentially throughout a lot of Latin America who are facing a
(29:07):
lot of the same problems, especially in Honduras, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, they're facing some of the same
issues. And then potentially in Latin
America and conceivably, why not, and the rest of the world
that's dealing with yet again, alot of the same problems.
Right, I feel like it's one of those if you find if you find
the solution should tell everyone you show it, use it,
(29:33):
fix the problem everywhere. And I love the fact that you
intentionally were thinking about the long term, making sure
that it could fit the requirements, because every
state and everything has their requirements for education.
And that I think been a big hurdle where people don't
necessarily think about, they just go, oh, well, this is the
best way to learn. But they don't think about how
to make it easy for a public school to integrate.
(29:56):
So that kind of thinking, it really makes integrating that
stuff way easier because you're making it, you're making it easy
for the teacher to go, well, it's, it meets all my actual
requirements and it's better. So I'll, yeah, of course I'm
going to do it. Yeah, doesn't really require
that much teacher training. Well, I mean, everybody does
need some enhancement and some explanation.
(30:18):
Well, it's it follows the basic course that they're already
working with. And some of them have already
tried it sound and are like, yeah, this is kind of a no
brainer. This is way more interesting
than what I was doing before. So why wouldn't I do this?
And so, you know, we'll start dividing.
We'll assign a public school, the sector of the town.
They'll decide who is living in the most poverty, they'll do the
(30:40):
surveys and then, yeah, we should be able to have a pretty
major impact on the people that are living in extreme poverty in
that area within the next coupleof years.
And as far as I know, I don't know of another school that is
doing that exact approach. There's a lot of schools, lot of
Ng OS fighting a lot of poverty in a lot of different ways.
(31:04):
I am not sure of who else is doing it that way.
I don't know of any either. It's not my expertise area, but
a very unique from the people I have talked to.
It is a unique approach. So I'm really excited to see
where things go from here with you guys and see it and
obviously it's working now, but I love to.
I'm excited to see what happens after a couple years of doing
(31:27):
this. Yeah, I am really excited to
find out what how the next chapter unfolds really, because
there's a lot of potential and there's a lot of people
suffering and we can have a major impact on that suffering
as soon as we possibly can. I love it.
It is amazing and I wish you thebest.
I hope that this just keeps growing and growing and does
(31:49):
really well for you guys and forcommunities you're in.
Before we wrap up here, I did want to two things.
One, anything we didn't cover that you wanted to mention, do
that and then how can people find you, reach out, connect,
support you guys and what you'redoing?
Well, thank you for this opportunity.
This is how people find out because we spent 17 years on the
(32:13):
ground in Guatemala doing this and didn't really take the
traditional NGO approach. I'm so we were heavily focused
on program services. How can we make sure that we're
integrated into the community, understand, collaborate or in
the respect, in the trust of thecommunity.
And we did not during that time do a very good job of promoting
(32:35):
ourselves. Not so easy to do from that
space. We had a lot of help.
A lot of really generous people have helped us while living in
the States or other parts of theworld, and they have gotten our
name out and done a really wonderful job of that.
But, you know, we're not actually very good at that.
So I really appreciate this opportunity for us to get our
(32:56):
name out a little bit and for people to hear about this
process. How can people help?
Well, you can e-mail me directlyat matt@lwhome.org.
So you can volunteer and you could bring a service group.
You can donate, you can bring school supplies.
And going back to the volunteering thing, so we've had
(33:17):
so people come to our school to learn sustainable building
techniques, right? And so that has been our earned
income model, right? It doesn't cover all the bills.
Basically, people pay us $85 to live in our volunteer house for
a week. Then in exchange for that, we
teach them how to green build. Now, some people stay for a week
(33:40):
and people have stayed for as many as seven or eight years,
right, because they're fully engaged in the process.
That's awesome. Yeah.
And so the next real major opportunity is like our Indiana
Jones version of what we do is coming up on October the 20th to
November the 14th. That is when the students, the
(34:01):
teachers, the volunteers, we allget together and we go out into
one of the really remote poorer villages and we're going to
build 2 classrooms and we're teaming up with an organization
called ecohab.org and their leadbuilder is going to work with
us. And he's been green building for
(34:22):
30 plus years, really well known.
His name is Bill Basehard, Google him, he's been doing this
for a long time. And so you can jump into that
workshop and work with us and have that experience.
Amazing. Well for everyone listening and
watching, we will have links in the show notes.
So don't worry, it'll be easy for you to find all that stuff.
(34:44):
And Matt, I really appreciate you being on.
I loved hearing about everythingyou're doing.
Excited to see what comes out ofthe next couple of years.
Yeah. Thank you for this opportunity.
Again, I really appreciate it. Absolutely.
And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design
Podcast. If today's episode inspired you
to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a
(35:05):
sustainable 7 figure business, visit petermanfirm.com or click
the link below. Your ideas how the power to
change the world, and we're hereto help make that happen.
Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next
episode.
Hello and welcome to the Conscious Design podcast.
I'm your host, Ian Peterman, andI help turn product ideas into
sustainable businesses. Join me for another episode
where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy.
Today, I'm really excited to have Matt Pennites.
He's ASAP fellow and executive director at Long Way Home, where
they are turning trash into schools.
(00:28):
Welcome to the show. Great to be here.
Thanks for this opportunity. Yeah, I'm excited to dive into
how you built schools from trash.
Let's start a little bit towardsthe beginning.
Everybody loves the origin story.
So how how did? You get into this.
Field How did this start as A and turn into turning trash into
(00:50):
schools? Right.
Well, you ever seen The Goonies where he's like, you know,
starts and won the 3rd grade? No, I'll go slightly beyond the
3rd grade. So I was in the Peace Corps and
so that was the first time that it was ever introduced to
Guatemala. I don't think I'd ever even
heard of Guatemala before the Peace Corps.
And then so I did my Peace Corpsservice in the town where we are
(01:13):
operating the school that we both out of trash.
So that's where I was introducedto the concept of building out
of trash. We were running our NGO.
We had built a City Park. We started accepting trash
bottle bricks instead of like a fee to get into the park.
You know, the fee was like $0.25but there were local
neighborhood kids that couldn't afford that $0.25.
(01:35):
I was the trash and on the streets because there's trash
everywhere. Put it in this plastic bottle
that will make a fence out of itthat you can get in for free.
So you know, 10,000 bottles later and I started talking to
the Co founder of Long Way Home and said, hey, I'm thinking
about building a school. And he goes you ever heard out
of building out of trash? Like no, never heard of a
(01:56):
building out of trash. And then he busts out this book
called Our Ship volume 1 and it's about how to build the
tires. Now both of us had some
construction experience, which is kind of why we starting the
NGO together and put the book onthe ground, got some dirt, got a
couple of tires and got after itstarted practicing and we went
(02:16):
well people loved it, we enjoyedit.
We somehow enjoyed, you know, using the sledgehammer for 8 or
9 hours to pack dirt into a tire, right?
And then we decided to build an entire 20 building complex out
of that trash. Amazing, that is a lot of trash
to turn into something useful. Yeah, yeah.
(02:39):
Well, in Guatemala there's a notown system waste management,
right. And so, you know, while we're,
you know, wanting to build stoves, water tanks and other
basic infrastructure where, you know, didn't have much of a
budget to work with. So we were like, can we take
some of this trash, offset some of the materials, claw costs
that'll also allow us to clean up some of the streets and
(02:59):
decontaminate the air, water andsoil.
And so all those things converged and we came up with an
idea. I love it.
And when when did you start? I know you start, you know, and
then you started construction onthis major kind of timeline
light wise. Could you outline like when did
you start? And obviously you're up and
(03:21):
running like it's a usable. Yeah, so Peace Corps was 2002
and 2003, but I moved back to the US, decided to try to live a
normal life. And that didn't really work
because I was still have this feeling that I wanted to go
back, that I'd left it unfinished.
Bought a 1988 Volkswagen Jetta with a windows didn't work
(03:42):
Kerouac style and drove back. And then you from 2005 to 2008,
we built a City Park grass soccer field, the first grass
soccer field in the history of that town, so that all these
people from the town started coming to the City Park and you
started really getting to know everybody playing ball like
seven days a week. You want to integrate into a
(04:05):
society the thing, you know, playing soccer worked out pretty
well because you make friends atall levels, right?
And then in 2008, we decided that we would try out the
concept of building with trash. So we did a tire house.
Then we did a house out of superAdobe or what other people call
earth bags. And then in 2009, we bought 2
(04:25):
acres of land. And January, we were digging out
the foundation for the first setof buildings.
Amazing long term rate. Have you built all the buildings
that you want to, or do you see this is more like an ongoing
project? So we built like about a week
ago, we finished the last campusbuilding, right.
(04:48):
So it took us, you know, going on 17 years to build the all of
the buildings. That is not because we're like
terribly slow builders. It was because there was a
process involved of first of all, we had to learn how to do
it. We've done some construction in
our lives. We've never built with tires,
so, and there wasn't a lot of information out there on how to
(05:11):
do this outside of the airship book, right?
And then we wanted to build withearth bags.
Many have to get books about that.
In addition, we were also training locals, right?
Because we were a couple of people from the United States
living in Guatemala in the middle of nowhere and needed the
support and the contribution in the collaboration of all the
(05:33):
locals, But of course, none of the locals that ever built the
trash. So we're taking, you know,
people who had experience building with cinder blocks and
going, hey, can you think outside of the box?
We're all going to learn how to do this together.
And so, you know, the basic principle still applied, you're
still, you know, trying to Plumbthings and level things.
But there is a lot of work to bedone to figure out how it
(05:55):
exactly all works together, right?
And so we were working it all together and getting to know
everybody in the town. And yeah, we are in it.
So, but on the campus also, there is a bunch of different
types of buildings. We've experimented with bamboo,
we've experimented with Ubuntu blocks, eco bricks, we have
domes, we have barrel bulbs. Because the campus itself is a
(06:19):
menu of options for infrastructure for the local
community. If you walk into the campus,
what you will see is options, right?
So you could build a house for afamily.
If it's a barrel bulb sitting over tires, you could do one
that's columns where in between the columns you have earth, you
have Ubuntu blocks or Adobe. We also you would see compost
(06:42):
with trees and stoves and retaining walls.
So, you know, we were practicingwhile building the campus and
building the classrooms for whatwe would later be implementing
in the community. Right.
I love that idea. That's something that I've
there's a interior design company that they built their
(07:02):
offices in a way to kind of showcase and have their
designers be able to play with aspace because it's, I think
that's one of those things you don't, you don't actually sit in
it, especially if you're going to build a home or something,
you know where you're going to live, work.
You should be able to experienceit and see what might work the
best for. And it's hard to, it's hard to
do that from a picture, right. So I love the idea of building
(07:26):
this. It's a school, but it's also
this way to go see a bunch of different construction methods
that aren't they aren't the typical brick and mortar or 2 by
4, right? They're not just a standard kind
of construction options. So I love that idea of being
able to actually see, touch, feel, check out what is it
actually going to look like whenyou're done?
(07:47):
Right, right. And because we turned it into a
showroom, and it's not like a lot of people in Guatemala were
building out of trash whenever we started.
So people from all over the country and really all over the
world have come to this campus. And what we've done at our
campus is certainly influenced other practices at other
campuses around the country because kids take and schools
(08:11):
take field days to come to our campus, talk to our teachers,
talk to our builders so that they can have some ideas on what
they might implement at their schools as well.
And because they're not even looking at a picture, they're
actually coming to physically see it and feel it.
And then they'll usually be involved for a couple of hours
or a couple of days or a couple of weeks.
(08:33):
You know, they walk away with a much deeper understanding and
the possibility of implementing it at their schools.
So you've. Obviously used a lot of
different methods. You see it have 20 buildings
right on this on this campus. What are I guess, Are there any
that you started and then decided to reject because it
just didn't work out? Or have you been able to find a
(08:56):
way to make everyone you've tested work?
Yeah, the first one we did out of tires did not work right.
So if you can imagine takes a good 1520 minutes to pound one
tire with dirt. The first building 1 of the
rooms would have let's say 250 tires, but we over packed the
(09:16):
tires and so as it got 10-11 courses tall, it started to get
unstable right? Because we'd like kind of hockey
puck did, rather than leaving a little bit of space within the
tire so that it could comfortably sit on top of the
one below it. So as we got pretty much all the
way finished, we had to tear theentire thing down, which meant
(09:39):
using picks to work the dirt outof the tire and then had to
start over from scratch, right. And another occasion, we built
another building out of a more like Cobb right or Adobe.
And we went eco brick and then Adobe and then eco brick and
then Adobe. And usually in Guatemala in
(10:00):
February doesn't rain, right? It never rains.
And then as soon as it never rains, we didn't tarp the
building. It rained one night and it was a
two-story building in the entirething came crashing down in the
middle of the night because the cob on the top turned into mud.
And the entire thing, you know, there were no students, there
was no people. And you know, we still hadn't
(10:21):
really opened the campus yet andstill all under construction.
But yeah, that entire thing failed as well.
And as we've had a lot of failure, in fact, we probably,
you know, probably 90% of what we did, we did wrong, right?
Because we didn't really know what we were doing.
But we learned from our mistakesand dusted ourselves off and got
right back at it. Yeah, there's nothing, nothing
(10:42):
like having some good heavy rains to test your test your
structure with. One, as far as like
replicability goes, we found that it's a lot easier for
people to replicate tire buildings because there's more
room for error, right? You can like, you know, with the
tire that is, you know, a good 2foot wide, you can move it in,
move it out, you can plaster forwhatever the difference is in
(11:04):
the wall thickness. But whenever you're doing earth
bags, it's more technical, right?
And there's less room for air. So we've encouraged people to
work more with tires than we have to, say, work with earth
bags. Right.
Just don't pack it too much thatway.
So outside of the tire ones, what would be your second most
(11:25):
popular that you've people find that it's easy to work with?
The eco bricks because basicallyyou're taking cob and then a
plastic bottle filled with trashand then cob and then a plastic
bottle filled with trash and you're going up and all you have
to do is stay Plumb. Now we prefer the methods that
(11:46):
use the most trash. Earth backs don't use that much
trash, right? And so, you know, a big
important part of this is to clean the environment and figure
out what to do with all the trash that we find on the
ground. So the eco brick one is one of
our favourites. Also the Ubuntu blocks, because
what we do with an Ubuntu block is we basically, you know, build
a column, build a column. An Ubuntu block is like all of
(12:09):
the plastic or some of the random rubbish that we couldn't
get into a bottle. We put it into a little
compression machine that's manual, we compress it down, we
get some baling wire, throw it around it and it basically turns
it into a cinder block, right? And so it's like, that's another
really good way to get rid of loose weird shaped plastic that
(12:33):
needs to go into a wall, but that doesn't really fit into
anything else that we've done. So we're trying really hard,
like I said, to get rid of as much rubbish as we possibly can
and then plaster it up and then keep it out of the waste stream.
Right. And how so you've been building
these for a while. So durability you're seeing
(12:53):
these structures withstand monsoon seasons and heavy rains
and things like that. Have you had, what is your
experience been like looking at buildings that are, are not
brand new anymore? They've they've sat there and
been used for a long time now. Yeah.
So whenever we were building thecampus, we lived on the campus,
right? So our approach was like build a
(13:15):
class ring and then live in it and then build another one and
then live in it and open. So that saved money.
It kept us kind of in the belly of the beast all the time to see
all what's going on. And I'm not sure if you're
aware, Guatemala has a lot of earthquake activity.
There's been a lot of ruptures of this volcano called Fuego
(13:36):
that's even kind of famous because of how high it shoots
lava into the air. And so we get, you know, in a
month you'll get 10 tremors. And when you're living in the
building and you get that level of tremor, instead of running
out of the building, we're goingto kind of ride it out because
sometimes the tremors are so strong they'll wake you up.
(13:57):
And so, you know, now we're intoalmost 2 decades of tremors and
the buildings really haven't changed that much.
You'll see the occasional crack in the plaster, right?
But because of the way that the walls function, the rubber
absorbs the movement of the trimmer and so the wall doesn't
(14:19):
have a way to crack. It's not going anywhere.
And because we'll backfill a lotcan't actually fall when we use
opposing forces when we're doingthe barrel valve domes and then
the connected to the different wall structures that we have.
So in a conceptually, the buildings have already fallen,
right? And so with all of the natural
(14:42):
activity in the area of the monsoon, the earthquakes, we're
shocked even ourselves that the buildings have not changed
hardly at all. They're still in about the same
condition as when we started. Hey, it's your host, Ian.
I'm really glad you're enjoying this episode.
I absolutely love highlighting amazing brands and founders for
the awesome things they are doing.
(15:03):
I've helped hundreds of entrepreneurs and businesses
like yours turn their boldest ideas into powerful, purpose
driven brands. So if you're serious about
building a brand people love, like our guests and clients too,
and one that you're proud to stand behind, I invite you to
dive a bit deeper with our book Conscious Design.
Inside, you'll discover the exact framework and steps we use
to help entrepreneurs like you turn purpose into a powerful,
(15:27):
impact driven brand. Brand that stands out, tracks
loyal customers and drive sustainable growth with social
and environmental responsibilitywoven into its DNA.
Grab your copy today. You can find it on our website
consciousdesignhouse.com or justfind the link below in the show
notes. Enjoy the rest of the episode
and don't forget to like, subscribe and share.
(15:54):
That's amazing because that's even, you know, that's something
that modern builders deal with not so well sometimes, sometimes
especially that much and that's a lot.
That's a lot of earthquakes to be dealing with along with heavy
rains. It's a very strong, tough
environment for Ridgewood, what normally would be a very rigid
structure. But like you said, I think
(16:15):
that's the absorbing those shocks is that's great.
Great to even able to achieve that so well, because that's
keeps keeps all the trash out. Otherwise it's it defeats the
point. Well, and we did this because in
1976 there was an earthquake, and that earthquake killed a lot
of people, right? And so people had built their
homes out of Adobe, and then they put Adobe tiles basically
(16:39):
on the roof. And those tiles are really
heavy. And then the earth shook.
And then all those tiles fell inside of the house and those
roofs fell on top of people. So that's why we were trying to
use tires so much, so we could come up with an alternative to
that, so that people could see how it's done.
They could see that over 15 to 20 years how it performed in the
(17:02):
exact same environment and potentially decide to use it
themselves rather than risking what might happen if your walls
are built out of Adobe or even cinder block.
Cinder block will crack. Right.
Yeah, No, bricks are not good for earthquakes.
They're riches. So what have you done for
knowing that the roof, the roof side is so key?
(17:24):
I What have you done for roofingto help make sure that that's
not a concern anymore? Yeah, so like with the roofs, we
tried bamboo trusses. Right.
And the world. Knows that bamboo is strong and
durable and the bamboo trusses are in the same shape they were
whenever we started. They perform really well and
(17:47):
earthquakes and we do a lot of rounds, round shapes, right?
So arches and domes because architecturally they say round
is sounds. And so, yeah, our buildings,
it's difficult for a barrel ballto fall in, right, because it's
already pressing out and the domes are already pressing out.
(18:09):
So they both perform really wellin those conditions.
That's awesome. So you've been able to have you
had to use any lumber then or you've you been able to use like
tree lumber be have you been able to just replace that
completely with bamboo and otherother materials then?
Yeah, it's not so easy to get lumber.
We've used some because we will frame out some interior walls or
(18:33):
you know, but one mall is prettydeforested and lumber is really
expensive. However, bamboo, you know, grows
back quick, and they have a lot along the coastal areas, and
it's not expensive. And if you treat it then it
lasts a really long time. So most places where we might
(18:53):
have used wood, yeah, sure, we use a lot of bamboo.
Wood is faster or so sometimes we're like, all right, we're
going to make a door frame. Let's make the door frame out of
wood because wood is much easierto work with than bamboo.
But no, we haven't built any structures using wood.
That's awesome. I think that's super important,
(19:14):
right? Thinking, thinking about what's
actually there and what what I mean, it goes even back to, you
know, the trash, right? Use what's?
Trying to figure out what you can use that's actually locally
there and rather than importing from some other country some
expensive material to try to tryto build out of.
It sounds hard to do, especiallyif you're modeling it for people
(19:37):
to be able to easily copy elsewhere in the country.
Yeah, we'd like to have zero impact on the environment, but
that's not, it's not exactly a reasonable thing because we
could build everything out of urgent materials that we find on
site. Conceivably we could grow our
own trees, we could plant strong.
(19:59):
It would take a 75 years to do this if we did it that way, but
it is possible to do so. Then we start having to make
decisions, right? So we think about the emission
effect on whenever we go get tires because we use a large
flatbed truck that we drive along the Inter American
(20:20):
Highway, which is about 25 milesfrom our sights, and we pick up
tires at little mom and pop tireshops.
Now, those mom and pop tire shops would otherwise be
throwing their tires into a ravine, right?
Or they'd be burning them or they don't really have a good
way to dispose of their rubbish or their trash.
(20:41):
So we are not perfect in the sense that, you know, there are
some emissions related, plus we use some cements, we use some
conventional materials or we're trying to use cement
responsibly. Our barrel valves are made out
of cement or concrete. And so we try to use the least
(21:02):
amount that we possibly can. However, we think that it's the
best use of that material because if used properly, it can
last a really long time. And then this is always what
we're dealing with. What is the most reasonable move
to put on one of these buildings, Right.
So we're constantly talking about it, thinking about it,
(21:23):
discussing it, getting advice and trying out the ideas.
I love it. Yeah, there's obviously it would
be great if there was magical material that you could just
plop in the ground and in three days you had all all the
components to build out. That would be great.
But it's just not especially in.I'd love that you're using this
as an example for like people come and see this.
(21:45):
So this is also people that they're just going to build a
house for themselves. They need something that they
can actually do and not just this.
Yeah, it's perfect, but good luck doing it on your own that
no one's going to do that. They're that's cool.
I saw it, but I'm not going to do it.
So this, like you said, the practical kind of this practical
side of, OK, you're going to have to make some decisions
(22:07):
because you have to make it thisdoable repeatable path that
someone will actually go do not necessarily this perfect
laboratory setting basically where you have everything.
So it's a, there's those decisions to make and not any
people. Some people, a lot of people
(22:28):
really kind of worry about like,oh, we'll have to make it
perfectly sustainable. Otherwise it's not doing and
it's it's really hard to do thatrealistically.
Yeah. And you know, we have some
partners, like one of them is called the Natural Building
Collective and they work out of South Africa and they do their
work with 95% natural materials.And so by partnering with them
(22:52):
and collaborating with them, we do learn from what they do and
use Adobe bricks where we can tomake an arch, use earth back
bricks where we can to make an arch rather than forming it out
of concrete. There are places that we've
learned how to spend a little bit more time because that's
what the difference is. Concrete dries fast, right?
(23:14):
You can walk in a concrete floorthe next day pretty much you can
use the door of an arch of a concrete doorway pretty much
immediately. So, you know, it's a balancing
act. How fast we want to spend 17
years or 34 years building a campus?
Or do we want to be able to use the doorway tomorrow so that we
can access our tools quicker so that we can move along with the
(23:36):
campus? We're constantly balancing.
Best way to go about doing this?Yeah, looking forward like build
this campus, you just finished your last building.
Is this, do you see doing this again?
Is this something that you guys are are thinking about building
another campus? Kind of what's your guess?
What's next for you guys since you've built this one out?
(23:58):
So chapter 2, right? That was a really, really long
chapter 1. And so the next chapter for us
was so like what we saw in Guatemala, what we thought and
we were quite wrong about was that if we built all these
structures that the people around us would pick it up and
that they would build it too. And that did not exactly happen.
(24:21):
Right now if you go around Guatemala, something you will
see are a whole lot of tire retaining walls, because tire
retaining walls are way cheaper than rock and concrete retaining
walls, and they last a lot longer.
So they're super popular, So popular that at the beginning
people weren't giving us tires. Right now they're selling the
(24:45):
tires to us, so we've kind of shot ourselves in the foot on
like being able to get our. You created a whole new market.
We. Created an entire market out of
the tire thing and so good and bad.
But so like the next step for uswas in order to make sure that,
you know, we didn't do it and then it was kind of forgotten.
(25:06):
We started integrating what we learned into the lesson plans
because we have 178 students that go to our school that had
been attending our school for pretty much the last decade.
And So what we saw is school could be boring.
We've all heard of this, that the teacher stands there and the
students receive the information.
And we're like, we're not going to put all this effort into all
(25:27):
these amazing buildings and thenuse a normal education model
that kids are not totally engaged by.
So we came up with an alternative model and that's
where you get the name Hero School, right?
So the same buildings and the same concepts that we use while
building the campus we integrated into like let's say
(25:48):
math class. Now in math class, instead of
doing something abstract, we usemath to decide how to build a
ventilated stove for a family, right?
What are the dimensions? What's the design?
In social studies class, you're supposed to do a survey based on
the state mandated curriculum. But now we do a survey and we go
(26:11):
out into the community and find out which families, because
there's a lot of poverty in the area, which families are cooking
over open flames and doors, right?
And then in art class, we model the project.
So by integrating these conceptsinto the curriculum, the
students are now going out into the community and building these
(26:34):
projects. And now that we're of, we're
seven or eight years into reallyintegrating these projects into
the curriculum, Our students have gotten really good at this.
It's really amazing to see a group of 6th graders identify a
family that needs a stove, walk into that family's house, get
(26:54):
permission from the family to doit, go back to the classroom and
decide how they're going to do it, and it's divided up between
all of the major courses. And then go out and actually
build that stove or that water tank or retaining wall or dry
compost the tree or a classroom.So the students are super
(27:16):
engaged by this process. They're so excited to be doing
something of real value for their community.
Does wonders for their self esteem.
And then the next chapter, now that we've kind of integrated
that chapter and the next chapter is provide the local
public schools with our lesson plans because we want all of the
(27:38):
public schools and the whole area to all be doing the same
poverty fighting techniques, right?
So if you're, you know, right now we've got 15 kids in our 6th
grade class, but there's another256th graders in the town.
We're going to hand them our lesson plans.
The teachers are happy to receive the lesson plans.
And so we're going to work with the other public schools and
(28:01):
start fighting poverty on a massive scale.
I love that. And I think the practical side,
right, that was always anybody who was bored in school was
usually because they're like, what do I do with this?
What's the point of what's the point of learning all this right
now? So I love that you're
integrating, integrating that and it's it works.
(28:22):
It's amazing what happens when you actually engage kids and
you're trying to teach them. If they're engaged, they learn
and it's did elsewhere. But at least you're working, at
least you're helping the area you're in get there.
I think that's needed all over. Right.
And what we're doing is creatinga replicable model because we
could create a curriculum that wasn't proved by the Ministry of
(28:44):
Education, but then it would kind of stand alone and it
wouldn't be able to be integrated into the other public
schools education systems. But by following their standard,
now they can use our lesson plans.
And we've written it in such a way that it applies not only in
our town, but it applies throughout the country and even
potentially throughout a lot of Latin America who are facing a
(29:07):
lot of the same problems, especially in Honduras, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, they're facing some of the same
issues. And then potentially in Latin
America and conceivably, why not, and the rest of the world
that's dealing with yet again, alot of the same problems.
Right, I feel like it's one of those if you find if you find
the solution should tell everyone you show it, use it,
(29:33):
fix the problem everywhere. And I love the fact that you
intentionally were thinking about the long term, making sure
that it could fit the requirements, because every
state and everything has their requirements for education.
And that I think been a big hurdle where people don't
necessarily think about, they just go, oh, well, this is the
best way to learn. But they don't think about how
to make it easy for a public school to integrate.
(29:56):
So that kind of thinking, it really makes integrating that
stuff way easier because you're making it, you're making it easy
for the teacher to go, well, it's, it meets all my actual
requirements and it's better. So I'll, yeah, of course I'm
going to do it. Yeah, doesn't really require
that much teacher training. Well, I mean, everybody does
need some enhancement and some explanation.
(30:18):
Well, it's it follows the basic course that they're already
working with. And some of them have already
tried it sound and are like, yeah, this is kind of a no
brainer. This is way more interesting
than what I was doing before. So why wouldn't I do this?
And so, you know, we'll start dividing.
We'll assign a public school, the sector of the town.
They'll decide who is living in the most poverty, they'll do the
(30:40):
surveys and then, yeah, we should be able to have a pretty
major impact on the people that are living in extreme poverty in
that area within the next coupleof years.
And as far as I know, I don't know of another school that is
doing that exact approach. There's a lot of schools, lot of
Ng OS fighting a lot of poverty in a lot of different ways.
(31:04):
I am not sure of who else is doing it that way.
I don't know of any either. It's not my expertise area, but
a very unique from the people I have talked to.
It is a unique approach. So I'm really excited to see
where things go from here with you guys and see it and
obviously it's working now, but I love to.
I'm excited to see what happens after a couple years of doing
(31:27):
this. Yeah, I am really excited to
find out what how the next chapter unfolds really, because
there's a lot of potential and there's a lot of people
suffering and we can have a major impact on that suffering
as soon as we possibly can. I love it.
It is amazing and I wish you thebest.
I hope that this just keeps growing and growing and does
(31:49):
really well for you guys and forcommunities you're in.
Before we wrap up here, I did want to two things.
One, anything we didn't cover that you wanted to mention, do
that and then how can people find you, reach out, connect,
support you guys and what you'redoing?
Well, thank you for this opportunity.
This is how people find out because we spent 17 years on the
(32:13):
ground in Guatemala doing this and didn't really take the
traditional NGO approach. I'm so we were heavily focused
on program services. How can we make sure that we're
integrated into the community, understand, collaborate or in
the respect, in the trust of thecommunity.
And we did not during that time do a very good job of promoting
(32:35):
ourselves. Not so easy to do from that
space. We had a lot of help.
A lot of really generous people have helped us while living in
the States or other parts of theworld, and they have gotten our
name out and done a really wonderful job of that.
But, you know, we're not actually very good at that.
So I really appreciate this opportunity for us to get our
(32:56):
name out a little bit and for people to hear about this
process. How can people help?
Well, you can e-mail me directlyat matt@lwhome.org.
So you can volunteer and you could bring a service group.
You can donate, you can bring school supplies.
And going back to the volunteering thing, so we've had
(33:17):
so people come to our school to learn sustainable building
techniques, right? And so that has been our earned
income model, right? It doesn't cover all the bills.
Basically, people pay us $85 to live in our volunteer house for
a week. Then in exchange for that, we
teach them how to green build. Now, some people stay for a week
(33:40):
and people have stayed for as many as seven or eight years,
right, because they're fully engaged in the process.
That's awesome. Yeah.
And so the next real major opportunity is like our Indiana
Jones version of what we do is coming up on October the 20th to
November the 14th. That is when the students, the
(34:01):
teachers, the volunteers, we allget together and we go out into
one of the really remote poorer villages and we're going to
build 2 classrooms and we're teaming up with an organization
called ecohab.org and their leadbuilder is going to work with
us. And he's been green building for
(34:22):
30 plus years, really well known.
His name is Bill Basehard, Google him, he's been doing this
for a long time. And so you can jump into that
workshop and work with us and have that experience.
Amazing. Well for everyone listening and
watching, we will have links in the show notes.
So don't worry, it'll be easy for you to find all that stuff.
(34:44):
And Matt, I really appreciate you being on.
I loved hearing about everythingyou're doing.
Excited to see what comes out ofthe next couple of years.
Yeah. Thank you for this opportunity.
Again, I really appreciate it. Absolutely.
And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design
Podcast. If today's episode inspired you
to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a
(35:05):
sustainable 7 figure business, visit petermanfirm.com or click
the link below. Your ideas how the power to
change the world, and we're hereto help make that happen.
Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next
episode.
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