George Srour on Education, African Schools, and Building Tomorrow

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2008

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

George Srour, founder of Building Tomorrow, a non-profit that builds schools in Uganda, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his experience starting, funding, and running an organization that tries to change the world one school at a time. Srour discusses how he tries to make sure that his organization accomplishes more than bricks and mortar and the rewards and challenges of a start-up non-profit.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Before introducing today's guest, I want to mention that this will be
0:40.7	the last podcast of 2008. We'll take a break next week and return on January 5, 2009, a happy
0:48.6	and healthy New Year to all our listeners out there. My guest today is George Sruer, founder
0:55.3	and executive director of Building Tomorrow, a charity that builds schools in Africa. George,
1:01.5	welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you. So tell us what Building Tomorrow does and how it got started.
1:08.3	Well, Building Tomorrow is a social profit organization that works with university students and
1:17.0	young people really all over the United States to raise awareness and also build schools
1:24.6	in Uganda at the present time, sort of vulnerable children. And we got our start as an organization that
1:33.9	was really born out of an experience that I had working for the United Nations World Food Program
1:40.4	and having the opportunity to visit a number of different schools throughout central Uganda
1:46.8	that were really in pretty poor shape. And after doing a little bit of research,
1:52.3	realized how far money can go in a developing country versus the United States. And so
2:03.0	the idea was to essentially raise $10,000 to rebuild this particular school that I had seen
2:11.3	during my senior year of college. And I hope was to raise this money in between
2:17.0	Thanksgiving and Christmas and our goal was $10,000. We ended up raising $45. And out of that was
2:24.6	really born this idea that there were a lot of young people out there who wanted to make a
2:28.6	tangible difference in the world, but just perhaps didn't have a medium to which to do it.
2:33.9	So you were going to raise $10,000 in a pretty short period of time, which is actually a rather
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