My Class Cares: Reaching Across Borders to Bring Children Together Through Education

In 2003, Ben Schumaker, a graduate student in social work at the University of Wisconsin, went to Guatemala to volunteer at an orphanage. When he arrived, he was distraught to realize how little he could do to help them: “It struck me profoundly that at this orphanage, nutrition and healthcare were awful,” he says.

He wasn’t a doctor, and he didn’t have millions of dollars to donate to the orphanage and raise the children out of poverty. Although he’d come with a mission of helping to provide for the children’s basic needs, he thought that there was little he would be able to accomplish.

But after having a talk with an older man who had grown up at a local orphanage, Schumaker realized that there was something simple he could provide to children, which might turn out to be the most important thing of all.

“He told me that he didn’t have any photographs or keepsakes or parents to provide him with a sense of personal heritage,” says Schumaker. As difficult as the circumstances were for the children, “his advice didn’t have to do with basic needs, it had to do with the psychological need of creating a sense of self.”

It occurred to Schumaker that by asking artists to create portraits of the orphans, he could provide them with special keepsakes that they would always treasure. With that idea, The Memory Project was born the following year.

Through The Memory Project, Schumaker works with orphanages all over the developing world, in countries such as Burma, Kenya, Ecuador, the Ukraine, and Ethiopia. He then coordinates with American high schools, sending photographs of the orphans to art class teachers. Each high school student creates a special portrait of an orphan, which Schumaker will present to the child as a gift.

“Usually, I personally deliver all of the portraits,” says Schumaker. “I have about 1,000 portraits for any country, and will take them there over the course of a week. Then I’ll take photos of the delivery, and bring them back to the artists.” Often, the art students will receive gifts from the orphans as well: “I give the kids blank sheets of paper, on which they can do a drawing or write a note to send back to the art students.”

Through the organization, about 8,000 unique portraits are created and delivered each year. The orphans are thrilled with their portraits, but it seems the project’s impact on the high school students is just as profound.

“Almost on a daily basis, I get emails from teachers saying it was the best project of the year,” says Schumaker. “Students really started to care for the kids.”

Schumaker has since expanded The Memory Project into a broader education-based nonprofit group, My Class Cares. The Memory Project’s first partner program, Books of Hope, is run by Schumaker’s wife, Abha Thakkar. The program matches American schools with impoverished schools in Uganda, and allows the U.S. students to create, illustrate, and bind their own books, which are shipped to the sponsored school as educational resources.  The program also allows the American students to collect both donated books and financial donations to send to the Ugandan schools.

Currently, Schumaker is developing a third program, Hopeful Voices, which will serve as a valuable resource to help teachers in U.S.-based schools illuminate diverse global viewpoints for their students.

“It’s an electronic publication about 30 pages long that contains a collection of essays written by kids around the world who’ve faced a variety of social issues,” he says.

To compile the essays, Schumaker sends a series of interview questions to nonprofit organizations around the world, which are translated into the native language. Native children’s responses are transcribed, translated back to English, and sent back to Schumaker, who organizes the responses and includes a series of academic writing prompts to help American students connect with the stories.

“One essay is from a girl in Cambodia whose parents died of AIDS, so she ended up working in a trash dump,” he says. “Now, she has a scholarship to attend the most prestigious high school in Cambodia. The essay ends with a series of prompts for students, such as the prevalence of AIDS in Cambodia, or how many children there work in trash dumps.”

The entire Hopeful Voices essay package is available free as a PDF for teachers to download from their website. In return, Schumaker asks that schools that use the essays make a $3 per student donation to the nonprofit groups involved in the essay collection’s creation.

Although My Class Cares is a registered nonprofit, the group, which consists solely of Schumaker and Thakkar, operates more like a business, relying on participation fees from U.S. schools to cover most of their normal operating expenses.

“That said,” says Schumaker, “any donations go into shipping a huge sea container to Uganda that will go into war-torn area in the North where we have 20 schools involved, full of books and school supplies, which aren’t available there at all.”

Want to help My Class Cares finance their educational outreach missions? Make a donation to the group through Razoo.

By Kathryn Hawkins