The Ixtatán Foundation was initially formed to help create the first high school in the Chuj speaking area of San Mateo Ixtatán, Huehuetenango, Guatemala.  There had never been a secondary school in this community of 50,000.  What the town requested was just that:  a school building (with its requisite basketball court).

But, if you’re going to build a school, why stop at walls and roof?  Why not create a school where students can help shape and mold the future of their own community? 
Why not teach the students to study the water quality in their own town, and try to figure out how to change the fact that no one in San Mateo Ixtatán has safe reliable access to clean water?
Why not a build a school that nurtures the love of learning through applied sciences, where students might learn to make hydroelectric generators, or wind-powered pumps?
And why couldn’t the students themselves help sustain the school, help build buildings, make bricks, design classrooms, and create cash generating businesses?

The Ixtatán Foundation has the audacity to believe that this can be done in San Mateo Ixtatán, where infant mortality is as high as anywhere in Central America, where 64% of women cannot read or write, where there is one doctor for 30,000 people, where there is no waste water treatment and no tenable garbage management.
Education is the wellspring of the future of San Mateo Ixtatán.  Through the School, these changes become manifest.

A small group of people working together can raise the quality of life for everyone in San Mateo Ixtatán.  That small group can keep a community moving towards a future where everyone has “Three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits… " Martin Luther king Jr.