About Us

While a student at the College of William & Mary, Co-Founder and Chief Dreamer George Srour embarked on what would become a life-changing internship in Uganda with the World Food Program. During his internship, George visited a one-room building in Kampala, Uganda nicknamed “Meeting Point Kampala” by the school’s students. The only light that made it into the schoolroom came courtesy of termites and their appetite for the wooden planks used to reinforce the school’s walls.

Four classes, each with about 125 students, took a corner of the room and, seated on the dirt floor, listened to the day’s lesson. Many children were content, focused, and enamored with the chance to learn. One of the school’s leaders mentioned to George the price tag to properly rebuild the structure: $10,000.

George did the math. If he returned to his own school and asked every student to donate $1.81, hundreds of kids would have the chance to learn in a proper, well-constructed building. He returned to university with conviction, and Meeting Point Kampala’s new school building opened nearly three years after that visit. In 2006, George partnered with Joseph Kaliisa to found Building Tomorrow, and with that, the organization took flight with a community-driven construction model, leading to the construction of 87 primary schools in villages where none existed.

Our work has evolved since those early days…

In 2015, we shifted gears from building schools to focus on learning outcomes. That year, we hired our first cohort of Building Tomorrow Fellows to deploy to rural communities. These Fellows also conceived of Building Tomorrow’s Community Education Volunteer (CEV) model.

In 2018, we piloted Roots to Rise, our signature literacy and numeracy program, and in 2019 introduced the program to 70 schools, reaching 13,000 children through school-based camps.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought new challenges and seeded new innovations, and we pioneered community-based Roots to Rise camps via CEVs, strengthening the educational ecosystem through added community and parental engagement. In 2021, we also participated in our first randomized controlled trial, which proved the efficacy of CEVs as instructors.

In 2025, we turned the page to the next chapter in our journey… Building Tomorrow Rwanda, hiring our inaugural cohort of 10 Fellows deployed to Ngororero District. By the end of 2025, we were serving 400,000 children per year across our two countries of operation.

And in 2026, our 20th anniversary, we marked the milestone of reaching our 1,000,000th learner with Roots to Rise. Just as we set out to do in 2026, we will continue supporting quality education in partnership with communities. Onward!