Rupununi Learners Foundation (RLF)

About us

The Rupununi region of (formerly British) Guyana is mixed savanna, moist forest and mountains — largely pristine, still not fully explored.

Rupununi Learners focuses on literacy and conservation together: on building management capacity among primary stakeholders to protect "an astonishing haven for wildlife".

Rupununi Learners Incorporated (RLI) is a Guyanese nonprofit corporation registered in 2007. Rupununi Learners Foundation (RLF) has been a United States nonprofit foundation since 2001.

The mission of the Rupununi Learners Foundation is to contribute to improvements in the quality of life of Rupununi inhabitants, by means of materials and activities that enhance literacy, numeracy, access to information, and the preservation and dissemination of indigenous or local knowledge.

RLF and RLI collaborate to manifest a holistic approach to environmental conservation, encompassing wildlife research, education, economic development and cultural preservation.

We bring together the needs, interests and resources -- human and material -- of participants from both hemispheres. Our ideas, projects and products emerge through a process of continuous dialog and encounter.

The intellectual commitment to an adaptive, dialogic process brings with it a certain way of working with people. Unlike "best practices" and other wisdom aimed at generating replicable projects, this approach is based on the nurture of authentic relationships among unique individuals. Our values are also our conscious, applied ways of working: acceptance, support, trust, compassion, gratitude and love are sensitive instruments that can approach thorny, mutual challenges in development, which we understand as human development, above all.

Activities:
• The Rupununi Learners Foundation (RLF) has built a field station for ecological and educational research known as "Caiman House Field Station" in Yupukari, Central Rupununi, the heart of black caiman country.
• RLF has built four libraries (three classroom libraries in the nursery school and two primary schools, and an Internet-enabled public library).
• We provide weekly training to nine schoolteachers in the teaching of reading, along with the books and classroom supplies to support them, and daily supervision of two librarian-trainees.
• Encouraged by requests from wildlife tour operators, Caiman House Field Station staff are learning to run the field station as an ecotourist homestay, bringing income to the libraries and new jobs to the village.
• Yupukari Crafters is another for-profit enterprise with a nonprofit mission, a furniture business that draws on traditional crafts and skills to develop marketable items for the home. Capitalized by RLF to generate a funding stream for the schools, Yupukari Crafters also provides jobs and helps to preserve endangered folkways.

Alice Layton is the President of the Rupununi Learners Foundation (RLF).

For other net participants we can offer an expert guidance through trained staff, give an expert opinion, procure expert information and establish new contacts in the field of our work.