Build a School in Africa does not have any paid staff–we are 100% volunteer-run. Here are the people behind our operations.

Matthew Heberger, president

Matthew is an environmental scientist in Richmond, California. In the late 1990s, he served in the Peace Corps in Mali as a water and sanitation educator in a small village in the Segou Region. He has been the the organization’s webmaster since 2006, when he met co-founder Judy Lorimer at an African concert. He’s had the good fortune to visit several of the schools and meet many parents, students, teachers, and principals.

Abou Coulibaly, local coordinator

Abou, as he usually known, is a Malian citizen with over two decades of experience in development work. His career started at the Peace Corps as language teacher and cultural guide, helping American volunteers to integrate into Malian communities. In December 1999 he joined Save the Children as the Field Manager at the Sponsorship Department in Bamako. He later moved on to the position of Coordinator of the sponsorship funded programs in Kolondieba.

Abou and Judy met in 2002, during her visit to her sponsored child at Dialakoroba, in the south of Mali. Three years later, BSA’s first school was established through a partnership between Build a School in Africa and Save the Children. After 12 years of intensive work building schools and promoting girls’ education, Abou left Save the Children to join Plan International as the World Bank Grant Coordinator in Early Childhood Education.

Even at Plan he continued to support the work of Build a School in Africa by briefing and mobilizing communities around the school projects, and encouraging education authorities to show ownership. In 2012, Abou moved on as the Program Manager at Right to Play, where he stayed for three years before joining Oxfam as the Associate Country Director for Novib, the Netherlands branch of Oxfam in Mali. Along with Madou Traore, Abou is still working to promote Build a School in Africa school projects in Mali.

The volunteer work he provides to Build a School in Africa is most valued by the Malian rural children. About education in Mali, he likes to say, “Build the classrooms, and they will fill them with children.”

Alice Heller, Board member

Alice’s connection to West Africa started in 1990 when she went to her first African dance class. She has been studying, performing and teaching African dance ever since. She and Judy took classes together in Cambridge for years before collaborating on the creation of the Build a School in Africa benefit shows.

Alice helped organize, danced and choreographed for all of the 10+ benefit shows (2001-2012). She is still teaching movement forms including African dance and Nia — wellness dance — and also serves on the board of Dance New England. www.alicehellerdance.com

Kyla Malone, Board member

Kyla is a nurse practitioner who provides outpatient care for an OB/GYN practice and also on faculty as a nursing instructor for Northeastern University.

She initiated the first efforts to fundraise with Judy back in 2002 and they earned enough money that year to build the first school that this organization served!

“In order to graduate from the Bromfield School in Harvard, MA I had to complete a senior humanities project. At the time Judy Lorimer was a kindergarten teacher in Harvard who generously collected school supplies from families in town and donated them to children and schools in Mali when she would visit during the summer. When I approached her with the idea to raise $10,000 to build a school in Mali for this project she was thrilled. With the support of Judy as my mentor, we spent the entire school year fundraising and by June hit our goal. The big fundraiser at the end of the school year was an African dance and drum show that not only raised money but demonstrated some of the beautiful elements of the Malian culture to our small community. That was the easy part. What followed was Judy working tirelessly through the years to donate her time and energy to make sure that the children of Mali would benefit with 100% of the funds raised. I’m thrilled to be back with this organization after all these years to help the other board members carry on Judy’s efforts.”

Heather McCurdy, Board Member

Heather McCurdy was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Segou region of Mali from 1999-2001, working on projects such as small animal raising, environmental education and tree nurseries.

For the past decade,  she has worked at the The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, whose mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policies and funding is informed by scientific evidence.

In her spare time, she leads local hikes for families in the Boston area.

Remembering Judy Lorimer

Judy served as Director for 20 years until she passed away in 2023. She is dearly missed by the Build a School community. Judy’s interest in Africa began in 1991 with classes in traditional West African Dance. In 1996, she took her first trip to Mali, a cultural tour with Malian dance teacher Seydou Coulibaly, fell in love with the country, and began making annual trips, bringing school supplies to a small local school. This inspired high school senior Kyla McKenna to raise money to help build a school to fulfill her Senior Humanities Project, with Judy as the project mentor, and Build a School in Africa was founded in 2002.

Building a school in the capitol city of Bamako proved to be too expensive, but fund-raising continued, and when Judy retired from teaching in 2004, she spent a month as a volunteer for Save the Children in the rural Kolondieba District of southern Mali. Impressed with Save the Children’s school construction programs, she offered a $10,000 donation from Build a School in Africa to help build a school. The first school, a middle school in the village of Dialakoroba, was built in late 2005. Afterwards, the project gathered momentum, with 2 schools a year being built since 2013.