Long Way Home’s Hero School in Guatemala is a community-rooted educational initiative that transforms local trash into useful buildings. Matthew Paneitz first visited San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, as a Peace Corps volunteer in 2002, and was deeply affected by this rural, Indigenous Maya community where 64% live in poverty and 27% in extreme poverty. People lacked clean water, reliable sanitation, resilient homes, steady employment, and quality education, and the air, water, and soil are all contaminated by waste and pollution.

Unable to put this out of his mind, Matt returned in 2004 and founded non-profit Long Way Home. One of its major projects is Hero School, a project-based, community-rooted educational initiative grounded in Education for Sustainable Development. Between 2008 to 2025, the Long Way Home team transformed 550 tons of trash (including 35,000 used tires) into the Hero School green-built campus.

Every part of the Hero School campus, from walls made of earth-filled tires and eco bricks to glass mosaics, embodies Long Way Home’s values of environmental stewardship, cultural pride, and resourcefulness.

Matt tells us more about Comalapa and how he started Long Way Home on a shoestring, and takes us behind the scenes for how they began co-creating buildings with the local community.

We hear about some of the unusual approaches to repurposing waste into construction materials, and how Long Way Home is solving multiple problems.

We also learn about some of the unintended consequences – good and not-so-good – and the challenges of funding initiatives like these.

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