In March 2003, a group of Vanderbilt University students spent their spring break living and working with street kids in Lima, Peru. Deeply moved and motivated to do something about the tragic but common plight, a dialogue began stateside about a response to their experience. Hoping to get their peers involved, they established an on-campus service organization. This new group’s goals were to bring the university campus into greater contact with the local immigrant community, and to provide international service opportunities for students.
During the summer of 2003, one of MPI’s founders, Luke Putnam, encountered the August family in Managua, Nicaragua. The Augusts’ plan to develop a community and sports center to offer recreational, educational, and social opportunities for the local community coincided with MPI’s goals. After visiting the site again six months later, the four college seniors established MPI as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and began recruiting other college graduates to commit to working in Managua for one year. In September 2004, eleven college graduates arrived in Managua to begin their year of service. Every year since, a new group of yearlong volunteers – called Program Directors or PDs – continue the work of that founding group and initiate new programs to reach out to local communities.
2007 marked MPI’s first international expansion, into Quito, Ecuador. After a scouting trip in January and with help from local nonprofit UBECI, MPI began work in the neighborhoods of San Francisco and Rumiloma, in a valley southeast of Quito. Please see our Nicaragua and Ecuador pages for more details regarding the status of our work.
