Tony Gasbarro

Interview with Tony Gasbarro, Board of Directors, Project Salvador

CLICK on the player to listen to this 6 minute interview, or on the link below to download the audio file to your desktop.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Download the Podcast

In 1962 Tony Gasbarro heard President Jack Kennedy's call to young Americans to help people in the developing world, so he volunteered and went to the Dominican Republic.  His second Peace Corps assignment occurred 30 years later, after a career as a professional forester and educator.

The two assignments were quite different. In the Dominican Republic, he lived in a city and served as an advisor to a District Forestry Office, accompanying the district forester and offering professional advice. He taught in a forest guard school, training young Dominican foresters who were protecting forestlands and parks.

In El Salvador he was assigned to a very isolated village in the northern mountains that owned 800 acres of pine forest. The villagers wanted to manage their forest to improve their quality of life. So Tony trained several members of the community to implement a plan for sustainable forest management.

After he left the Peace Corps, Tony retained his passion for the people in his village and wanted to get them the resources needed to enable the children to complete high school.  He was referred to Project Salvador, a non-profit organization providing community development assistance to the people in El Salvador. Tony offered to help expand their small scholarship program and soon became the major fund-raiser for the program.  He started with raising funds for about 12 children. Today Project Salvador supports 260 children with an annual budget of $40,000.

One of the great examples of social entrepreneurial sprit he found was a Mayan community development specialist he met in Guatemala during training. She gave advice to the Peace Corps trainees on how to interact in their villages.What really impressed him was her advice to encourage the village men to provide “windows of opportunity to the women.”  She also told them to “tell the villagers what they are doing well instead of always focusing on where they need to improve.”

Tony feels that social entrepreneurship means much more than his original thought of small business. He defines social entrepreneurship as any enterprise that connects people and enables them to improve their lives.

Tony's work gained him a Lillian Carter Award, presented by President Carter at the Carter Center in Atlanta Georgia in 2003. This is given to a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in the Peace Corps when over 50 yrs. old and returned home and continued “serving”. President Carter read a poem he had written about his mother, Lillian Carter, describing how she changed her feelings about leprosy after having to treat a little girl with the disease. During the reading former President Carter was overcome with emotion. 

Tony’s advice to social entrepreneurs is to try to “capture” some of the family remittances - the funds sent by US immigrants to their families in their home countries.  He encourages Salvadorans with relatives in the United States and Canada to ask these relatives or family members to devote some of their remittances to scholarships.

CLICK on the player above to listen to his interview.

Feel free to leave a comment or a question below if you wish.