THE ORGANIZATION

Knowledge iTrust (KIT) is a not-for-profit organization that works in partnership with K-12 schools, teachers, organizations, and experts from various fields to design, develop, facilitate and disseminate programs about community and global issues, and equally important, viable solutions — best practices for children, families, communities, and their ecological and societal habitats.

Mission
Children are our future; we want to help them have access to programs that work and people that care. We aggregate and distribute best practices for a quality of life. KIT promotes a quality of life for people, the path to peace.

Principles
The path to peace is through mutual social and economic participation and understanding. The fostering of mutual understanding in our next generation will result in a higher propensity for peaceful coexistence. KIT seeks to promote this mutual understanding through programs such as Peace Diaries that focus on human rights, local capacity building and sustainable development at the grass roots level.

History
Two years ago we founded KIT with teachers and students in mind. We came to the table as advocates of reform and change. Questions we asked: How to harness the power of technology in ways that are meaningful to teachers and students? How to bridge the disconnect between machines and people? How to propagate the free exchange of knowledge to the benefit of all learners – in every part of the globe?

In the beginning we concentrated on building a technology platform. An open source platform that would be free to all educational institutions, teachers and learners. It would be extremely flexible in nature and accommodate a variety of learning styles and user populations. We weren’t the first to identify this need and partnered with institutions and organizations that were exploring these paths. We spoke with educators and administrators and collected valuable input on what was needed in the classroom and how it would be used.

Then 9/11 happened and changed our world. Students were asking, "Why did this happen?" and we needed to address the issue.


GENESIS OF PEACE DIARIES

The Peace Diaries was funded by grants from foundations that believed in helping students to establish a dialogue to help them find answers and work toward ending conflict in their lives and the lives of other. We’ve created an international education forum where students and their teachers can meet to work through the issues and help themselves help their families and communities.

Students talk about a variety of issues: from war and the atrocities of war to pop culture and music. And in their essays we find that, though we have different cultural perspective, we’re still human beings.

So where do we go from here? Answer: Full circle.

Serendipity lead us to OpenVES: The Open Education Platform. Now, we’re bringing students and teachers from around the world together in a forum where their can freely, exchange knowledge and help each other to build a better world.

Stay tuned. The best is yet to come.