Director and CEO Julia Rayberg is featured in this article in Boston Voyager. Click the button after the excerpt to see the full interview with Julia!
From BostonVoyager:
Today we’d like to introduce you to Julia Rayberg.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
When I attended UMass Dartmouth, it was in my sophomore year that I traveled to Guatemala with a few students and my professor. That trip changed my life- I was exposed to extreme poverty and living conditions that I knew existed, but I had never been put in front of before – and it truly impacted me in a huge way. Myself and another alum (and Guatemalan native – Mayra Perez) began working towards developing small programs to support the communities we had worked with.
A year later, I arranged for a dozen UMass students to come down to Guatemala and do service work and the brainstorming and local involvement grew. We worked for about a year and a half before we sat down an attorney and registered the organization and called it Worthy Village. At that point, I was 21 years old (Nov of 2014) and in my junior year at UMass Dartmouth.
I continued to build the organization while I was in school full time – working late nights in the library, trying to build connections, market our ideas and work to build what we knew would provide sustainable support and pathways out of poverty for these communities we loved too dearly in Guatemala. When I graduated from UMass in May of 2016, I had to make a decision, do I take a job, or do I continue to build this organization – a tough decision but we continued to work towards our goals and I am so grateful we did.
