Alumni Profile - Kurt Shaw ’93

Kurt Shaw

Before founding Shine a Light, Kurt Shaw ’93 spent almost two years working with grassroots groups in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, using his Fulbright Fellowship to study the relationship between contemporary French philosophy and Liberation Theology.

During years of shuttling between the academy, think tanks, and grass-roots social movements, Kurt Shaw learned that the real experts on marginalized children didn't work at UNICEF or Harvard. Though the most innovative solutions to poverty and social exclusion came from the streets and shantytowns of the third world, but grass-roots leaders and intellectuals had few chances to learn from or teach their peers in other countries. Shaw founded Shine a Light to disseminate local, innovative solutions for homeless and working children in Latin America.

Social change networks grow out of personal relations, so Kurt began three years of hard travel. On a budget of less than $20 a day – all of which came out of his own pocket – Kurt visited almost every country in Latin America, meeting with over 300 organizations and learning what works and what doesn’t in services for marginalized children. The resulting research, published with the somewhat ironic title of For a General Theory of the Street, has become a reference for the children’s rights movement in many countries.

Collaborating with the most successful organizations in Latin America, Shine a Light has documented the best practices for working with homeless and working children and their families. Kids from the organizations learn to film and edit movies, showing other people what has worked for them. Shine a Light brings these videos together with interviews, exercises, and lessons into DVD-based courses, catalyzing education and social change on the urban periphery. Since 2003, Shaw has published a dozen of these Digital Workshops on subjects from indigenous education and refugee children to hip-hop.

Before founding Shine a Light, Shaw spent almost two years working with grassroots groups in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, using his Fulbright Fellowship to study the relationship between contemporary French philosophy and Liberation Theology. For a time, he returned to the United States, first as a Research Associate at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC – where he worked on US-Cuba relations and governance issues in Chile – and then as a graduate student at Harvard. Frustrated with the academy, he left to counsel street kids in New York and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In addition to numerous publications in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, Shaw was also a commentator on Working Assets Radio. El Túnel, a movie he helped an ex-street boy to make, was selected to close the Argentine National Short Feature Film Festival in 2006, and his first full-length documentary, City of Rhyme, will begin to tour festivals this year. In 2007, Harvard University honored him with the First Decade Award.