The Maasai Community Partnership Project was created to support the Maasai people of Southern Kenya in their efforts to sustain their culture, achieve education, and become politically and economically empowered through partnership with a U.S. institution of higher education. The Partnership Project was created in 2004 by Meitamei Olol Dapash, Maasai community leader and Executive Director of the Maasai Environmental Resource Coalition (MERC), and Mary Poole, Cultural and Regional Studies faculty at Prescott College in Arizona, and other members of the Maasai and Prescott College communities. The Partnership Project began as a field studies program that brings Prescott College students to Maasailand to learn about Indigenous approaches to activism and to contribute to that work. It has since expanded to include other partnerships and programs that address issues prioritized by Maasai leadership.
Our Philosophy
The Partnership Project is organized around a common desire to share resources of higher education not generally available to the Maasai community, including: access to scholarship written about Maasai people, time and skills and money to produce scholarship written by and with Maasai people, and access to technology and media that will promote equal representation of Maasai people addressing issues facing their community.
All of our work is driven by a belief that our planet’s future may depend on the cultural survival of the world’s Indigenous communities, and that culturally competent and collaborative education may be the most effective and sustainable approach to that end. Indigenous cultures such as the Maasai hold the key, we believe, to our planet’s ability to respond to the environmental, economic and social challenges we face as a global community, as they offer perspective developed outside of the western culture.
