CLEVELAND — An educator in northeast Ohio is working to make the lives of students better across the globe. 

What You Need To Know

  • A part-time professor at John Carroll University is the founder of a charity called For the Greater Good

  • The professor has spent the last decade going on mission trips to Honduras

  • In March, the professor and four students went to Honduras to rebuild an elementary school

David Clifford is a part-time John Carroll University professor, and he also founded a charity called “For the Greater Good.“

For the last decade, Clifford has been going on mission trips to Honduras.

During one of his most recent trips in March, Clifford and four John Carroll students went to Honduras to rebuild an elementary school.

“Us five went down and laid 1,100 block in a week, which was a lot. It was 95 degrees outside, 13 UV and we had challenges every day and we just figured out what is going to go wrong today,” Clifford explained. “The first day, we had no water, and it’s really hard to make cement with no water. But the mountain that we were building the school on, they just didn’t have any. We just had to pivot and find a better way.”

Thanks to his years of volunteer experience, Clifford was able to navigate these difficulties and lead his team through challenges.

“Every time I go down, I see something I have not seen before and there is just a lot of opportunity to make a difference,” the professor said. “We were able to do something we have not done before and we were able to see something that I know a lot of other people have not seen because this was a very rural area of Honduras.”  

The whole project took 23 days from start to finish and the students were able to use their new building immediately.

“We did the ribbon cutting on Saturday,” Clifford said. “Monday, they had school in there.”

The professor and the students will be heading back to Honduras at the end of May to paint the school.