Volunteers

Rye Barcott
Founder and Member of the Board of Directors

While an undergraduate on an NROTC scholarship at UNC in 2001, Barcott founded Carolina For Kibera (CFK) with the late nurse Tabitha Atieno Festo and community organizer Salim Mohamed, who each shared the conviction that the poor have the solutions to the problems that they face. CFK emerged in part out of research on youth violence and participatory development that Barcott conducted as part of an unpublished senior honors thesis in Peace, War, and Defense.

Barcott served five years on active duty in the Marine Corps before earning a combined MBA and MPA at Harvard as a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and George Leadership Fellow. He served for two years on the Harvard Endowment’s Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and is currently a member of the World Learning Board of Trustees, the UNC NROTC Board of Directors, the UNC Chancellor’s Innovation Circle, and the Board of Directors of Three Ships Media.

A TED Fellow, Barcott is currently writing a book that tells the CFK story and juxtaposes humanitarian and military service (under contract, Bloomsbury Publishing).