Rye Barcott

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Rye Barcott is founder of Carolina For Kibera (http://cfk.unc.edu), an international NGO that runs a sports association, medical clinic, Binti Pamoja (Daughters United Center), and waste management program in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Because of CFK's innovations in youth programming and participatory development, TIME Magazine and the Gates Foundation named CFK a "Hero of Global Health" at the Global Health Summit in 2005. In 2006 CFK published LIGHTBOX, a book of photographs and narratives from the young, courageous women of CFK's Binti Pamoja Center. Sales from LIGHTBOX benefit CFK's girls' scholarship fund (www.bintipamoja.org).

A graduate of the Peace, War, and Defense (http://www.unc.edu/depts/pwad/) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (http://cfk.unc.edu), Rye Barcott was a Triangle Institutes for Security Studies Millennium Fellow (http://www.pubpol.duke.edu/centers/tiss//) and a Burch Fellow (http://www.burchfellows.unc.edu/). While an undergraduate at UNC, Rye founded CFK in Kenya with Salim Mohamed and the late Tabitha Atieno Festo, who each shared the conviction that the poor have the solutions to the problems they face.

Rye Barcott is the co-author with Dr James Peacock and Ms Carrie Matthews of the American Anthropological Association Statement on Ethnic Cleansing and co-editor with Dr Carolyn Pumphrey of Armed Conflict in Africa (Scarecrow, 2003). In 2006, ABC News named him a Person of the Week and a Person of the Year.