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Cloud Foundation › Transformation Centers

La Guajira · Villa Luz, Cali · Medellín

A Transformation Center costs $20,000, complete.

Building, roof, poured slab, desks, and every education supply inside it. That is what the La Guajira centre cost, and it is what the next rural centre costs. In a city, where land and materials cost more, about $50,000.

Build one — $20,000 Talk to us about it
Volunteers raising the roof frame of a new community building on open ground in La Guajira, Colombia.
La Guajira, Colombia. Raising a roof frame at the Transformation Center — built by the community that uses it.
A completed open-air community building with cane walls, a red metal roof, a concrete floor, desks and chairs.
La Guajira. The same building, finished: cane walls, a corrugated metal roof, a poured slab and desks.

What a Transformation Center is

Communities under pressure are rarely short of one thing. They are short of several at once — food, schooling, work, and someone to lead. A Transformation Center brings a feeding point, an educational programme, startup training and a leadership hub into a single building, so a family does not have to travel to four different agencies to be helped once.

It is deliberately unglamorous architecture. Cane walls, a metal roof, a concrete slab, second-hand desks. What makes it work is not the building but the fact that it is permanent, in the community, and open on a schedule people can rely on.

Children at desks in an open-air classroom with cane walls, holding up their workbooks, with class-schedule posters on the wall behind them.
The La Guajira Transformation Center. A class holding up their workbooks. The schedule on the wall behind them is the timetable they keep.
The empty interior of a cane-walled classroom with a corrugated roof and about a dozen mismatched second-hand school desks.
Inside the La Guajira Transformation Center. Second-hand desks, no two the same. Nothing here was bought new that could be bought used.

What the $20,000 covers

  • The structure

    Timber frame, cane walls, corrugated metal roof, and a poured concrete slab so the floor does not turn to mud in the rains.

  • The furniture

    Desks and chairs, bought second-hand wherever second-hand will do, which is almost everywhere.

  • The education supplies

    Workbooks, materials and the everyday consumables that turn an empty room into a school. This is the part most build budgets quietly leave out.

  • The labour

    Raised largely by the community that will use it, working alongside our team.

Children holding up packs of school supplies above their heads at sunset in La Guajira, with the Cloud team crouched in front.
La Guajira. School supplies going out. These are part of the $20,000 — the building is not much use empty.

Villa Luz, a barrio in Cali, is our urban centre. La Guajira is the rural one.

Flagship

The Real Transformation Center, Medellín

A permanent ministry campus in Medellín, on a different scale from the rural centres: a home for discipleship, leadership training and community programmes that does not depend on rented rooms and borrowed time.

We are raising a $500,000 down payment toward a property of approximately $3 million. This is the one thing on our list that needs institutional or major-donor money rather than a card payment, and we will send a written proposal to anyone considering it.

Request the proposal

$20,000 builds the next one, complete

We can tell you exactly what it costs because we have just built one. An urban centre runs to about $50,000.

Fund a centre Ask for the detail

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