The Working Boys’ Center

The Working Boys’ Center started as an educational outreach to shoeshine boys in Ecuador in 1964. WBC has since broadened its focus from the working boy himself to teaching the boy and his entire family technical skills. As the individual families learn, work, and serve their community, they are connected with supporters who raise money to build a home with the WBC family who will live in it. This approach has rescued 30,000 people from poverty. In March 2017, a team of students from the University of South Carolina spent their Spring Break in Quito building a home with one of these families.

WBC embodies what Wonder Voyage Legacy is all about: impacting vulnerable youth around the world in a way that will outlast our pilgrims’ stay. While WBC focuses on the tangibles of education, housing and food, they also focus on intangible things like dreaming about their future and then going after those dreams.

The student leader of the University of South Carolina team, Chris Perez, said, “Having a home will allow the family we worked with to foster pride, identity, love and everything else that comes with the word ‘family.’ It will give them a place of security, a sense of worth, and a sense of belonging. All of this will contribute to their right to dream and their hopes for working as hard as they can to achieve those dreams.”