About Us


QUEST - MISSION STATEMENT
Mission	Quest Mexico is a non-profit organization devoted to creating social justice and peace through transformative, experiential education. Through direct encounters between our participants and the people of Mexico, we work to cultivate mutual respect and a sense of our common humanity. We work to sharpen our participants’ understanding of their role in the global community. We encourage our participants to incorporate this understanding into their lives.

Objectives	• Participants recognize that building and sustaining community is necessary for social change;
	• Participants discover the human faces of poverty;
	• Participants recognize their interdependence; they understand the world-wide consequences of personal and governmental decisions;
	• Participants begin to understand and value different cultures and to critically examine their own;
	• Participants return to their own communities as inspired agents of change.

Educational philosophy	Community:
	Quest knows that learning cannot occur without community. We need community to affirm or challenge new insights about the world and our roles within it. Community empowers us to practice just living. It is a vital source of confirmation and support as we move into the world to act out our commitment. Therefore, our programs are invitations into community. We ask our teachers and group organizers to relinquish their professional authority to the greater wisdom of community. At Quest, we know that community process teaches us to honor the viewpoints of others and that this is the first step towards a pedagogy of justice and peace.
	New Perspectives:
	Knowing that responsible membership in the world community requires the ability to transcend our own cultural assumptions. Our pedagogy reflects this knowledge: all of our participants become students of alternative forms of wisdom. We struggle together to see the world through the eyes of others, and to add to our own wisdom the radical insights which other viewpoints bring.

	Experiental Education:
	Quest knows that true education liberates students from the oppression of existing authorities. For us, the art of teaching is not the transfer of ideas from teacher to student, but the creation of moments in which students make their own discoveries. We assist this discovery by arranging encounters, presenting our students with people, situations, and stories which challenge previously held assumptions about work, about poverty, about consumption, about faith, about joy. Through these encounters participants become authors of their own lives, critically examining their previously held assumptions and rewriting their futures with a new commitment to just living.