Who Are We?
We are a startup education nonprofit helping students cultivate intellectual virtue through meaningful, reflective, and transformative learning. Our programs run through the Barutwa Transformative Laboratory, a learning space dedicated to fellowships, workshops, and practices that foster clarity, discipline, and thoughtful living.
Why We Exist?
What Guides Us?
Our approach to learning is guided by four core principles, which we embrace in creating a learning environment that integrates deep reflection, rigorous intellectual engagement, and meaningful dialogue.
Simplicity
"If you want to entertain knowledge as your guest, you do not need rare furniture, nor numerous servants. Much peace, a little beauty, certain conveniences that save time, are all that is necessary [...] You must reduce matter to the minimum, so as to lighten and liberate the spirit." — Antonin Sertillanges
Contemplation
"Contemplation develops the natural human capacity for knowing through silence, looking inward, pondering deeply, beholding, witnessing the contents of our consciousness and so forth. These approaches cultivate an inner technology of knowing and thereby a technology of learning.” — Tobin Hart
Conversation
"A conversation implies two friends [...] who have a certain affection for each other [...] and so they talk over things together, not try to browbeat one or the other by superior knowledge, or superior intellect, but to investigate together their own problems, their own difficulties, their own personal lives and so on.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Hospitality
"To be inhospitable to strangers or strange ideas, however unsettling they may be, is to be hostile to the possibility of truth [...] So the classroom where truth is central will be a place where every stranger and every strange utterance is met with welcome.” — Parker Palmer
About the Founder
Collieus Lebudi is the founder and tutor at The Barutwa Institute. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Materials and Metallurgical Engineering from BIUST and an MSc in Materials Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University. His experiences as a peer mentor, residence assistant, and graduate teaching assistant shaped his reflections on learning, purpose, and how education often feels disconnected from meaning. Outside his work, he enjoys rural living, walking in nature, and engaging in thoughtful conversations on a broad range of topics. His work is guided by a simple belief: learning should shape not just what we know, but how we think, who we become, and how we live.