The investigation into the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is revealing how bureaucrats perverted the agency’s purpose to “promote and demonstrate democratic values abroad and advance a free, peaceful, and prosperous world.” As a result, the agency has been shuttered.

The urgent matter now is for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s team to facilitate USAID’s metamorphosis into a functioning entity whose people believe that promoting democracy abroad and doing good in the world go hand and hand. And an effective pro-democracy project promoting U.S. interests abroad need not cost millions of taxpayer dollars.

I should know. I was a USAID grant recipient in Colombia.

Thanks to support from American organizations including USAID, I was able to build playgrounds in remote rural villages where young people were at risk for recruitment by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). I worked mostly in Tolima, the departamento or “state” in which the FARC was formed in 1964. And like all Marxist guerilla groups in Latin America, the FARC saw the United States as the enemy.

If I had settled on building playgrounds for the sake of building playgrounds, I would have probably been seen as a Yanqui interloper whose efforts would have had little lasting impact. Instead of merely gifting something new, I decided to show the kids what they already had: their democratic rights as young citizens of a republic … and hopes for an existence unmarred by guerilla violence.

So I decided to build “playground projects” in which young people were required to use the democratic process to determine where the playground should be built and why. The process would begin with a tour of candidate sites pre-approved by the local mayor, followed by public debate among young people representing each site before taking a vote to determine the winning location of the new playground.

Borrowing my high school alma mater’s motto Non Sibi—not for self—I called the playgrounds “Non Sibi” playgrounds. The kids who participated became members of the “Non Sibi Team.”