Jon Bon Jovi was in the green room, locked to his cell phone. Nancy Pelosi stopped by. Arnold Schwarzenegger was around, Maria Shriver, Matthew McConaughey, Michele Obama and a bunch of Secret Service agents.

When Shawn Rubin was called to center stage to receive his award — after actress Kerry Washington and before Arianna Huffington — he said it was the kind of moment you might imagine at times but never think you’ll really be in.

But he was in it, all right. This 33-year-old teacher from Providence was there at the convention center in San Francisco last month with the A-list from People magazine. He was there because of his connections.

There’s Meshach Bondzie, for one. He started a nonprofit secretarial school in the village of Abeka in Ghana to provide the kind of opportunity for women that is extremely rare in that country.

And there’s Ravi Kumar, who follows an often dangerous path into villages in India to tell the “untouchables,” who live at the lowest level of a cruel caste system, about their rights and how they should use them.

Rubin and his wife, Laura Westberg, an architect, met the two men when they took this amazing trip that they had been thinking about almost from the time they met at the University of Michigan. When they got married in 2002, they asked the wedding guests to give donations toward the trip as gifts. They saved every penny they could.

“We took a two-year sabbatical and visited 20 different countries and volunteered in 6,” said Rubin.

They met people who were working against years of oppressive tradition and doing it with almost nothing. Bondzie had a broken piece of chalkboard in his secretarial school. Most of the typewriters had no ribbons. Still, said Rubin, the students were focused on their teacher.

“That stuck with me,” he said.

When they got back to Rhode Island in 2005, they started calling people, e-mailing. There was this school in Ghana that needed just about everything — laptops, typewriters. There was this guy in India who could use a lot of help reaching people with a vital message about basic human rights.

The response was amazing, he said. It just snowballed.

It was the beginning of Longitude, which is now a nonprofit organization that supports human rights and educational initiatives in developing countries. It raises money, recruits volunteers and creates some enlightening connections.

“We want to open up the global classroom,” said Rubin as he sat with his laptop in the backroom of the Liberty Elm Diner in Providence Friday morning. The diner is sometimes the office of Longitude.

The global classroom includes students in Ghana and students at the Highlander Charter School in Providence, where Rubin was an original faculty member and where he will teach kindergarten in the fall. The students chat online. They chat about music and food. The students in Providence tell the students in Ghana about all the different nationalities in their classroom. The students in Ghana seem fascinated by that.

And those students in Ghana are in a school very different from the one Rubin and Westberg first visited. It has gone wireless. It has a computer lab, a typing pool and 40 full-time students. Last year, on the day after Christmas, two volunteers from Barrington, Jack Grant and Ed Znosko, went to Abeka with Rubin to help renovate the school.

“The space Jack and Ed built, it’s like a brand new school,” said Rubin.

Longitude has sent more than 160 volunteers to India to help Ravi Kumar spread his hopeful message. They have also helped build concrete houses in the villages. The Indian government has taken notice and has “gotten in on it” said Rubin.

Word gets around. There have been inquiries from other places about projects Longitude might want to consider. The future is open. There is a board to put together, possibly even paid staff to hire. There are fundraisers to plan. There are always fundraisers to plan. There are grants to write.

Longitude has raised more than $100,000. It has spent about $2,000 on overhead.

Actually, it got $5,000 richer last month. That’s what Rubin was given when he received The Eli Segal Award at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service at that star-studded event in San Francisco.

He learned he had won the award, the highest given by AmeriCorps Alums, just days before the event. Rubin is a former member of AmeriCorps.

Now, there is school to think about. He loves teaching. He will be back at Highlander in September. He isn’t exactly sure how he will balance teaching and Longitude. Maybe full-time staff and more volunteers can take over some of the day-to-day duties.

But he has created something wonderful. There are people he will never meet who will have better lives because this teacher and his wife decided to check things out in parts of the world very different from their own.

To learn more, go to www.golongitude.org.

bkerr@projo.com