When Rebecca Davis researched the genocide in Darfur for a dance she was choreographing in the U.S., she was so moved that she changed her dance company’s mission.

“I realized that the arts can be a very powerful tool in post-conflict recovery,”  Davis said.

Now she uses dance and IT to help street children in Rwanda, Guinea and Bosnia, raising funds through crowd sourcing and private donations.

More than 700 street children and orphans have learned dance and IT through the Rebecca Davis Dance Company and its Dance-IT Program for Street Children.

Living in Philadelphia and reading about Darfur, Davis said, “I decided to translate it into an art form.” In 2008 she went to Africa for the first time. “I was curious what a society had to do to rebuild to bring children back into an environment where they can be a productive again. There’s such a need for that kind of work.”

LaMar Baylor, 27, is cultural ambassador for the New York-based nonprofit, Rebecca Davis Dance Company.

Baylor lives in alternate realities. He’s a Broadway dancer in Disney’s “The Lion King,” and he’s teaching Rwandan street children how to change their lives through dance.

Dance helps vulnerable kids become their own agents of change, Baylor said. He traveled to Rwanda for a week in November. It was his second trip.

There he worked with orphans and street children, and trained dance teachers to work with them once he was gone. About 700 children have been enrolled in the company’s dance and IT program.

Once a full-fledged U.S. dance company that funded and staged dance performances in the U.S., the Rebecca Davis Dance Company changed its mission to focus on educating street children in countries struggling with post-conflict recovery.

“This was Rebecca Davis’s vision,” Baylor said. “When I hear her name I think of a pioneer.”

A New York City resident, Rebecca Davis, 31, grew up in Canada.

In 2007, she founded a nonprofit for performing arts in Philadelphia and initially received funding through private and public grants and donations to create ballets in the U.S. In 2010, after researching the genocide in Darfur for a new dance she was choreographing, Davis changed the dance company’s mission.

The Rebecca Davis Dance Company stopped seeking funds for performing arts in the U.S. and instead, raised money to send dancers into third-world countries to better children’s lives through performing arts.

It’s still Rebecca Davis Dance Company, Davis said, “but we don’t have a contracted group of professional performers in the U.S. Instead we contract performers to travel with us and improve the capacity of local teachers abroad. We have a country director who hires local teachers. We bring dance teachers and dancers to help local teachers in Rwanda and Guinea in West Africa and Bosnia-Herzogovina.”

Originally from South Jersey, Baylor says dance can change the lives of Rwandan youth the way it changed his life. He has started a scholarship fund to help send deserving youth to school in Rwanda and has raised enough through crowdsourcing on Global Giving to support students.

Baylor danced through high school and became a member of Rebecca Davis Dance Company in 2007. At the time it was one of the new contemporary ballet companies in Philadelphia and being accepted was a big deal, he said. “(Davis) did interesting work because it was based on literature and social awareness,” Baylor said. “Her name was the buzz of the city. She sought me out.”

At the dance company, Baylor worked as a rehearsal director, principal dancer and taught at the academy. He danced with Davis until he graduated from the University of Philadelphia. Then he joined the Philadelphia Dance Co., auditioned for “Lion King” in March 2012 and got an offer in June to perform on Broadway.

As an ensemble dancer for “Lion King,” Baylor dances the parts of a zebra, an ostrich, a hyena, a blade of grass and a kite flyer. His work on “Lion King” took him to Mexico, Chile, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland, but not Africa.

When Davis did research on “Darfur,” a ballet she was choreographing about the genocide in Sudan, Baylor told her he’d love to go to Africa one day. Davis took him seriously.

“Then she sent me a random email saying it was time,” he said.

Baylor taught in Kigali, Rwanda for three weeks in December 2011, returning a second time in November.

There he met the orphans who became his students — street children who he said had been tortured, abandoned, incarcerated or prostituted.