Education Costa Rica Project #9219

Upskill a Community to Fight Poverty in Costa Rica

by Action Change (Formerly GVI Trust)

Project Report | Jun 10, 2016
Give Jose a Healthy Start Each Day

By Kate Robey | Charitable Trust Operations Manager

Dear Supporters,

Today I want to tell you about a new initiative on our Quepos project. We are aiming to launch a Healthy Breakfast Club in conjunction with one of our partner schools.

Why?

Jose* lives in a community in Costa Rica called El Cocal. His parents came from Nicaragua, hoping to find a better life for their family in the tourist mecca that is Quepos, the gateway to the famous Manuel Antonio Park.

The reality of the situation isn’t as good as his family might have hoped for. Theirs is a daily struggle to make a living, provide 3 meals a day and to keep their children off the streets and away from a multitude of negative influences.

Jose goes to school every morning with an empty stomach and a distracted mind. Because of this, he isn't doing as well in school as he should and he often gets into trouble with his teachers.

With your help, we can help Jose by ensuring that when he gets to school he has a healthy breakfast waiting for him, so that he can start his day off on a positive note and work hard at school.

With your help, we can help Jose and 79 other school children like him.

This initiative costs $1/ day/ per child. That means that for only $20, Jose and his parents won’t have to worry about starting the day on an empty stomach for a whole month.

Our Goal

We need to have an initial sum of $9 600 so that we can launch our Healthy Breakfast Club to 80 children for a 6 month period.

Will you help us?

As an extra bonus, this GlobalGiving Bonus Day, your gift will go that much further because GlobalGiving will match your donation by 50%! That means that children like Jose will be guaranteed a full stomach and healthy mind for that much longer.

So, put the 15 June, 9am EDT in your diary and help us get the Healthy Breakfast Club off the ground!

With Gratitude,

GVI Costa Rica

*Names have been changed

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Jun 1, 2016
A Holiday Camp for Students during Semana Santa

By Cynthia | Costa Rica Country Director

Fun and games and music!

Dear Supporters,

Semana Santa, which literally means ‘Holy Week’, is the week around Easter and it is celebrated throughout Latin America. All schools are closed during this week. So, instead of following our regular class schedule, we decided to host a 3-day holiday camp for the children. The theme was “Around the World” with the idea that we would teach the students about different continents, counties and cultures.

On Monday of Semana Santa, we started our Cultural Camp in El Cocal.

We divided the days according to continents. On the first day we focused on Europe and Australia, the second day celebrated cultural traditions from Asia, and the final day wrapped it up with Africa and the Americas.

We exposed the children to a wide variety of cultural activities such as Aboriginal painting from Australia, lantern making from Asia, netball from England and an Easter egg hunt from North America. By engaging the students in these experiences, we introduced them to new ideas cultures. For the majority of the students, this was the first time that they were exposed to traditions outside of Costa Rica.

The volunteers with GVI Quepos successfully provided students with a safe, fun, educational environment to spend their Semana Santa holiday week. This is important for several reasons.

Access to camps and activities like these are incredibly important for the children, and even more so when the schools are closed. When the schools are closed there are very limited supervised activities for the children. They will mostly be found playing, unsupervised, in the streets. This can be problematic because there are plenty of negative and unsafe situations that the children could be exposed to. The community, made up mostly of migrants fleeing bad situations in their own countries, is rife with drugs, violence and cultural conflict and poverty.

For these reasons it is important to provide an alternative for the children that is safe and fun. Word of our camp reached over 20 children, which gave the program an platform to inform more families about what we were teaching on a regular basis. As a result, we had 10 new children join our regular classes after the week was over! We were also able to bond with students who were already attending class and a greater level of mutual trust was achieved between the volunteers and their students.

It is safe to say that Cultural Camp during Semana Santa was a great success in both positively influencing the children as well as expanding the reach of our regular program so that it may benefit more and more children in the community.

Thank you for your generosity which makes programs like this possible.

With Gratitude,

GVI Costa Rica

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Mar 10, 2016
Teaming up with Sing me a Story

By Kate Robey | GVI Charitable Trust Operations Manager

Teaming up with Sing me a Story!

Dear Supporter,

We have some very exciting developments here in Quepos and one or two plans up our sleeves. We are really looking forward to what 2016 holds for this project!

We are very pleased to tell you that we are teaming up with the Sing Me a Story Foundation (SMAS) in 2016. SMAS works with children all around the world, turning their stories into songs.

The partnership is part of a wider effort to create a stable learning environment for the children from the El Cocal community. El Cocal is an illegal settlement of mainly immigrant families and life there is a daily struggle for a lot of the families.

What we are going to offer is a safe place where children can come before and after school hours or when school is closed. The children will be given a series of classes on social and emotional intelligence, as well as English lessons. It will be a fun and interactive space with lots of music and singing and creativity. Part of this will be for the children to write their own story, based on topics that we are covering. We will then be sending these stories over to the amazing team of songwriters that Sing me a Story has and get the stories turned into a song for the children.

It is a wonderful gift to hear your own words sung back to you and we are hoping that this will inspire the children to carry on coming to the community center. In conjunction with this project, we are also raising money to be able to provide the children that join the project a healthy breakfast.

We are really looking forward to the challenges, excitement and successes that we know 2016 is going to bring and we can't wait to share all of our developments with you!

With Gratitude,

Kate

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