Empowering Indigenous Youth for a Healthy Future

Rising Minds has been working with our partner preschool, CEIBI, for 2 years! We launched our In-School Health Training Campaign to Empower Maya Indigenous Youth for a Health Future with CEIBI back in 2017. CEIBI serves 60 indigenous children between the ages of 1.5 and 7 years old. We work with the school to deliver weekly health trainings surrounding themes of disease prevention, nutrition, and mental health. We spent the first few months of the school year redesigning our curriculum surrounding these themes, drawing stronger connections to the curriculum standards set by the Ministry of Education. Designing a program that is tied to the curriculum set by the Ministry of Education is of the utmost importance to us.  This way we can work to fulfill the community identified need of a lack of health education while working to make sure students are meeting benchmarks set by the national framework.

Bonnie, our community health educator says, “Health, and all its components, is very important in our daily lives. Because of this, it should be inculcated from the early age of a child. Through our Health Program, Rising Minds is promoting healthy habits in the children of CEIBI.” Furthermore, she states, “The topics we cover in our trainings are tied to the Curriculo Nacional Base set by the Ministry of Education. Standards are contextualized to help ensure a more well rounded education.”

In addition to redesigning our curriculum, we also receiving approval from the Ministry of Education to continue our programming with CEIBI for the coming years! We are thrilled to be able to work with CEIBI and hope to continue to expand to other schools in the surrounding area.