Feed, House & Educate Colombia's Most Vulnerable

Hola from Help Colombia in Medellin! It's been an extremely busy year with our community projects, and in this update we're sharing backlogged info on a bunch of activities.

To start off, we did socieconomic surveys with our communities in Moravia and Belen Altavista, to develop and adjust our main activities to participants' needs and realities. The results identified capacity, education and skills training to give the unemployed opportunities to generate income, and to keep youth off the street with positive outlooks for their future. There is a huge concern for food security in these neighbourhoods, and we hope that by teaching people to earn an honest income, in the not so long run there will be less dependence on food donations.

To date we have focused our skills training workshops in two areas: English language skills, where we currently have 45 students participating weekly, with 15 of them already graduating from basic to advanced level (and we celebrated their achievement at a finca/country home by the pool!); and our software development skills workshops have 12 young participants who are already developing basic software programs. To help them with future work placements, we're creating and looking for alliances with local software companies who could provide internships and/or permanent job opportunities once graduated from our training program. We also provided 400 school kits to underpriveleged youth in Moravia and Belen Altavista, so they have books, pens, bags and basic tools to particpate actively in their studies.

To help with food security, we've supported a community kitchen in Jerusalén (Bello), which provides breakfast and lunches to hundreds of youth on weekends, when they don't have meal support from school. And to support and educate young women on self hygiene, we provided a workshop and free feminine products for 60 women with the participation of professionals from ProFamilia. 

To support special Christmas activities last December, we organized a bikeathon where hundreds donated money and resources, and 60 cyclists participants in 4 hour activity riding around Llanogrande. With the donations we were able to provide Christmas celebrations for 1500 orphans around the city, and 600 youth in Moravia and Belen Altavista. This included an recreational afternoon with games and activities, Christmas dinner and gifts for everyone.  

We've also focused on positive recreational activities with youth, where we take them out of their everyday environment to see a world of fun and opportunities in other neighbourhoods around the city. We've taken over 150 kids to the Oviedo shopping center in upscale Poblado, where they've gone rollerskating on numerous occasions in addition to enjoying snacks while having fun. Every two weeks we visit a number of orphanages, and we brought 20 kids to a professional soccer game where they could forget about their challenges in life and enjoy the spectacle of cheering with 44,000+ fans all around.

Thank you so much for waiting patiently for our update, and for continuing to support us with donations and by shares! We will do our best to provide more frequent updates moving forward!

The Help Colombia Team