Motivate and empower teenagers through music

We hope this message finds you well and that you are handling these uncertain times as good as possible.

From Hogar de Cristo we wanted to let you know our current situation of our organization in Chile and how we have been carrying out our project focused on young students.

As you may already know, in Chile, more than 200,000 children and young people are outside the educational system. With the current health crisis this number will surely increase. Education became much more complex than usual. Many young people were already being excluded from the system but the pandemic  has widened the educational, economic, and social gaps.

Face-to-face education in Chile is still not a reality due to the pandemic and in fact the country is in a new wave, with many communities in new quarantines.

Our students have needed more emotional support than ever. They have shown how much they miss the protective space of the school and we have responded with constant monitoring online, giving distance classes through our Virtual Learning Classrooms and creating new workshops to motivate them and continue teaching. We never lost contact with them. We made a diagnosis and found them with many uncertainties, anxiety and demotivation. There were many who said: "I'm locked up, they won't let me out." It happened that they began to miss the classroom, the school, the classmates, the teachers. Before the pandemic, everyone wanted to be out of school, they did not like the norms very much, the rules, but this crisis came to show that education, educational establishments, are a very important linking element in them. When one hears as a cliché that the school is the second family, it became real because that is where young people receive a lot of support; there were links that they began to miss.

In this time of pandemic, we discovered that we could not deliver certainty to young people or their families. We couldn't tell him this was going to end tomorrow, because no one knew anything anyway. And here we adopt a phrase: "The opposite of uncertainty is not certainty, but it is the community, it is living it together." That was a super important discovery because at the youth and team level we concluded by doing group activities that are not only to know how they are or what they need, but so that they could collaborate mutually, get to know each other and accompany each other. Young people have given us a lot and made us understand and learn about resilience. When everything seemed lost, with an uncertainty that at the beginning was very powerful and we figuring out what we could do from our computers, which seemed impossible, we began to see that we could overcome this uncertainty together. It was an invitation to be united, there was no reason to be alone.

Virtual Learning Classrooms and online workshops and are now a successful reality. Young people are super grateful, they perceive us as a recess from everything bad. For them it is a moment of relaxation, a space for personal and group care. We work with a wide variety of topics, topics that they themselves raised with their tutors that we later transformed into new workshops.

We have been able to achieve this transformation because of your support. Your contribution has meant being able to continue providing quality education to thousands of young people throughout the country. We really thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your help that is giving hope and a future to so many young people.

It has been a year that no one will easily forget. In March when the pandemic began, all the members of the education system - students, teachers and directors - thought that the emergency would last a couple of months. They never imagined that it would last the whole year.

However, Hogar de Cristo has adapted quickly to the new way of teaching and supporting people in need. We began a profound process of digital transformation with the objectives of reaching more young people with their educational paths interrupted, being more flexible in their accompaniment and providing them with a comprehensive education that includes the development of social-emotional and digital skills.

Liliana Cortés, director of Súmate, explains: “This project complements our service and gives the foundation an injection of energy to be able to reach more young people and in a better way. It is an opportunity that arises from the pandemic, the suspension of classes and the fact that we had no way to reach the students directly. In this search for alternatives we find the great opportunity offered by the digital world ”.

Súmate trusts in the high potential of these children and young people who have huge gaps in general and digital knowledge, but which with proper guidance are possible to overcome. “It is a huge challenge to reduce the digital divide in which the young people we work with and their families live. We do not want them to be left behind again in this development in which Chile is embarking. If we do not put a sense of urgency on this issue, we are going to generate inequality again in the world of education ”, added Liliana Cortés.

To this end, the goal was to enable virtual learning spaces that allow the accompaniment service to be taken to the next level. Currently, they have three projects under construction:

• FLOPPY: It is an application through which the participant can develop socio-emotional skills that aim at greater well-being, while motivating him to continue his educational career through gamification - which is a learning technique that transfers the mechanics of games to the educational-professional sphere - and constant positive reinforcement.
• EVA: It is a virtual work modality complementary to the face-to-face one. These are virtual classrooms or other platforms in synchronous and asynchronous format, which are adapted to the needs of the participants. In this way, digital literacy will be promoted and strengthened and will make it possible to move towards a hybrid model of work - face-to-face and virtual - with young people. Socio-educational accompaniment will be made more flexible.
• CRM: It is a transactional system that allows to collect and systematize the information of the entire participant process based on instruments, work sheets, development of an accompaniment plan, monitoring and generation of reports. It has the benefit of having the information in a single platform and having reports and quantitative data in a dynamic and efficient way.

The challenges and opportunities involved in implementing these three paths requires, of course, funding, training in Teams for Education, preparing content for the application and for virtual classrooms and, in addition, seeking connectivity for young people.

Furthermore the methodology to to follow-up one by one with the students have being carried out via telephone, WhatsApp groups and video calls in case the students need some kind of containment.

Our priority was to make sure they have access to online classes. We have gone out the same to the field at least once a month, either to deliver merchandise or chips that would allow them to have internet on their cell phones to those who did not have.

It has been a huge effort by our tutors, teachers and students but the fruits are in sight and our commitment to not leave anyone behind is more valid than ever.