Transforming The Lives of Children in Cartagena

Dear Friends,

About 1 year ago, a group of close friends and I started working on making a reality our vision for transforming the lives of children in my hometown Cartagena. Those kids are vulnerable to drugs, gangs, domestic violence, malnutrition, and many other threats. The challenge was big, but with your support, we were able to get started.

In early February, we finalized the adequation of a facility and started providing breakfast to 50 kids every weekday. Since then, we have distributed over 6900 meals! This has brought very gratifying moments to all of us involved, a very special one was when a father in tears said: 

“If it wasn’t for you, my kid would be going hungry to school today”

I trust you experience the same fulfillment I do by knowing that your contributions can make such an impact. This is not all, the team is convinced that to make a life long-lasting transformation on those kids, we need to tackle their environment, the relationship with their parents, hygiene & education. As a result, we have conducted several activities throughout the year and found fascinating results, which you can see below:

• Music and Arts days
• Entertainment days include going out for football, puppet shows and playing in the best playgrounds of the city!
• Hygiene and dental health lessons

One of our most recent sessions consisted of using Augmented Reality and Games as a Tool to Discover Skills.

But we don't want to stop with the kids, we also identified a great need of education and training in the mothers, and soon started a program for empowering women through workshops where they can learn how to avoid abusing the kids and also how to make products to generate income, here is a video where you can see this in action Empowering Woman Through Life Skills. The moms have expressed immense gratitude for multiple reasons. First, their relationship with the kids improves as they recur more to talking rather than physical violence; second, they really enjoy the fellowship with the other moms; third, they learn valuable skills to produce income. In fact, 3 moms already started commercializing food-based products.

 Altogether, the last 10 months have been plenty of challenges, excitement, and satisfaction. We were fortunate to have you onboard supporting us along the way. For the year ahead, we have the vision to expand the facilities to be able to reach out to a total of 200 kids, we don't want to turn away any kid that touches our doors, and we need your continued support keep making a long-lasting impact in the lives of those children. Here are two easy ways in which you can help us further: 

1. A monthly contribution of at least 20 USD, that will help us cover the monthly cost for one kid
2. Alternatively, you can also contribute by providing a point-time donation now which we will equally appreciate. All donations can be done here.

Thank you again for the continued support, it means so much for the kids and their families. Looking forward to keeping partnering with you and we wish that you may have a merry Christmas.

Thanks to your support we have we provide opportunities for children to improve their nutritional conditions and develop their creative and cognitive physical competencies while supporting families to improve on internal crises and train for work from a children's canteen that provides children with breakfast daily , in addition to educational workshops for training in values, healthy lifestyle habits, art and creative reading among others. We also carry out workshops with the mamites and in the line of positive upbringing and also in culinary and artistic arts.

We have achieved many things since we started our project which we describe below:

• Amount of food delivered: 5118
• Amount of health day: 2
• Number of workshops to promote healthy, recreational and art life: 11
• Number of workshops to promote good treatment, stress management: 2
• Number of home visits: 110 (made in two time periods of 3 months)
• Number of entrepreneurship workshops: 2
• 60 school kits delivered
• 120 oral hygiene kits delivered
• 80% have improved their nutritional condition
• 90% have improved their eating habits
• 98% say children are happy with the dining room
• Interpersonal relationships among children have improved 50% reduced their bad vocabulary
• 85% of children have improved their healthy hygiene habits
• Oral hygiene I don't have the exact data
• 20% fewer cases of domestic violence

There are 3 mothers developing their own commercial activities, for the workshops learned. Mothers have learned from the foundation that the child should not be mistreated but talked They have also learned how to raise their children better, how to feed them, and many other things and all this we do because we are interested in children being able to have the favorable conditions for integral development, growing in protective environments and overcoming their difficult situations. . We want our children to be happy. We notice the improvement of the nutritional status, the decrease in the levels of abuse and the improvement of life habits in terms of health, hygiene and behavior and improvement in social interaction, and it also favors community integration among beneficiary caregivers. and generates entrepreneurship practices in mothers.

we dream of having a place where learning environments of English, technology, music arts are created where children can count on all the resources to develop their skills and ultimately that this project can be taken to all vulnerable areas of the city of Cartagena .

Your support is essential for this project to continue and we can reach many more families.

Links:

• Follow us in Facebook Fan Page
• Follow us In YouTube

At the Fundación Betania Juvenil we have been working hard in our community, in order to fulfill the objectives we have set for ourselves. In the Boston neighborhood of the city of Cartagena we are developing our main project, the Rayitos de Sol dining room, where today we have 60 children between the ages of 2 and 9 years old. We are also impacting 33 families as beneficiaries. , in these first 4 months of having started, we have been able to distribute more than 2,500 totally free breakfasts for our children today.

Achieving our goal depends a lot on the continuous help that comes from our donors like you, continuity is very important, children who are part of our project, through the activities we have done have improved satisfactorily in their academic, social and psychological. Every day our volunteer group takes note of the problems that it presents in each one of the aforementioned branches, and through scheduled home visits, and workshops that we carry out in our headquarters, we make parents aware as their guardians.

The volunteering activities that we have carried out today in the academic field have allowed us to identify which children have problems in certain areas of education and we have taken an educational reinforcement that has allowed them to improve their training process; in the social field, volunteer work has focused on recreational activities and workshops on the values that should be held as people in a community that respects and lives in harmony, also in the psychological field, has worked and continues to work with parents, in the respect, love and other values that are essential for the formation and growth of children to be integral. They have also worked on activities and crafts that will allow moms to have a source of employment, understanding that the main problem of malnutrition in children is the scarcity of resources that they have as a family.

For this reason the dining room is allowing children to have food security, because we are through volunteer activities solving all the problems that surround children that do not allow them to grow fully.

Your continued help is very important for our project to continue, we invite you to continue supporting us, to dream with us, the project in its advance is already in the 50 percent range. and it is very important because of the work and I can continue it.

We invite you to look at the evidences of each of the activities in our social. Facebook

We look forward to your continued donation in our Globalgiving pages

Thank you

We started the activities in the dining room. with 60 children and their families.

THANK YOU for your generous donations, we will continue with the children's dining activities and the desire to bring hope to many families!

From February 3 with a health brigade and the socialization of the activities to be developed in the dining room project, we welcomed parents and children to this beautiful project, our wish is that they are many more, now, we work With 60 children and soon with your help, there will be more than 200 children smiling and their families happy.

 Stages of the project.

  Start of activities of the Dining room with children

• We started with the medical and nutritional evaluation of children from 1 to 11 years old.
• The ludic activities began.
• We started the dining room with the children from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., providing them with balanced meals focused on the results of the nutritional medical evaluation.
• We continue with the management and promotion of the project in order to obtain many more grants and donations that allow us to support this project.

Thanks to your support, the project has an advance of 35%. We keep encouraging you and also many more, to reach 100%.

See the joy of children and the face of parents when leaving the dining room, and knowing that this child thanks to this project will improve their lives, motivates us not to falter.

Your support creates the success of the dining room. Here are some ways we can help:

  Click on the donate button below and choose the best option for you.
Make your donation one monthly (this Option is Important to Guarantee Food to Children)
 
  Be sure to include a gift for the Dining Room for a Future in your plans for the Donation Season. 100% of your financial support goes directly to our team in Colombia and, therefore, to the families that participate in our programs.

 Thank you for being part of the Betania Juvenil Foundation team, we continue to be a helping hand.

Links:

• Encuentrenos en facebook

The dream of giving hope to 200 children with problems of malnutrition in the Boston Neighborhood of Cartagena - Colombia, is being built, because of your support, THANKS for your generous donation, with it, we started the construction of the dining room and the hope of many families!

 The construction of the dining room began satisfactorily. With the donations received, we are adapting the place where there will be the meeting of many children and families who are looking for hope and escape from the environment that surrounds them. To this day, this neighborhood remains plunged into a situation of poverty with multiple unmet needs. It generates a dissatisfaction among its inhabitants, who yearn for scape of the situation in the poverty in which they are immersed and have a better future for themselves and their children as mentioned by Mrs. María "I am immersed in poverty and I want to get out of it. "

 Stages of the project

• Construction and adaptation of the kitchen,
• Purchase of equipment, tables, chairs, kitchen utensils, stove, refrigerators and everything related to the preparation and preservation of food.
• Approach to the families that will be beneficiaries of the dining project.
• Square daily menus, make provision of daily meals.
• Start the dining room giving breakfast to the children

 Thanks to your support, the project has a 30% progress. we keep encouraging you and also many more, to reach 100%

 Therefore the hope that the dining room general in the whole sector is quite big, we already have the place, we are building the kitchen, we have bought the stove, 60 chairs for the children and 12 tables, we also acquired the kitchen utensils, blenders, spoons, plates, glasses, pots. On the 16th and the 22nd of December we will have the first approach with the population that will be the beneficiary of this great project. We will also bring gifts to the children to give them a little happiness.

Watch the video of our progress on our YouTube  or Facebook Page

We need to buy more than 50 chairs and 10 tables, we also need to buy the refrigerator, 3 large fans, and get the food we are going to distribute monthly to start the start stage of the dining room. The next stage is the orientation to parents and children, orientation in the studies and use of free time through art classes, music and school support among other activities.

 We hope to quickly finish the initial phase of the project that corresponds to the purchase of all the utensils and the adequacy of the kitchen, and to be able to open the dining room where many lives will be transformed, but we still have to reach the goal

 Your support creates the success of dining room. Here are some ways you can help:

• Click on the donate button below and choose de better opocion for you.
• Make your donation to monthly one (this option is important to guarantee food to the children)

 Please be sure to include a gift to the Dining room for a Future in your Season of Giving plans. 100% of your financial support goes directly to our Team in Colombia and thus to the families who participate in our programs.

 OUR ONGOING SUPPORT IS VITAL SO WE CAN HELP MORE FAMILIES FIGHT AGAINST MALNUTRITION AND BUILD BETTER LIVES FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR CHILDREN.

 Thank you for being part of the team of the Betania Juvenil Foundation, and have a happy holiday and a happy new year.