Dear Friends,
We are thrilled to announce that Mariposa won the first ever Global Giving Girl Effect Challenge!
2011 has been a year of tremendous growth at The Mariposa DR Foundation and realizing our potential is only possible with the support of thoughtful people like you.
This past fall was packed with lots of activities for the Mariposa girls including tennis, swimming, health and nutrition classes, sewing, art, dance, field trips and more!
On November 29th we took a very special field trip to Santiago to see the EVEOKE dance performance of Julia Alvarez's "In the Time of the Butterflies" - the girls enjoyed a modern dance interpretation of the famous story of the Mirabal sisters and got to meet famous author Julia Alvarez.
We would like to extend a huge thank you to all who supported Mariposa in 2011. It's been a great year.
Wishing you a warm, peaceful and very happy holiday season!
With gratitude,
The Mariposas
www.mariposadrfoundation.org
Links:
Dear Friends,
We are extremely pleased to report on the accomplishments of the past few months for The Mariposa DR Foundation and share our plans for the upcoming year! The second year of our Girls Summer Leadership Program was a resounding success with 70 young Mariposas, ages 8-18, attending a four-week program run by international and local volunteers and certified teachers. The girls were immersed in a unique and creative hands-on learning environment that included sports, environmental education, theatre, dance and academic tutoring. Thanks to our community sponsors and partners, we also enjoyed many educational field trips to Puerto Plata and Sosua.
Our resource center has quickly become an important community center and safe house for both the younger and older Mariposas who often drop by to ask for help with homework, check out books from our library or play games and read in a quiet and welcoming environment. We also welcome many of the younger boys from the community who often follow their big sisters to the office and want to read as well!
One of our older Mariposas has been placed in a professional training internship with a local restaurant to be trained as a chef and understand restaurant management. She returns from every session eager to share everything she learned and has recently been trying her hand as a pastry chef! As more of our older Mariposas finish high school, we are looking to expand resources and options available to them for higher education and job placements like this position.
In July we started working with satellite Mariposa programs in the communites of Tres Ceibas and La Mina, and are hoping to continue working with adolescent girls in different communities along the North Coast.
This week, we will resume our regular programs starting with our Saturday camps and continuing with Health and English classes during the week. We have many exciting activities planned for the rest of the year and have a great team of staff, volunteers and parents to help support these young girls in their journeys of empowerment and education!
For more real time updates “like” us on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/MariposaDRFoundation
With Gratitude,
The Mariposa DR Foundation
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Dear Friends,
Because of your generosity we have experienced tremendous growth and success over the past few months. We have opened an official Mariposa office space and resource center for the girls in our community. A safe, secure and inviting space where our girls can come to read, study, check out library books and relax in a quiet room away from all the distractions of their often overcrowded homes. The girls and neighborhood kids have already checked in and out the books over 500 times since March!
There have been a lot of individual successes as well. Two of our Mariposa girls began University this spring and are also interning in the Mariposa resource center to develop essential business and office skills. We also have a girl in our sports program who last August was afraid to put her foot in the water and is now a competitive swimmer!
Our intense Health and English program concluded in May and the school year has just ended. Four of our girls who needed to pass eighth grade national exams worked intensely with individual tutors and have passed with flying colors.
We are gearing up for the second year of our Girls Summer Leadership Program. This summer's program will include two healthy meals a day, environmental education, sports, theatre, dance, intensive academic tutoring, field trips and more. Working together with certified teachers, students, parents, local and international volunteers Mariposa creates this unique experiential education program just for girls. Camp will run for four weeks from July 11th - August 5th.
All of this is only possible because of thoughtful contributions from people like you. We have lots more exciting things planned for the rest of the year so stay connected for more updates on what the Mariposas are up to!
For more real time updates "like" us on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/MariposaDRFoundation
With Gratitude,
The Mariposa DR Foundation
Links:
Dear Friends,
We are proud to present our report of the first 18 months of the Mariposa DR Foundation. Reaching our goals is only possible because of thoughtful contributions from people like you. We want to thank you for believing in our cause. We hope that you will take a few minutes to review our report (attached) and see how you are helping us Unleash the Leader in our girls.
With gratitude,
The Mariposas
After spending the previous day relaxing at a tourist filled beach town with tons of hotels and nice waterfront restaurants, Patricia and Jessica from Mariposa introduced me to another side of the town of Cabarete. We met at Patricia’s coffee shop where several of the older girls Mariposa works with have found employment. I was provided with a summary of Patricia’s long history of involvement in the community and how, after years of working to establish a quality education system for the children of Cabarete, the logical next step for her had been for her to form Mariposa with the goal of seeking to educate and empower young women in the community.
After our discussion and a few cups of organic Dominican coffee, Patricia and Jessica walked us around the town in which they work. The slum lay just out of sight from the tourist filled beach road, hidden behind hotels and storefronts; it likely went unnoticed by the majority of visitors- including myself until this point. As we walked, people were constantly waiving and coming up to say hola and discuss various issues with the women, providing an illustration of just how great the scope of the work is that these women were doing. We were welcomed into the homes of several of the girls Mariposa works with- most of them small, one-room shacks with a family of 8 or more, only curtains acting as dividers between sleeping areas, and garbage filled swamps for backyards. But these living conditions were only a small element of the hardships many of the girls in the communities are dealing with. We were introduced to some of the girls and got a small taste of just how badly needed Mariposa’s service were. We met teens who had become pregnant, living with abusive fathers, had lost family members from easily preventable situations, and one HIV positive young girl, who, without the assistance provided my Mariposa, would not be able to access the ARVs needed to help stem the progress of her disease.
We met many girls with many different problems, but as Mariposa recognizes, there is one solution- enabling these young women to change their situation and empower them with knowledge and confidence that will help them to create a better future for themselves and future generations. Mariposa has taken holistic approach to helping girls and their families overcome negative effects of poverty and change the stereotype of what it means to be a woman in a developing country.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
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