Break The Cycle Of Poverty Through Education in GT

NDG is pleased to announce that we are the recipients of the Juan Bautista Gutiérrez Foundation’s 2014 Sustainability Award! In recognition of our stable financial model, we’ve been given a check for Q250,000.This generous donation will go toward materials for our programs as well as our básico school.

The Juan Bautista Gutiérrez Foundation has been supporting community development projects focused on education and health in Guatemala for nearly thirty years. Their annual Apoyando a Quienes Apoyando (Supporting Those Who Support) grants are designed to recognize smaller NGOs for their work and to help with publicity and funding.

The selection process for these awards is rigorous and highly competitive. In addition to writing a grant, our team gave a detailed presentation about our schools, their impact on the local communities, and how they are financed. More than forty-eight nonprofits across Guatemala were up for consideration.

In the end, it was our social businesses that led to NDG winning the Sustainability Award. Since our founding in 2006, we have opened both Cambio Spanish School and the Experience Guatemala Tour, which donate 100% of their profits back to NDG. Together, they constitute a reliable, independent source of funding for our projects that helps to supplement other donations. To learn more about our social businesses, please visit our website.

Many thanks to the Juan Bautista Gutiérrez Foundation for the incredible support!

The English program at both our Nuestro Futuro and El Porvenir schools has made incredible progress since its founding in 2013. While NDG previously relied on long-term volunteers to lead our English classes, we now have two full-time language teachers on staff that follow and adapt the national curriculum based on our students’ needs.

English is a critical skill for our students. Given the strength of the tourism industry in and around Antigua, even a basic grasp of English can dramatically improve a student’s chances of finding a stable job once he or she graduates from our program.

The students themselves continue to be highly enthusiastic about learning a foreign language, taking every opportunity to practice their English with our international volunteers. Based on their level of interest, we’re now considering launching an English afterschool program to reinforce and expand upon what they have been learning in the classroom. Some of the parents in our adult literary program, CONALFA, have even requested private English lessons from our teachers!

Our classes are divided in half for their English lessons in order to ensure that our teachers can monitor each child’s progress with grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. While the lower grades are focused entirely on speaking and listening, the older students are now reading and writing as well.

In general, our English lessons reflect what the students are learning in their other classes. For example, while our second graders are studying healthy diets this month, they will also be learning about the food pyramid in English. What’s more, our classes are designed for visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles, incorporating songs, hands-on activities, and plenty of visual aids.

Right now, our teachers are still working with limited materials, creating many of their exercises from scratch. In order to continue to grow our program, we need to purchase English-language textbooks, activities, posters, and games in the near future. If you would like to help us accomplish this goal and break the cycle of poverty through education, please donate today.

Thank you for your ongoing support!