Upskill a Community to Fight Poverty in Costa Rica

Introduction 

El Cocal suffers from high levels of immigration resulting in huge cultural differences and high unemployment, substance abuse and general despondency. This is a hard place to live, most often especially for children. Limited funding for schools means schools are only open for 1/2 days. There are very few safe spaces for both children and adults to gather, play & learn

Report 

The most important part of this project is awareness and empowering our local community members to tackle the issues. With their passion, we provide the framework and support and work closely with them to tackle the issues. By providing them with the training and vital funding to build the infrastructure in the community we allow them to promote a sustainable future that includes local income generation and increased access to quality education! Just $25 will feed a child breakfast the most important meal of the day for the entire month!

Thank you for your support

It’s certainly a challenging time for our community in Costa Rica. While due to COVID we had to pause the majority of our operations we continued to support our community through awareness of COVID preventative measures and we help keep funding the majority of our local team through lockdowns. 

In October we finally were able to get back to engaging the community and following COVID guidelines we found it essential to take people’s minds away from COVID and begin our business as usual free workshops for the community. 

Over the passed few weeks we have covered a wide range of topics that include how to care for the most important mangrove habitat that surrounds the community in Cocal and play a very important park in the local ecosystem. We also began to run educational workshops that start to engage and welcome the community members to engage with our project. We started with workshops on the history of the local area and this was very popular and rewarding. 

We want to engage our local community further and begin to offer English lessons and other skills that will help upskill the community in 2021.