Early Childhood Literacy & Nutrition in Guatemala

Locally Led Development is defined by USAID as the process in which local actors – encompassing individuals, communities, networks, organizations, private entities, and governments – set their own agendas, develop solutions, and bring the capacity, leadership, and resources to make those solutions a reality. USAID recognizes that local leadership and ownership are essential for fostering sustainable results across our development and humanitarian assistance work.

Riecken Community Libraries play a strong role in the Locally Led Development.  All Riecken libraries have local boards consisting of members of the community that develop mission statements, hold elections and establish library policies. They gain financial literacy, public speaking opportunities, and negotiating experience – backed by a deep understanding of the value of partnership. These are high-value skills, especially for those in poor rural communities in a developing country.

Riecken foundation and the programming it provides community libraries prioritizes engagement with Indigenous people, women, and youth, and emphasize community partnership as a means of building the self-reliance of partner countries so that they are better prepared to tackle their own ongoing challenges. 

For the Riecken Foundation, it is essential that there is a group of citizens committed to the library's mission and the efforts involved in promoting it, based on community volunteering. And the active participation of women is essential in our community library model.Once they express their interest in a library to the Riecken Foundation, the focus, mission and values of a community library of the model promoted by the Foundation are shared with them. Transparency, volunteering, inclusion, responsibility and respect are some of the values that we wish to transmit.

An example of this is Gisela, a young women who is the secretary of the Board of Directors of the Palestina Los Altos Library in Quetzaltenango.

For Gisela, “I joined the board of directors team because of my teaching profession. I have always worked on school projects to encourage reading in my students, because personally I also like to read and inform myself.

Personally, I have verified that we are the fruit of what we read and that passion makes me work with great pleasure in the Community Library, taking advantage of my new stage as a retired teacher, I put the experience acquired during 24 years of service at the service of society”.

Like Gisela, in 2023, more than 278 people were part of the boards of directors of community libraries in Guatemala, adding to the total of 768 volunteers who supported the different activities carried out by libraries for the benefit of their communities. During the past year, more than 40,500 volunteer hours were carried out. If we monetized this ad honorem time, it would be a total of almost $50,000, according to the salary hour stipulated by the minimum wage in Guatemala.

The Palestina community library, when it opens its doors to the public, and like the rest of the libraries in the Riecken network, will offer a series of free services and programs for the residents of this community. Some of these activities will be the Readers' Club, technology, computer workshops, first aid course, as well as research, bibliographic consultations by users at the school, basic, diversified and university levels are carried out in the library facilities.

But the most important thing of all is that it will be the same community, represented by volunteer community leaders, that will be in charge of transparently managing the library and, by extension, leading programming based on access to information, reading and participation. youth. Programming aimed at the development of your community.

Palestina de los Altos Community Library in Guatemala, as well as the rest of the community libraries that are part of the Riecken network, with support from USAID/ASHA (American Schools and Hospitals Abroad), have improved their technological equipment, their collection of books and furniture.  Riecken community libraries, with with support from USAID/ASHA, will continue to help transform a single building block -- a community library with free computers, internet, print resources and programs -- into a springboard for democracy building, local leadership development, women’s empowerment, civic engagement and social justice in Guatemala. Riecken community Libraries are a demonstration and promotion American principles of inclusiveness and equality, civic engagement, free expression and independent inquiry. Together with the USAID / ASHA program, we will give a concrete response to promote community cohesion.

Riecken Community Libraries are a social platform and an essential space for the social cohesion present in 14 communities in Guatemala.

Learn more about the work of the Riecken Foundation and its network of community libraries in Guatemala.