Empower Guatemalan Families With Food & Nutrition

THIS IS WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE! 

The whole family participates, from planting, to harvesting, to preparing (and eating!) delicious meals.  Bartolo and Flor Elizabet are very happy and successful with their Backyard Farm (Casa Granja).  While the attached photos show mostly their garden, they also have fruit trees and raise poultry and small aminals for protein.  Arody, Juana del Rosio and Eli Bartolo help in the garden, too, and are strong and healthy because the delicious meals Flor Elizabet prepares are also very nutritious.

Notice that the garden is protected from unwelcome guests, such as a neighbor's free-range chickens, or local cats or dogs, by a simple barrier of plastic sheets and support posts.  

The plants being cultivated were chosen for their high nutritive value.  They are mostly native species and well-adapted to local climate conditions.  What's new, is learning how to successfully grow them right outside the home, so families do not have to spend scarce cash for them at the market, or search for them in the forest areas.

An important part of our coaching and support of the families is focused on nutrition -- what it is, why it's important, and how to create balanced meals that will help all family members be healthier and live better lives.  

A BIG THANKS to all our supporters.  Your donations make it possible for our fantastic local team to provide families with  knowledge and skills they can use throughout their lives, and that they can share with others -- spreading the benefits of home grown healthful food to their friends and neighbors, to help build a healthier, more successful comunity.

We need your on-going support, and a gift just now would be very welcome.  Please consider starting a monthly giving plan.  A smaller gift each month will help sustain Seeds for a Future, so we can continue to help people like Bartolo and Flor Elizabet build a better future for Arody, Juana del Rosio and little Eli Bartolo.

Seeds for a Future’s main focus is on fighting malnutrition and helping women understand nutrition – why it’s important, how nutrients work in the body, and how to boost nutrition in daily meals. So, whether we’re working with women in their kitchens, or coaching them in growing nutritious greens in their home gardens, we are fundamentally exchanging knowledge – TEACHING.

Our team of local men and women have been trained, not only in nutrition, kitchen and household cleanliness and an entire array of gardening techniques and information, but also in techniques of teaching and methods for working successfully with the families of participating community-members.

Recently Clelia and Ingrid, our lead extensionists, attended an exciting seminar on new ways to teach reading skills. The seminar was sponsored by FUNCAFE, the public service arm of the coffee growers’ association. Clelia and Ingrid will share what they learned with the rest of the Seeds Team, and the new techniques will be integrated into our household visits with participating families.

The Team will also apply these new techniques to the Reading Skills and Comprehension classes we provide at no cost to grade school students of the Chocolá area. Our classes supplement their regular schoolwork in a vital way, ensuring that the students learn not only to read well for classwork purposes, but also learn the delight that reading can bring into their lives, and that reading can open the doors to knowledge for the rest of their lives.  

Your support of Seeds for a Future is what has made this possible. 100% of your financial support goes directly to our Team in Chocolá and thus to the families who participate in our programs.

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

Please consider:

• sharing part of your tax refund with us
• making an affordable donation on a monthly basis
• doing all your online shopping via AmazonSmile (with Seeds for a Future as your organization of choice)
• or ALL OF THE ABOVE!! (YAAAAY!!)

THANKS FROM ALL THE FAMILIES WHO ARE HAVE BETTER HEALTHIER LIVES BECAUSE OF YOU!