By Chase Williams | Program Officer
The devastation of Hurricane Maria revealed the longstanding and historical traumas faced by many Puerto Rican communities. Now the pandemic and its complex web of impacts have further built upon and exacerbated these traumas. A critical question has emerged: What does a just recovery mean for Puerto Rico?
Your donation to the Puerto Rico & Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fund has ensured that our incredible nonprofit partners across Puerto Rico are able to help answer this question through their critical work in service of communities across the island every single day.
Here’s a brief look at how your donation has helped one of our key partners, Mentes Puertorriqueñas en Acción (MPA), contribute its own unique answer to this important question.
For the past 10 years, MPA has been at the forefront of inspiring the next generation of citizen leaders to transform Puerto Rico. The MPA team works directly with college students and young professionals to provide them with the skills and connections they need to advance social causes that build a fair, just, and participatory society.
MPA’s flagship program is called the Program for the Empowerment and Retention of Agents of Change (PARACa). Through PARACa, their team provides intensive training every year to a cohort of about 20 youth leaders and places these new leaders in internships with community-based organizations driving social change across Puerto Rico.
After Hurricane Maria, MPA adapted the program to have the youth leaders focus on relief and recovery efforts. This contributed to the long-term resilience of impacted communities and tackled systemic issues that amplified the outsized impacts of the hurricane.
The pandemic caused MPA to make significant changes to the structure of the program, but the organization maintained its core promise of preparing more than 20 young Puerto Rican leaders (even though Zoom!) to excel in the social impact sector. Thanks to your support, GlobalGiving was able to invest in the success of MPA’s 2020 PARACa program and, by extension, in the next generation of citizen leaders in Puerto Rico. Your donation helped shape the answer of what a just recovery looks like in practice: providing the opportunity for Puerto Rican youth to chart a course for their own self-defined, locally-relevant recovery.
Imagining and achieving a just recovery for Puerto Rico will continue to require many unique approaches, voices, and perspectives. Thank you for joining with GlobalGiving and MPA to continue pushing towards that just recovery.
As we’ve done over the last three years, GlobalGiving will continue to keep you updated in the months ahead about how your generosity and support have powered community-led disaster recovery in Puerto Rico.
Be safe and well.
With gratitude,
Chase + the GlobalGiving Team
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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When a disaster strikes, recovery efforts led by people who live and work in affected communities are often overlooked and underfunded. GlobalGiving is changing this reality. Since 2004, we've been shifting decision-making power to crises-affected communities through trust-based grantmaking and support.
We make it easy, quick, and safe to support people on the ground who understand needs in their communities better than anyone else.
They were there long before the news cameras arrived, and they’ll be there long after the cameras leave. They know how to make their communities more resilient to future disasters, and they’re already hard at work. GlobalGiving puts donations and grants directly into their hands. Because the status quo—which gives the vast majority of funding to a few large organizations—doesn’t make sense.
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