By Jessica Lawson | Cofounder
Dear Friends,
The past few months have been extremely busy at The Mariposa Center for Girls. In April we welcomed families, community leaders and members, and special out-of-town guests to officially inaugurate the Julia Alvarez Children's Library and the Minou Mirabal Teaching Kitchen. Acclaimed author, Julia Alvarez and her family joined us for a a very special week of celebration and volunteering with the girls, reading, doing crafts and helping to prepare them for a spectacular Earth Day performance. Representatives from the US Embassy, the Mirabal Family, donors, community leaders and friends of Mariposa all came together for a ribbon cutting ceremony and special performances by the Mariposa girls.
The Julia Alvarez Children's Library is painted with beautiful murals depicting memorable scenes from Julia Alvarez's stories and features hundreds of the best Children's books in both Spanish and English. This cozy, inviting space helps girls in our programs to foster a love of reading and encourages creativity and imagination. During this week of celebration we also officially opened the Minou Mirabal Teaching Kitchen. Tourism and hospitality is the biggest contributor to the local economy in our town of Cabarete and we want our girls to be prepared for success in the workplace. Many of them grow up with basic cooking skills as this is one of their many responsibilities in the home. In the teaching kitchen we can inspire and teach them to think outside of the box, further develop a skill many of them already have and inspire them to learn about nutrition and how to prepare international cuisine from all over the world!
The Julia Alvarez Children's Library and Minou Mirabal Teaching Kitchen are just two of the many dedicated spaces we have at The Mariposa Center for Girls. Each area of the Center is named after a Dominican or Haitian woman who is a positive role model for young women. Some of the women featured are famous and some of them are extraordinary local community leaders and parents. As girls learn and play at The Mariposa Center for Girls, they will be surrounded by imagery and information about powerful women to inspire them to become agents for positive change in their families, communities and the world.
We have lots of exciting updates planned to the Center in the coming months and we look forward to sharing more with you soon.
Warmly,
The girls, families, volunteers and staff at The Mariposa DR Foundation
Links:
By Jessica Lawson | Co-Founder
By Jessica Lawson | Co-Founder
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.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can recieve an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser