Education Colombia Project #35067

Transforming The Lives of Children in Cartagena

by Fundacion Betania Juvenil

Project Report | Mar 2, 2020
First Anniversary - The work continues

By Jorge Perea | International Partner

Performing

A new year has come and we are back serving the kids after a short Christmas break. We spent the last part of the year reflecting on all we have learned and how we will apply this to our vision for 2020. In February, we reached a very important milestone: our first anniversary. Your support has been an important factor that has enabled us to reach this point. In addition, to continue giving daily breakfast to 70 kids (20 more than last year), we also conducted the following activities since our last report:

School supplies: In Colombia, the school year starts in January, and this is a time with many parents struggle to provide school supplies for their kids. We are aware of this problem and wanted to help by providing 67 of our children with full sets of supplies which included notebooks, pens, pencils, and bags.

Music workshop: the children embarked on training for a musical for a very special occasion. This activity was helpful to develop the kid's artistic talent and to overcome shyness. It took discipline and effort, but it was very well worth it.

Fundraising concert: We invited an international artist to perform to an audience of about 700 people to help us raise funds for the new year. The kids had a chance to showcase their talent as well with a very moving performance (see the first picture of the report).

Nutritional screening: We brought in a nutritionist to perform nutritional screening to 65 children. As we did one year ago, the goal was to reassess how the kids are progressing in terms of nutrition and which ones are still at risk. The results were very encouraging showing that 60% of the kids under 5 years present a proper weight and height whereas for those above 5 years the proportion is around 50%. For the rest of the kids that don't have an ideal weight and height, we will be increasing our work with them to help them fight the malnutrition. Among the actions we have identified are:

Increase their breakfast portion.
Provide them with special food supplies that they can take to the school or house.
Help the family with goods to improve the quality of food at home.
Provide vitamin supplements to assist nutritional recovery.

Medical assessment: In addition to the nutritional screening, we also conducted medical assessments to identify potential illnesses that are common in children and to follow up with the medical authorities to make sure they receive proper treatment.

Finally, we conducted surveys to understand how the children and the parents feel about our work for them, the results were remarkable with the vast majority of the kids and parent indicating that they feel happy and helped. This is a great encouragement for us and we would love to continue having your support to make even more progress in transforming the lives of those children.

School Supplies

Nutritional screening

Medical assessment

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Dec 4, 2019
Almost One Year Transforming Lives

By Jorge Perea | International Partner

Just Joy!

Dear Friends,

About 1 year ago, a group of close friends and I started working on making a reality our vision for transforming the lives of children in my hometown Cartagena. Those kids are vulnerable to drugs, gangs, domestic violence, malnutrition, and many other threats. The challenge was big, but with your support, we were able to get started.

In early February, we finalized the adequation of a facility and started providing breakfast to 50 kids every weekday. Since then, we have distributed over 6900 meals! This has brought very gratifying moments to all of us involved, a very special one was when a father in tears said:

“If it wasn’t for you, my kid would be going hungry to school today”

I trust you experience the same fulfillment I do by knowing that your contributions can make such an impact. This is not all, the team is convinced that to make a life long-lasting transformation on those kids, we need to tackle their environment, the relationship with their parents, hygiene & education. As a result, we have conducted several activities throughout the year and found fascinating results, which you can see below:

Music and Arts days
Entertainment days include going out for football, puppet shows and playing in the best playgrounds of the city!
Hygiene and dental health lessons

One of our most recent sessions consisted of using Augmented Reality and Games as a Tool to Discover Skills.

But we don't want to stop with the kids, we also identified a great need of education and training in the mothers, and soon started a program for empowering women through workshops where they can learn how to avoid abusing the kids and also how to make products to generate income, here is a video where you can see this in action Empowering Woman Through Life Skills. The moms have expressed immense gratitude for multiple reasons. First, their relationship with the kids improves as they recur more to talking rather than physical violence; second, they really enjoy the fellowship with the other moms; third, they learn valuable skills to produce income. In fact, 3 moms already started commercializing food-based products.

Altogether, the last 10 months have been plenty of challenges, excitement, and satisfaction. We were fortunate to have you onboard supporting us along the way. For the year ahead, we have the vision to expand the facilities to be able to reach out to a total of 200 kids, we don't want to turn away any kid that touches our doors, and we need your continued support keep making a long-lasting impact in the lives of those children. Here are two easy ways in which you can help us further:

A monthly contribution of at least 20 USD, that will help us cover the monthly cost for one kid
Alternatively, you can also contribute by providing a point-time donation now which we will equally appreciate. All donations can be done here.

Thank you again for the continued support, it means so much for the kids and their families. Looking forward to keeping partnering with you and we wish that you may have a merry Christmas.

Playground Fun

Women Life Skills

Puppet Show

Dental Health

Music Day

Arts Day

Building Family Relationships

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Sep 3, 2019
We don't stop, we continue transforming lives

By Diego Mosquera | Coofunder

Thanks to your support we have we provide opportunities for children to improve their nutritional conditions and develop their creative and cognitive physical competencies while supporting families to improve on internal crises and train for work from a children's canteen that provides children with breakfast daily , in addition to educational workshops for training in values, healthy lifestyle habits, art and creative reading among others. We also carry out workshops with the mamites and in the line of positive upbringing and also in culinary and artistic arts.

We have achieved many things since we started our project which we describe below:

Amount of food delivered: 5118
Amount of health day: 2
Number of workshops to promote healthy, recreational and art life: 11
Number of workshops to promote good treatment, stress management: 2
Number of home visits: 110 (made in two time periods of 3 months)
Number of entrepreneurship workshops: 2
60 school kits delivered
120 oral hygiene kits delivered
80% have improved their nutritional condition
90% have improved their eating habits
98% say children are happy with the dining room
Interpersonal relationships among children have improved 50% reduced their bad vocabulary
85% of children have improved their healthy hygiene habits
Oral hygiene I don't have the exact data
20% fewer cases of domestic violence

There are 3 mothers developing their own commercial activities, for the workshops learned. Mothers have learned from the foundation that the child should not be mistreated but talked They have also learned how to raise their children better, how to feed them, and many other things and all this we do because we are interested in children being able to have the favorable conditions for integral development, growing in protective environments and overcoming their difficult situations. . We want our children to be happy. We notice the improvement of the nutritional status, the decrease in the levels of abuse and the improvement of life habits in terms of health, hygiene and behavior and improvement in social interaction, and it also favors community integration among beneficiary caregivers. and generates entrepreneurship practices in mothers.

we dream of having a place where learning environments of English, technology, music arts are created where children can count on all the resources to develop their skills and ultimately that this project can be taken to all vulnerable areas of the city of Cartagena .

Your support is essential for this project to continue and we can reach many more families.

Links:

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