Help Feed and Support 600 Students in Guatemala

The School of Hope has been a very busy place this 2nd quarter of the year! We are gearing up for our exciting 20th anniversary celebrations at the end of the month. We cannot wait to celebrate this enormous accomplishment with our students, staff, graduates, and donors! Thank you for believing in us and making our work possible over the last 20 years. 

In the last few months ago we started a new program for our junior high students which focuses on entrepreneurship.  They attend multiple class periods each week and in this course students learn how to budget, manage money, calculate expenses and set prices, and other important skills. We are partnering with another organization who is an expert in this area in order to strengthen the coursework. During this class students also learn to make different products that they can easily make from home and sell with little investment. These include soap, vases, small paintings, and other goods. Our students are very artistic and many of them have grown up working in informal sales. These courses help them learn more about the skills required to be a successful entrepreneur.  The goods they make during class are then sold to the local community and that funding is reinvested into this school program.  This program feeds into the entrepreneurial workshops that have been running with our high school students since 2021. 

Additionally, we have had the great pleasure to receive two skilled groups of volunteers over the last few months. In May we received a very important visit from a team of doctors from Moorfield Eye Hospital in the UK. They evaluated the vision of every one of our students from kindergarten to 9th grade. They determined that 102 students needed glasses and amazingly provided each and every one of those students with not only one, but two pairs of glasses. This way they will have a pair for school and for home. Our families do not have the financial means to pay for glasses which are very expensive in Guatemala. Without these amazing doctors these students would still be struggling to see and therefore unable to learn at their full capacity.  The team was very passionate, dedicated, and talented during their time at the School of Hope and we are eternally grateful for their commitment to our students’ wellbeing.  We know we will continue to partner with this talented group of doctors for years to come.  

The 2nd group of talented professionals were a group of teachers from Wisconsin who visited us through the Organization Mathkind. They spent a week in July at the School of Hope where they completed an exchange with our teachers. They helped plan and facilitate lessons, participated in joint training, and exchanged resources and ideas during their visit. We are so glad we had the opportunity to meet these talented teachers and we know this time together and the ideas and resources exchanged will have a lasting impact on our teachers and our math program.  We look forward to continuing our enriching partnership with Mathkind.