By Diego Ontaneda | Co-Founder & CEO
Hello from LALA!
We hope that 2022 is treating you well, and allowing you to reconnect in-person with more of your loved ones and hobbies.
Thanks to supporters like you, LALA has had a strong and exciting start to the year, as 2022 marked the beginning of our three year plan to triple our annual student intake from 500 to 1,500, with a goal of bringing 500 young leaders into LALA in Spanish, Portuguese, and English programs each year by 2025. Thank you for your commitment to sustainable development in Latin America and for believing in the potential of the next generation to transform their communities!
Please find more information below on some key accomplishments that your support made possible for LALA, and learn about our upcoming plans!
Preparing for 3x growth:
In order to achieve our 3x student intake goals, LALA must (i) scale our outreach capacity to find more high quality and high potential applicants while maintaining our focus on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access (DEIA), (ii) scale our operational capacity to sustain 3x growth, and (iii) scale our ecosystem’s capacity to enrich the LALA leadership journeys of our students after their initial leadership bootcamp.
In our last report, we shared more detail about our plans and advancements for DEIA-focused outreach across the region. We are applying our DEIA experience in Brazil to guide our growth across Hispanic Latin America. In Brazil, we redesigned our recruitment machine by focusing our efforts to find BIPOC students through local partners, ensuring our diversity reflects the reality of the region, and empowering BIPOC alums to self-organize & co-lead the change with us.
The early results from LALA Brazil are encouraging: 60% of participants at our next Bootcamp in Portuguese self-identify as BIPOC! 90% of students receive financial aid, and 70% come from underrepresented backgrounds.
While we continue to prioritize our DEIA recruitment, LALA has begun 2022 with a heavy focus on our operational and ecosystem capacity building. We are excited to share the progress with you!
Our team has been growing!:
LALA’s mission to change the lives of over 10,000 Latin American young leaders takes deep commitment, skill, alignment of purpose, and a dedicated team.
Our team has been growing along with LALA, and some of the recent members to join our team are: Ecosystem Junior Manager Maria Clara who manages the infrastructures that support alumni engagement & development; Bootcamp Operations Manager Carolina Santos who works on scaling LALA’s entrypoint programs across the Latin American region; and Senior Manager of High Impact Careers Patricia Santana who is focused on removing the barriers that prevent our students from accessing the best university and career opportunities to reach their greatest potential.
We are very excited to continue to build and grow in a way that elevates the impact that LALA is spearheading both in the short term and long term. Our dream is to transform our region and change the world together, and thus we will continue to invite talented and tenacious professionals to join the team.
Organizing our Ecosystem:
With the growth of our community to over 1200 alumni and 20 ecosystem programs, and our projected 3x short-term growth, LALA unified recruitment into a single Ecosystem Application to streamline participation for both volunteers and program owners.
In January, we gathered an Ecosystem Application Task Force of 7 people, composed of representatives for tech, promotion, DEIA and programs to design a smooth process. On February 12th, we launched the application and received a total of 245 candidates by March 6th. Our goal was to distribute opportunities more equitably and improve volunteer retention rates. It was a huge coordination effort, but we are happy to say that we reached 80% of our recruitment goal!
The verdict is still out on how the EcosApp will influence the volunteer experience for Wind & Fire Season programming (March to August). Our hope is that LALums were better able to schedule their engagement with LALA among other priorities with school, work and family. We plan to collect volunteer feedback at the end of the season and launch the 2nd edition of the EcosApp in August, looking ahead to the Earth & Water Seasons (August to February).
2020-2023 Campaign Goal:
We are excited to report that we are well on track for our 2020-2023 Campaign Goals! Of our US$4.5M fundraising target, we have already received US$1.85M and have another US$1.05M committed for 2022-23, totalling US$2.9M, or 64% of our Campaign target!!
Thanks to the generous support of The Efrusy Family Foundation, we have now purchased facilities in Medellin to house our Leadership Academy! With this small five-storey apartment building, we will begin to develop our modular urban campus concept. We will now begin to evaluate the neighboring houses in the area for attractive opportunities that we can use immediately for housing (student & faculty), office space, and for the optionality for future development. As we continue to look at expanding our footprint, please let us know if you’d be interested in partnering with us in this area!
We are honored to be among the first partners of the Plataforma Vélez Reyes (PVR), the philanthropic vehicle that David Vélez and Mariel Reyes have created to bring to life their inspirational public commitment to Latin American development. PVR has committed a US$50K lead grant and a 30% match on donations to LALA (with a US$200K cap!).
We are thrilled to have been selected to join Imaginable Futures’ portfolio. This is a huge testament to the incredible work our team has been doing, and we are optimistic for the possibilities that this partnership will unlock.
Accel Partners has made a generous pledge of US$150K/yr for the next three years! If you would like to explore how your company might partner with LALA too, we’d love to talk about it!
If you would like to learn more about how to get more involved with our Campaign, don’t hesitate to reach out to juntos@somoslala.org!
As we enter this new scaling phase and increase the depth of development offerings in LALA's Ecosystem, we need your partnership!
"Obrigracias" from the entire LALA community, your support is making an impact across Latin America.
Gratefully,
Diego Ontaneda, Co-Founder & CEO
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