Education Panama Project #25671

Empower Youth Transition from Orphanage to Society

by Transicion a la Vida

Empower Youth Transition from Orphanage to Society

Project Report | Feb 20, 2018
The Year of impacting more lives

By Lucija Rozic | Project Leader

Allyson L. 1st year student in civil engineering

“Genious is in the idea. Impact, however, comes from action.”

As we mentioned in the last report, our 2017 finished with a conclusion that the pilot proyect of implementing our social reinsertion program in two new orphanages has been successful and that we are ready to acompany more girls in their transition of becoming independent young women.

For this year, 17 girls passed the selection process and and they will be mixed in two groups with participants from three other institutions, giving in total 30 participants from 5 different institutions for the year 2018.

A part of the individual evaluations and inital inductions to the program, we have been planning the yearly calendar that will be enriched with additional technical skills such as use of technology, culinary skills, etc... and strenghtening existing modules such as how to manage personal finances, creating carreer plan, professional orientation, etc.. in order to build up their self-esteem even more and give them variety of tools to be independent emotionally and economically.

Each participant will recieve:

300h of workshops
80h of personal mentoring
30h of individual follow up
16h of professional mentoring
15h of psycological assistance

Actualizing our measurement system, we have concluded that we can create even bigger impact by adding additional "Do it Yourserlf Tasks" in different types of enviroment that our participants face. In order to achieve that we are updating all our workshops and mentoring system.

Our team is very excited to work with so many different profiles and having the challenge of mixing groups, so we can create one big network of friends that can support each other, as for participants, as for our mentors.

This is also the year that our graduates that entered last year will have their university graduation and will step up into the independent working world.

Thank you once again for the opportunity to share our passion,

Your TaV team

Meeting our new participants

Links:

Meet our website

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Nov 27, 2017
This is our 2017!

By Lucija Rozic | Project Leader

Theater classes

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

Seneca The Younger

Finishing the last months of 2017, we can officially say that the implementation of our re-integration program has been successful in the two new orphanages and overall we had no desertion from the program.

Our plan for the next year is to continue working with the same orphanages without adding new ones, but focusing more on strengthening our relations with each institution and including new participants per institution.

Right now we are in a strategic planning process of our vision for 2020 that will help us achieve bigger but sustainable impact. As an organization one of our long-term goals are:

Strengthening our governance
Opening a Transition center
Getting program endorsement from the government or other recognized international institution that works with children and adolescents

These goals will help us open doors for every substitute home/orphanage that needs support

As a part of creation of the life skills measurement system we have re-confirmed that our program answers to the needs of the institutionalized youth. We have also discovered that by re-structuring some parts we can even achieve more profound change in life skills.

Our 2017^th results are:

100% participants retention rate
88% continues with their studies
87.5% no adolescent pregnancy
33% works and studies

To give opportunity to more young women, we have started the selection process for next year and for now we have 18 new candidates from 5 different institutions. By the end of January 2018 we will finish the selection and induction processes.

The only thing that is left to finish this year experiences is our theater play “La Principita” which all of us are very excited and nervous about =) and of course the graduation of 10 participants that have finished the two year program and are ready to start their emotionally and economically independent life.

Thank you once again for being our silent players behind the scene and making all of this possible.

Sincerely,

Your TaV team

Getting to know our future participantes

Links:

meet our new website

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Aug 28, 2017
Finishing the first semester...

By Lucija Rozic | Project Leader

The focus of this period was creating connections between all of our participants. In total we have 24 participants divided in three groups from different orphanages, so we did activities where all of them participated.

There are various objectives to this. Networking, new experiences that would help them create friendships for lifetime, understanding that there are more people in similar or worse situations than each one of them, and to expose them to different social situations where they need to apply skills that we have been promoting for the last 7 months.

We did workshop in an orphanage for young girls that were abused and with children, we had a touching workshop about values and forgiveness, we visited the Bio Museum to learn more about the geography of Panamá, we strengthened the subject of sexual education, etc. But the peak of this period has been our two day seminar, Potenciate, where we tried to raise awareness about social responsibility and how our actions have an effect on the society. One of the most impactful subjects was positivity through uncertainty where we tried to encourage our participants not to be afraid of the future and outcomes they don't know. Not to be afraid to take uncertain decisions because that will make them proactive instead of reactive decision maker.

Of course the fun part of the seminar was celebrating the end of the first semester. We celebrated on the beach playing team building games, football, volleyball and we had an opportunity to teach them something basic but really important, how to swim. All of the participants finished the first semester, some with better grades, others with average, but there were none dropouts.

As an organization we already knew how it is to work with institucionalized youth, but this semester was full of new learnings about working with youth that on top of all of the usual deficiencies (lack of resilience, aspirations and others) have different cultural beliefs.

Each orphanage/shelter homes that we work with has different characteristics and this was just a reminder that we need to stay open-minded and flexible to be able to give the best chance to all of the participants, no matter from what environment they come from.

Thank you once again for being part of this help and learn process

Sincerely,

Your TaV team

Links:

Meet our new website

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