Child Aid

The mission of Child Aid is to identify and work with talented and committed indigenous groups and individuals in Latin America and help them build brighter futures for their children and their communities.

Building Brighter Futures

For 20 years Child Aid has been working in Latin America to help create brighter futures for the children of the rural, indigenous poor. Our model is to find and work closely with local individuals who have passion, commitment and drive. Experience has taught us that it is not big projects but committed individuals who create real and lasting change in their communities. We are blessed to work with some of the most dedicated and hardworking local partners, helping them to realize their dream of a brighter future for their children and communities.

How We Work Child Aid is often asked how we get around the fact that we have so few employees. We don’t get around it. We plan for it. Our mission is to find those individuals in Guatemala and Mexico who have the type of drive and vision organizations in the US would seek out in leaders. We then provide these individuals or groups with the resources, training and organizational skills that they need to expand their capacity and become sustainable institutions. When organizations focus on projects and not people, once the “gringo” is gone, the projects generally fall apart. In contrast, when the local people are trained, given resources and take ownership, true community change happens. So, while we do not have many employees, we have many partners.

As we grow, we continually reassess our work to ensure that we have sufficient trained employees and/or volunteers to oversee our work. We then look to see if our present funding levels or projected fundraising goals can support any human resource expansion.

Guatemala More than 50 percent of Guatemalans cannot read beyond the simplest of words. Books are prohibitively expensive in Guatemala and libraries scarce. With our local partners we work to curb rampant illiteracy by building libraries in some of the poorest and most marginalized communities in Guatemala. Together we have helped build, stock and supply over 25 libraries and 14 small computer centers across the country. For schools without libraries, our partner PROBIGUA runs the only mobile libraries in Guatemala, bringing by bus, the power of reading to the remotest corners of the country.

After partnering to help build and stock libraries, Child Aid realized that to assure these community libraries would have the greatest impact, programs were needed to train librarians and teachers. Most community librarians have little if any training in how to organize and run a library. In addition neither the librarians nor the public school teachers have any training in literacy education or programs.

To address these serious needs, • Child Aid created an extensive and growing program of Librarian and Teacher Training. • Child Aid’s staff and volunteers work directly with local librarians to create school and vacation reading programs, to catalogue books, to create lending systems and design long term plans to address the communities’ needs and interests. • Child Aid’s staff teaches classes in active reading to future teachers from small rural villages so that when they return to their villages they can rapidly impact illiteracy. • Child Aid works directly with local library committees to help them build their organizational structure and support.

In addition to our work with libraries and teachers, we provide hundreds of scholarships to students who could not attend school including broad support of a community partner who runs a Montessori type preschool that prepares children from poor backgrounds to succeed in school. This program has an over 90% success rate in a country where on average rural indigenous children complete only 1 ½ years of schooling. Evidence of the power of working with dedicated local people.

Oaxaca, Mexico Child Aid and its local partner CORAL help impoverished deaf and hard-of-hearing children break out of the lonely world of silence with early screening, affordable audiology services, speech therapy, hearing-health education, outreach and advocacy. All CORAL’s programs and services are designed to fully integrate deaf people into their families, schools and communities so that they may lead richer lives. The only organization of its type in Southern Mexico, CORAL assists more than 1000 hearing-disabled individuals and their families annually. Each year young children who could never have dreamed of attending school are mainstreamed into the public schools and given a chance for a brighter future.