Thanks to our sponsors, we have been able to provide support for our families beyond free education. Unfortunately, many of our families have such pressing challenges and have not had the opportunity to receive an education themselves, therefore they don’t always give the gift of education the value they perhaps should, but have shown extreme gratitude when given support in the areas of medical care, food distributions, or housing.
You can see from this chart that 31.6% of our parents and guardians reported not going to any school or did not answer the question. Just 22.9% reported attending any high school, (9-12th grade), with just one person attending college. Therefore, we are working with a population that did not spend their childhood attending school, for the most part, and have different habits and attitudes, compared to parents who have received a proper education.
We find that when we provide food distributions for families of students who have regular attendance, it motivates other parents to improve their children’s attendance. We’re trying to find a way to internalize discipline pertaining to going to school regularly and on time in the absence of applied truancy laws. Being able to help out with rent when a parent has had an accident and is out of work, or help pay for a necessary surgery has helped to gain trust and increased positive attitudes among parents. We normally create a fundraiser when such situations come up and share it among our other projects for which we are seeking support.
We hope to be able to better reach our parents in the near future with workshops touching on topics such as child discipline, nutrition, and reproduction education. The plan is to hold a monthly family movie night where we interrupt the movie at some point with the short workshop. This is a work in progress, but if you are interested in helping out by developing materials such as short videos for this purpose, or being present at the events, we would love to hear from you!
Lastly, click here to learn more about our second hand store.
Project Esperanza 