From Little Seeds, Big Dreams and even Bigger Achievements.
A proportion of our income goes towards projects that support children and young adults in vulnerable communities, in particular within territories that were part of the conflict and civil war in Colombia, which dates back to 1949.
We support, for example, the Semillitas infant school project in the Siloe neighborhood of Cali, Colombia, an urban area to the west of the city which began as an ‘invasion’ by individuals and families from rural areas further to the south of the country, fleeing zones fought over by drug gangs and guerrilla groups where there was little or no state presence. It is now one of the largest neighborhoods in the city.
The school has 60 or so nursery-age children, most of whom are parented by their mothers, the fathers having lost their lives in the conflict.
The school, housed in facilities donated by the mayor’s office, runs two sessions – one in the morning, one in the afternoon – also seeks to provide food and refreshments. Lunch is provided for children of both sessions. Most of the children, when they first arrive at the school to be enrolled, arrive malnourished.
The Brewchange Group has been working for some years now with the school, helping with teachers’ salaries, with books, curriculum development, and with food and drink, including working with different actors within the city to help ensure a more constant and predictable supply of food for the daily lunches – a perennial challenge.
Children pay no fee for attendance; between the mayor’s office and private help and assistance, they seek to do the best they can. The medium-term aim is to grow the facility to be able to offer more places; demand from single mothers, most of whom work as maids or in retail stores across the city, or who are seeking such work, is constantly growing.
The rationale behind our support for Semillitas is to encourage safe, constructive spaces for children within an urban context where many are simply left at home, the door locked, with little or no food, by their mothers or carers during the day, for want of somewhere else to send them. This way, we feel we are contributing, however modestly, to producing a larger cohort of children within the city with access to a stimulating and predictable daily environment, who might then go on to enroll in, and benefit from, secondary school.
The nutritional aspect to the school’s work should, of course, not be overlooked; it is critical within the learning process that children have enough to eat. In so many schools in Colombia and indeed in the wider Latin American region, children of all age groups ‘desert’ their schooling when insufficient food and drink is provided.
If you’d like to understand more about our work here at the Brewchange Foundation or to get involved with us on this or any other of our projects, then please do get in touch. With best wishes, Brewchange Foundation team.
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