| Dear friends of the El Rio Foundation, In our first newsletter of the year, we are incredibly delighted to announce that Rio Hostel, Buritaca has been named the Hostelworld Community Super-hero BEST Hostel in the world for 2024 🌎 ❤️🥳 A huge thank you to everyone who has helped us to win this award. To our amazing amazing team and to our local community, especially all the incredible young people we work with, thank you for embracing our projects and inspiring us every day. To our funding partners @lavida.uk @latafoundation, BMK Holdings, @climbersshop, the Richardson Family, the Frere-Cooks, GivetoColombia US, our crowd-funders and our wonderful hostel guests who bring energy and joy to our local community every week. And to our long-term volunteers, the heart of the Foundation. And to @riohostels, the best home a Foundation could wish for. Thank you for supporting us in everything we do. And to our whole community! Our beyond incredible hostel staff, parents, teachers, under 5s, our funding and community partners, everyone! The community award is always won by the whole community and we couldn’t be prouder or happier to win with you ❤️ |
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| We are also delighted to share our Annual Review from 2023 detailing the highlights from each community programme. It was an absolutely stellar year with our participant enjoyment rating at our activities of 9.84/10. We also made huge strides with our wellbeing support across all programmes. Participant numbers continued to grow and through each project we captured powerful case studies which highlight the huge importance of our work: ‘When I dance I feel safe. Dancing is what I love the most! Dance is more than a passion. It’s part of me. I dance because there is no better feeling than moving around the room with the music. I dance because my body asks for it and my soul needs it. And it makes me feel so happy! I see dancing as a way of communicating between the body and the soul. To express what is really deep inside.’ – Mayerin, 14 years old. |
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| And 2024 has carried on where we left off. 600+ children from 7 communities accessing our educational, sporting, environmental and wellbeing programmes each week. This term’s highlights include our Academic Tutoring reward trip to the Pony club for 27 children with high attendance and the best behaviour. And for CARNAVAL, possibly our favourite week of the year, we organised a huge Carnival themed Super sports club (with 120+ children and 40+ volunteers) in Las Cabanas, complete with Carnival parade. Please see the festival day video HERE. And the Carnaval Pescaito parade in Santa Marta. The most joyous of occasions where our Los Linderos and P.Nuevo dance groups joined the parade for 2 hours before performing in front of 1,500+ strong crowd. ‘To dance through the streets at the Carnival is a beautiful experience…it is a huge happiness to watch my friends smile and enjoy something all-together’ – Buritaca dancer. |
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| We also celebrated Women’s day with a short video and organised a volunteer led Earth week. Activities included clay painting with an environmental theme at Little Kids Activities, planning a community mural with our community partners Costeño Social, and running a large Inclusive sports club and environmental learning day for 95 teenagers in the Indigenous Community of Q.del Sol. ‘At the earth week festival day in Q.del Sol we discussed how best to communicate key environmental knowledge to all communities along the Troncal. It was a great day and we had a good week in general but I was left with the feeling of how much more impact we could achieve with a small amount of funding directed towards the programme. Hopefully we will find a funding partner soon.’ Our full weekly timetable has been up and running and behind the scenes we have been working hard on our social media (huge thanks to Melinda, Sawsan, Lola and Ximena in particular) – please check out our Instagram profile HERE for the latest updates throughout the year. |
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| We are rather guilty of always accentuating the positive things that are happening through the Foundation through our external comms but it is also important to reflect on the huge challenges in our local area (please see page 3 for more details e.g chronically under-funded education system, very little wellbeing support, violence still a huge issue in a post-conflict zone etc.) Attempted suicides in families, a mother dying, parents leaving, violence at home, eating disorders, parents with substance abuse, peer to peer violence, poverty and violence against women and girls are all problems our participants have faced this year and so the work of the Foundation now goes so much deeper than when we first started with our once-a-week football club. |
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| Over the last four years, we have built an incredible team and have a proven track record of success in the design and implementation of tailored community programmes to support children’s education and wellbeing. The huge amount of trust we have built in the community now gives us the perfect base to have a huge and sustained impact for all young people living along the Troncal del Caribe. We are in an exciting place in that we have now defined how the capability and potential we have in our current team can best address the huge need in our local area. The missing piece is funding. We therefore welcome all ideas for new potential funding avenues (or with existing partners) to help us continue and expand our provision to all young people facing hugely daily challenges. |
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| We are really proud of winning the ‘Best Hostel in the world award’ for our community programmes but the feeling in our team is that we are all raring to go to the next level of delivery and impact in our local area! Thanks again to everyone who has and is supporting us! We are incredibly grateful and hugely motivated to fulfil our potential in 2024 and have our best year yet! Hope you everyone had fantastic Easters! And please don’t hesitate to get in touch with all and any ideas on possible funding routes for our 2024 Community Programmes. Kind regards, Felix and the El Rio Foundation team. |
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