It’s been another fantastic term at the El Rio Foundation with more participants taking part in our weekly clubs and activities than ever before. Thanks to our long-term funding partners, our crowd-funders, our hostel guests and El Rio hostel itself, we are now delivering over 100 hours of activities every week in our local area. Please see an album of our July – September highlights HERE.

To help us reach our end of year funding targets, we have recently launched our El Rio Games = JOY fundraiser for 2023. Every £6 donated = 1 hour of JOY and education in our local area for an average of 20 children. Please do share the campaign with anyone who might like to support – El Rio Games 2023 – Sports and arts club opportunities for every child in our local town 🙂 – JustGiving – All donations are hugely welcome 😊

As well as our new short video intro to our El Rio Foundation lead programmes for 2023-24, our former volunteer and Durham year abroad student, Jimmy Strainge, has sent us an introductory video to the Foundation from Carnival time last year, titled: ‘The El Rio Foundation: a story about family, love and joy’ – If you have a spare five minutes, it is well worth a watch!

We would also like to express our gratitude to our new partner Benchmark Holdings (read more about their amazing business HERE) who are supporting our Academic Tutoring, Community English and El Rio Games programmes in our local communities of Guachaca and Puerto Nuevo. They will be supporting over 100 children every week to access our educational, sporting and environmental programmes. Please click HERE to see some photos and videos of their programme in action.

As well as our standard weekly timetable, this term through the El Rio Games, we have also delivered six huge community festival days. A super sports club at the Police station involving children from all the communities in which we work, a Football, Frisbee and environmental workshop in the Indigenous Community of Quebrada del Sol and an incredible Circus show celebration in Puerto Nuevo. Our community football programme has continued to go from strength to strength with this term’s big events: a Girl’s world cup football tournament to coincide with the Women’s World Cup in Australia and a Boy’s football tournament with an epic 20 penalty shoot out in the semi-final stage. Finally, we supported the GUACHACA, COLOMBIANNISSIMA festival, a ginormous all-Guachaca schools festival involving 400+ children.

A huge thank you to Daniel Maldonado, our El Rio Games lead and the whole team for delivering such amazing and consistently joyous events! And thank you to the Richardson Family for sponsoring 10+ of our El Rio Games sports and arts clubs over the last 3 years! 🙂

Our Environmental education lead volunteer Angelica Rojas, who is in charge of our pilot programme, has also been extremely busy running 2 Earth weeks, with activities every day focusing on the themes of Biodiversity (Aug) and Soil (Sep). Highlights included visiting the Botanical Garden with Little Kids’ activities group and the trip to Yay Sustainable for children from four different communities to learn about perma-culture. Outside of the Earth weeks, we were also invited by Gitana del Mar to take part in the Trees and Seas festival, planting manglars and being attacked by a swarm of bees, was both very memorable and exciting for all the participants (a bit like a scene from Jumanji) but everyone came back smiling at the end 🙂

After a very successful pilot, we are now seeking a funder for our Environmental education programme for 2024 to help address the huge gaps in knowledge in our local area and inspire positive and pro-active climate action from the 550+ children, we work with, and their families. If you would like any more information about the programme, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

At Little Kids’ activities this terms highlights included a large sports club, a cooking workshop, Love and friendship day and a talent show! Our lead teacher Paola Bolaño’s feedback nicely captures the impact of the special events at LKA: ‘Love and Friendship day was the BEST day! The children really embraced the day 100% and loved all the little details! The activity with the chef, where the children made waffles was also extremely FUN and rewarding for the kids.’

At the La Vida and Lata Foundation sponsored Tutoring programme, where we have 70+ children accessing additional academic support each week, we would like to congratulate the Buritaca group who had the best behaviour and attendance and were rewarded with an extremely fun trip to El Laberinto Macondo. If you would like to read about the Impact of the programme from the first half of the year, please do so HERE.

And thank you to our brilliant Community English teaching team that have overseen great progress in all communities at Tutoring and with our 30+ hostel staff and for adults in the local community. We realised recently that all our area leads in the hostel, including our amazing hostel manager Ellie, are graduates of our Community English programme. The hostel is therefore extremely proud of the programme and the impact it continues to has on the future job prospects of all participants 🙂

A huge thank you also to our Indigenous Community Programme English teacher for the last six months, Sebastian, who gave up his salary to take on the role has had a huge impact in Q.del Sol. Pupils have been actively seeking more opportunities to learn English while he has been there and they have even set up a letter writing exchange with a primary school in Buckinghamshire, England. If you would like to find out more about our Indigenous Community Programme, please click HERE.
 

And lastly, in September in Bogota and in October in Copenhagen (luckily Ben was in Europe already), we were invited to the Hostelworld conference to share our hostel/foundation model and encourage other hostels across the world to start community projects and have a positive impact in their local area. We received great feedback from the hostel community and we are very hopeful more hostels will embrace Foundation Wednesdays and use the power of volunteering and fun to have a positive long-term impact for their hostel guests and local community.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us to build to this stage. We are now also on the look-out for funding partners for our 2024 lead educational programmes. If you have any ideas for potential new funding avenues or partners who would like to bring education and joy to our local area, please don’t hesitate to send them our way. All and any ideas are very welcome 🙂

For the latest updates from the foundation, please follow us @elriofoundation or email foundation@elriohostel.com.

Thanks very much for supporting our local community.

Kind regards,

Felix and the El Rio Foundation team