Thank you very much for your fantastic support in 2024 and Happy New Year! I’m afraid I’ve got carried away and it’s rather long, so please do feel free to dip in and out of our winter edition! 🙂
Christmas Ferias:
We start our round up with our end of year Christmas Ferias celebration. We were honoured to help launch the new Bellavista park in Buritaca and joined 20+ local stalls, adding a variety of fun and festive activities, building towards our end of year shows from the Tutoring groups, Little Kids’ Activities and our first ever dance and theatre performance in front of a 250+ strong crowd!
The performance was sensational and to say the actors enjoyed putting it on is a massive under-statement, Andrea fed back ‘I loved everything about the rehearsals and the performance. I was nervous and very happy to see so many people in the crowd, but I feel so happy and I would like to do it again 1,000 times!’ Mayerin added: ‘Thank you to Profe Lily for believing in us, making us believe in ourselves and for your dedication and love in your work with us.’
And Nina Arias from Fundación Sierra Artist residency shared, ‘We were thrilled to be a part of the El Rio Foundation’s Christmas Ferias. It was such a special gathering of local artisans, friends, business owners and the local community. It is so nice to have events like this that bring us all together.’
A huge thank you to all those who donated the amazing raffle prizes and to Guy and Piers Frere-cook and Juana Sanchez for working hard behind the scenes to make the large all-community event such a success.
Academic Tutoring and Community English programme:
At Tutoring, the end of the school year brought the excitement of exams and we are delighted that pupils from all our Tutoring groups performed above average across all subjects and excelled in particular in their school English exams.
Melany-Sofia got the highest test scores in Guachaca primary school, Valeria the same in Buritaca secondary school, achieving 95/100. And Yulibeth also fed back that her daughter aced her final year of high school English exam, ‘My daughter Lina, thanks to the classes she took in Buritaca with the El Rio Foundation and the teacher’s guidance, achieved one of the highest scores in English on the ICFES (national standardized tests for the final year of high school).’
These results are particularly pleasing for our schools’ community English programme with 77 children accessing regular Foundation led school English lessons throughout 2024.
And the participants, importantly, fed back very positively about the classes. ‘I like to participate in all the activities of the Foundation because I always have fun while I’m learning something new and with English I can communicate better with the foreigners that come to visit our country and in the future I would like to teach English so others can have the same experience that I’m having.’ Wendymar, 10 years old.
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To watch our Academic Tutoring Video Impact report for 2024 please click HERE.
The final term included celebrations and trips to reward the students’ high attendance and commitment to Tutoring over the last six months. The Halloween horror maze, that we will come to shortly, the Villacuiza Finca trip, the Yay Sustainable Eco-Hotel day-out, the Natillada and sports festival in Los Linderos and the Beach games celebration in Las Cabanas were all end of term festivities that were thoroughly enjoyed by all.
Continuing our commitment to facilitating external partners to bring expertise, joy and enthusiasm to the programme, we also ran a series of creative and creative writing and science workshops. Jose Bolivar from Guachaca also went from beginner to winning the regional schools chess competition in three months!
A huge thank you to our funding partners La Vida, the Lata Foundation, the FIFA Foundation and Benchmark holdings for supporting 80+ children each week to access the educational and wellbeing support they need. A big thank you also to our external partners running workshops, especially Laura Andrade for a morning training our Tutoring teaching team on ‘how to promote peace through education in post-conflict areas.’
El Rio Games
The El Rio Games programme has continued to provide 350+ children with multi-sports activities each week, however this term’s highlight was the two-day team-building El Rio Games festival for El Rio Hostel staff. Activities included a shooting range, an obstacle course involving a beach tunnel, a river swim and an egg and spoon race, Ultimate Frisbee in a river, Fitness challenges, Interactive English and Dance. We are very grateful to El Rio Hostel and their amazing staff for being so supportive of everything we do, so it was brilliant to connect with 80+ team members in two afternoons filled with team-work and fun! Thank you also to everyone who came out to support our Taco-Colombia fundraiser to re-develop the local Basketball court. We are now only £290 away from our El Rio Games funding target for 2024. All donations are still very gratefully received 🙂 – please click HERE to donate.
Community football programme supported by the FIFA Foundation
In the final quarter of the year, thanks to our new partnership with the FIFA Foundation, we had a big focus on football. Through the programme, we have trained five local football coaches, run four boys and four girls community football sessions each week and have organised two girls pathway clubs in schools. Overall, we have grown to now having 230 participants taking part each and every week! We have set up the first junior girls football league ever on the coast and we have created strong pathways through football onto our other educational and wellbeing programmes.
The goal of the year came in the Guachaca schools football tournament final, where Wilfranyer, just after conceding a last-minute equaliser, in the final seconds of the game, in the grand final, to complete his hat-trick in front of his home crowd, scored the winner to win the Cup. The stuff of dreams. To watch this iconic moment, please click HERE.
We also ran an Indigenous community football programme pilot and are very hopeful to be able to include the Indigenous town of Q.del Sol in the full programme next year. The Salvia Madre Super-copa, on a beautiful grass pitch and the end of year Santa Marta football tournament on a synthetic surface, meant twelve teams got to experience football like they’d never experienced before. The captain of the Los Linderos junior boys team, Darwin, in his victory speech said, ‘I know we won the tournament, but look at where we are and what we are doing. We are all winners!’
Thank you very much to the FIFA Foundation for bringing such joy and education through football to our area. We have 222% more participants taking part than last year and the numbers keep growing. It is really exciting to think about what is possible in 2025 and beyond!
Indigenous Community programme:
As well as the large football tournament on 7th November, we have added a small multi-sports club for Quebrada de la Linea primary school. They didn’t have much opportunity for organised sport before so the energy and excitement at the sessions has been stratospheric throughout the term. Our Indigenous Community El Rio Games lead Alvaro fed back that his favourite moment this term was when he was leading a session there and ‘realising the magnitude of the impact we have as a Foundation.’
Environmental Education programme
Through the Environmental education programme, we have continued to create ‘We belong to the Heart of the World’ murals, the latest in Buritaca. Ami Cardenas, our art lead has also continued to organise art hikes to beaches, rivers and waterfalls and also created the beautiful back-drop for the end of year play with the Buritaca Art group. We are delighted to share that we have been provisionally selected for an Environmental infrastructure and education programme to create an environmental hub in the Las Cabanas sports field to inspire positive pro-active environmental action from 600 local children and their families. The project will be run in partnership with Common Goal, Adidas and the Indigenous Community of Quebrada del Sol as part of the Adidas ‘Move for the Planet’ Initiative.
Little Kids’ Activities programme
Little Kids’ Activities has excelled yet again this term, with the most amount of children attending regularly ever and a wide array of creative and educational activities for the participants to enjoy. Highlights include workshops focused on strengthening motor-skills, embracing the colour blue, exploring the environment, Christmas activities and connecting with parents mornings. Thank you to our teaching team Paola Bolano and Marelbis Jimenez for another year of exceptional co-ordination and impact!
Halloween Horror Maze
And where else to end than our Halloween Horror Maze event on Saturday 2nd November. Nine monsters providing three hours of terrifyingly exhilarating experiences for our Foundation participants and the local community in partnership with Laberinto Macondo and La Selvita who provided the chocolates for both children and monsters! To see Catalina Baracaldo’s photos from the event, please click HERE.
‘El Rio Foundation successfully scared us again this year with their wonderfully organized haunted labyrinth maze at the Laberinto Macondo. This is such a fun activity for kids and adults alike, especially since there are little to no options in our area to celebrate Halloween,’ Ryan Gorman, Gitana del Mar Hotel.
Conclusion
And so 2024 came to a close. The year, our home El Rio Hostel was named BEST hostel in the world by Hostelworld for the Foundation’s community programmes. A year where over 1,000 children accessed Foundation activities, with 600+ weekly participants. And a year where we can see even more clearly the amazing potential of what we are doing for our area as a whole.
There are a lot of challenges working in a post-conflict zone but with the support of external partners, we really believe the future of the Troncal del Caribe is extremely bright. To find out more about our community projects, please watch our short video introductions to each by clicking HERE.
If you have any ideas for potential funding avenues we could explore or offers of support, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
And lastly, thank you very much to our outstanding team for working so hard, being so fun, inclusive, impactful and reliable. It has been our BEST year ever! So thank you for going so BIG on your projects and bringing such JOY to the children of the Troncal del Caribe.
Happy New Year and best wishes to all.
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