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The El Rio Foundation is the charity arm of the award winning Rio hostel, Buritaca. We run educational, sporting and environmental projects to positively impact our local community.
Thanks to the support of our funding partners, hostel guests, crowd-funders and the hostel itself, we now provide education and joy to 550+ children every week 🙂
For the latest updates, please follow us @elriofoundation
Ever since its inception, the plan was always for El Rio hostel to have a hugely positive impact in our local community. Before the hostel opened in 2017, Ben and Guy (the owners) set up community English lessons and a small recycling and waste management project, which grew to involve the majority of local hostels and hotels on the coast. In 2019, they sponsored a Community Jungle school (providing year-round education to nine children with no access to any other formal education) and started to run sports sessions in the local town. The growing community work of the hostel was sadly interrupted by the Covid pandemic, however, they were able to send out 1000 food packages to help local families with the support of Viva Air and other local hostels.
With the success of the hostel’s community work, the Foundation was formalised in June 2020. And post Covid, when face to face activities were once again possible, the Foundation started to expand. In September 2021, we ran one football session and one multi-sports session a week involving 55 children from one community. Within 15 months, we were running 20+ sports and arts clubs and we now work with 550 children each week and have seven active community programmes (link to programmes page) taking place across seven communities 🙂
The rapid growth of the Foundation is thanks to our long-term funding partners: El Rio Foundation UK (formerly the Frank Davies trust), La Vida, Lata Foundation, The Frere-Cook and the Richardson Family, our amazing hostel guests, both as volunteers and donors, our crowd-funders and the hostel itself for supporting us in everything we do and being the best home a Foundation could wish for.
Being based out of the hostel means also are our overheads as a charity are also very low (office costs, food, accommodation etc all covered), which means more of every dollar donated can go straight into the community. It also allows us to activate our wonderful guests as volunteers, who think they’re on holiday and then end up at Art club!! That could be YOU!! 🙂 – Last year, we had 1,717 guests come volunteering with us adding positivity and joy to our local community. THANK YOU!!
During the pandemic, children in our area didn’t go to school for 21 months leaving huge gaps in their education. Many children still really struggle with their reading, writing and maths as well as core every-day skills like concentration, team-working and communication.
Even now school is back up and running, there is not enough funding to provide a teacher for every class. If one teacher goes to the dentist, three grades are off school for the day. Class sizes are also very large, adding to the all-round challenging learning environment.
With limited money for teachers, schools also really struggle to provide the additional support many children need. Children with significant challenges in their home lives have very limited options for accessing external advice or support. We therefore have a full-time member of staff, Foundation psychologist Camilo Olivella, who works with individual children, our teaching team and their parents/support network to create tailored plans for our pupils with the most challenging behaviour.
The impact of the recent 55-year Colombian civil war and continued political unrest also continue to cause a whole range of socio-economic issues for local people:
‘The Troncal del Caribe has been an area impacted by violence, and the inability of the state to assist vulnerable populations has meant the Foundation plays a key role in providing spaces for community building and learning opportunities for 550+ local children every week.’
– Daniel Maldonado, El Rio Foundation community activities lead.
Our mission is to positively impact our local community by providing educational, sporting and environmental programmes for local children and adults. We especially aim to provide fun, free, inclusive, reliable and impactful programmes for all young people living in our local area.
Our vision is for all participants in our programmes to have regular access to activities they love and educational opportunities that are tailored to the support the skills they will need the most in their future lives. Our aim is to use the power of sport, education and joy to build confidence in young people and help them to overcome the significant socio-economic challenges of our local area: e.g poverty, violence, total disregard for environmental issues etc.
Our four key Foundation values are Fun, Inclusive, Impactful and Reliable. We recruit our staff and volunteers, and in large part measure the success of the programmes based on these four values.
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