Guayaquil, Ecuador - The first stop on my trip was in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where I visited with GFC grantee partner Fundación Crecer (Growth Foundation). This organization provides academic support, individualized psychosocial interventions, and recreational opportunities to working children and children living on the streets.

At Fundación Crecer, I had the chance to meet about 50 students, who make up half of the youth served by the foundation. They were in the midst of exams and seemed to be very focused and serious, working in separate classrooms according to age and level. While Crecer’s program is not their formal education, it does provide much-needed structure for the part of the day that these young people are not in formal school. There are two “shifts,” morning and afternoon, so students who attend formal school in the afternoon come to Fundación Crecer in the morning and vice versa. At Crecer, they learn academic subjects to complement their school curriculum, but they also have the chance to play, to garden, to eat together, and to explore their own creativity through writing, drawing, and other activities.

Last year, GFC funded literary expression workshops at Crecer, and I was thrilled when the executive director, Pastora Castro, shared with me the products of this program. The products were two exquisitely illustrated virtual children’s books that each encapsulated a piece of the reality that the child authors faced. One of the books was created by the younger children, and the other by the older children. The children worked for an hour each day with a teacher trained in this unique methodology, developing a plot, characters, and a “moral” for the story, and then writing, illustrating, and ultimately presenting the story in the form of a children’s book. These books were then scanned into the computer and shared with the 90 other organizations that make up Red Amiga, a network of children’s groups in Guayaquil that was created by Fundación Crecer.

My visit to Fundación Crecer reminded me of the important role our partners play beyond providing basic education and services to at-risk children and youth. By encouraging creativity, self-reflection, and free expression, Fundación Crecer helps to build self-confidence and challenges program participants to imagine possibilities beyond the streets of Guayaquil.

Susanna Shapiro is GFC’s Program Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean