AVANCE REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL

Jessica Hipchen MNPO 7010

Spring 2015

STATEMENT OF QUALIFICATIONS:

History of the OrganizationHonduras Hope is a 501c3 non-profit organization serving the department of Yoro, Honduras with headquarters in Franconia, New Hampshire. Their mission is to empower economically and politically marginalized people in rural Honduras to create stronger, more resilient, self-sufficient communities. Founded 13 years ago as a small project in Newton, MA in response to the devastation in Yoro caused by Hurricane Mitch, Honduras Hope has expanded over the years to meet the needs of families, primarily women and children, such as health and wellness, education, infrastructure development, economic development, and community engagement. Today, Honduras Hope has helped hundreds of children obtain an education through the distribution of scholarships, the building and renovation of local schools, and the purchase and reconstruction of a boarding house used for a residential program for students who could not otherwise attend school given the distance they would have to walk.

In order to meet the expansive needs of children, Honduras Hope created and funded a kindergarten program; a service the country does not provide. Through support from community members, Honduras Hope has been able to launch kindergarten programs in Plan Grande and San Jose. In Plan Grande, Honduras Hope pays the salary of the kindergarten teacher directly. In San Jose, Honduras Hope provided services and materials in exchange for the government’s addition of a kindergarten teacher.

By partnering with local schools and empowering women and children to understand the importance of education while nurturing a sense of shared responsibility for the greater well-being of the community, Honduras Hope gives people hope and shows them their opportunities. Integrating the AVANCE curriculum into the kindergarten program in Plan Grande and San Jose will broaden the impact that Honduras Hope has on these families.

Contact Information

Address: Honduras HopePO Box 60Franconia, NH, 03580

Program Coordinator:Bill BriggsWbriggs507@aol.com603-616-2133

Grant Consultant:Jessica Hipchenjhipchen1225@gmail.com912-242-2572

Services currently provided by the organization, to include demographics of families served, facilities/space available, and community support partnerships:Honduras Hope works through local community boards in Plan Grande and San Jose to determine needs, prioritize projects, and evaluate programs. Based on the collaboration between Honduras Hope and the boards, five broad service categories have been created.

Health and Wellness Education and Vocational Training Infrastructure Development Economic Development Community Engagement

Health and WellnessThree factors affect the health and wellness of the people Honduras Hope serves: living conditions, poverty and education level, and social services. Recognizing these factors, Honduras Hope has three health and wellness projects.

The first is the San Jose Health Clinic. In its eleventh year, the clinic promotes general well-being and disease prevention in the community and serves five surrounding villages. Honduras Hope built the clinic facility and covers the cost for medicine, facility maintenance, and the salary of a nurse. Without the health clinic the nearest facility is a four-hour walk away. In coordination with the Health Department of Yoro, the clinic provides vaccinations and medicine on a regular basis. The clinic provides free vitamins to all children under the age of twelve, and free prenatal vitamins to expecting mothers. The clinic nurse conducts outreach classes regarding nutrition, sanitation, and health education. She provides birth control shots to some women and family planning education. 

The second project is the Nutrition and Feeding Program in Plan Grande. Women from the community get together three times a week to prepare meals for the children under six years of age. Vitamins for the improved nutrition of children and mothers are also available. Honduras

Hope is in the process of expanding this program to San Jose and adding a kitchen gardening element to the program.

The final running project in this area is the Compostable Latrine Project pilot program, launched in 2013. Many of the houses use holes in the ground as latrines. Unfortunately with heavy rainfalls, the waste often runs off to those people living downhill. The compostable latrine provides a more sanitary method for dealing with human waste. The pilot latrine was built at the school in San Jose where children were trained on usage. Since then, the project has expanded, building a total of 75 latrines in local homes.   Education and Vocational TrainingHonduras Hope has programs focused at all levels of the education system; early childhood, primary, secondary, vocational training, college, and adult education. About 60% of their annual budget is spent supporting education programs. In total, there are seven programs up and running.

Prior to Honduras Hope’s arrival, Plan Grande had no elementary schools, and the San Jose school needed significant maintenance and expansion. Now that Honduras Hope has built each town an elementary school, the government is supplying 1st-6th grade teachers, and all children can attend. Honduras Hope has a program in place to identify kids who are not coming to school so they can help remove barriers to enable their attendance.

The focus of this RFP is to integrate the AVANCE curriculum into the already existing Kindergarten program. As mentioned previously, the Honduran government does not provide a kindergarten program. Through the contributions and support of community members, Honduras Hope has been able to launch kindergarten programs in both schools. In Plan Grande, Honduras Hope pays the salary of the kindergarten teacher directly and in San Jose they provided services and materials in exchange for Honduras’s addition of a kindergarten teacher. Working in collaboration with Honduras Hope and the two schools in Plan Grande and San Jose, AVANCE will create an even larger impact than there is now.

Secondary school is optional in Honduras. While it is publically funded, there are costs associated with attendance; shoes, uniforms, books, fees, supplies, and loss of family support with childcare or farming. Honduras Hope helps enable any student who wants to continue their education by covering the costs of these fees and working with parents to foster their support.

Students from San Jose have to walk four hours each way to attend middle and high school. Honduras Hope has built and manages a boarding house and dormitories in Yoro, so San Jose youth can continue secondary school. The boarding house can accommodate approximately thirty people. The Boarding house has house parents who provide a warm, family-type

environment for the students. Honduras Hope covers all expenses for room, board, school fees, supplies, house maintenance, and salaries for the house parents and helpers.Honduras Hope supports two alternative secondary school programs. These include a weekend education program and a home schooling radio-based program. These programs make it possible for students who need to participate in family life and family farming during weekdays to go to school. These options are also available to adults who want to continue their secondary school education but were unable to earlier in life. Approximately forty-five students have participated in this program.

Honduras Hope currently assists thirteen college students pursuing degrees: eight young women and five young men. Each arrangement is uniquely based on their course of study, the school they attend, and their personal ability to assist with the costs.  They have had a few students graduate or discontinue their post-secondary education. In all cases the students are now able to provide financial assistance to their families.

Yoro has a private vocational school, CEVER, that Honduras Hope helps to support. It was founded 40 years ago through the congregational church but is now severely underfunded. Honduras Hope sees this school as a critical job-training program and is working to help revitalize the school. They have contributed equipment and supplies to enhance the quality of the existing programs. They have also built a culinary and hospitality school to prepare youth for jobs in the hotel and restaurant industry. Meeting its goal of opening its doors in the summer of 2014, the culinary school has been operating for almost one year. Most of the programs at CEVER attract boys. Honduras Hope is at the early stages of creating a cosmetology school at CEVER to help provide job opportunities for girls.

Infrastructure DevelopmentOver the years, Honduras Hope has helped numerous families improve their living situation. They have provided over ninety roofs and concrete floors, and have helped build concrete homes for numerous families. Honduras Hope has also installed 25 pilas (water storage devices that are

used for washing clothes, bathing, and doing dishes). Currently, neither town has electricity. In the past, Honduras Hope has helped to install solar lights for Plan Grande. Now they are working on funding an extension of the electric lines from the city of Yoro into Plan Grande.

Clean water is also an issue. In San Jose, the current source of water is dirty and drying up. Honduras Hope is working to fund a project to pipe water from 3 kilometers away into the village. Once they have a reliable water source they will then work to install water filters in each home for clean drinking water. They successfully piloted these low cost water filters in the boarding house and are also going to provide them to the homes in Plan Grande.

Honduras Hope will continue to look at improving the four-hour walking access from San Jose to Yoro. There is a stream crossing that requires a footbridge for high water times. This project is a discussion item for prioritization in the coming year. 

Economic DevelopmentHonduras Hope has made notable economic development progress in Plan Grande. The Women’s cooperative has developed two products with resale value. The first product, Tree of Life silver pendants are made by the women of the cooperative, then sold in the U.S. to provde a profit for their makers. Additionally, the cooperative has developed a fleece baby blanket product for which they purchase fleece at a subsidized rate from the U.S. to make and sell blankets in the local market. Honduras Hope is exploring ways to source no-cost fleece remnants so that the women of the cooperative will have a higher profit margin.

Plan Grande has also formed an agricultural sustainability cooperative. Honduras Hope works with the group on sustainable farming practices, sourcing seeds so that they can sell their crops after the harvest, and providing used hand equipment from the U.S. Honduras Hope has attempted small ventures in the resale of coffee in the U.S. but have yet to find a large scale venue.

Community EngagementEngagement is how Honduras Hope lives their mission to empower economically and politically marginalized people in rural Honduras to create stronger, more resilient, and self-sufficient communities. They seek opportunities at each step along the way to partner with the communities they serve through: 

Self-determined projects Local leadership boards who help prioritize and evaluate direction Representative subcommittee for addressing problems and needs Regular town meetings for planning, reporting, and hearing from all constituents Physical infrastructure that is a shared asset in the community such as the building of the

community center, health clinic, schools, and, in the near future, a lending library Leadership training and opportunities Standing with communities over time to role model commitment and shared

responsibility Discussions about vision, dreams, and how to get there

Ultimately it is through Honduras Hope’s motto – “Juntos todo es possible”, (Together everything is possible) - that they model and live out their community development efforts, and transfer the ideas and principles of shared responsibility and community engagement to their partners.Conclusion

The wide array of services provided by Honduras Hope show that they are capable of taking on new projects. Not only do they have the capacity to expand, but they also prove to be effective in each of their services provided, as noted in the section above. Honduras Hope would benefit a great deal through a partnership with AVANCE, and would continue making a positive impact after AVANCE personnel are no longer assisting the organization directly.

Sustainability Plan to include funding resources and demonstrate long-term viability:Honduras Hope evaluates programs qualitatively and quantitatively. For the Kindergarten program, with which AVANCE will work, qualitative success is measured through satisfaction levels of the participating children and their families. Quantitative success is measured through factors such as increases in grades, increases in the number of students enrolled, and the number of children who move on to first grade.

Honduras Hope successfully runs a number of projects. The positive yearly outcomes that result from each of the programs provides evidence that Honduras Hope has the capacity to not only manage new projects, such as AVANCE, but to also do it well. Honduras Hope is an organization whose expansions are proven effective. Honduras Hope’s partnership with AVANCE will last much longer than the year that it takes to teach Honduran educators the skills to implement the program. AVANCE’s impact on the Kindergarten program will last for a lifetime.

With a history of increasing graduation rates from both high school and college, the AVANCE program will be evaluated through the use of school readiness surveys for children moving to the first grade and impact on mother’s surveys. Because most families in Honduras do not move regularly, it will be fairly easy to keep a database that follows children through graduation of high school and college. This will be done to evaluate long-term impact of the AVANCE program on the Kindergarten program.

Currently, Honduras Hope receives funding through independent donations, small civic organizations, donations from churches, fundraising events, and purchases of Honduran coffee and crafts. Their annual operating budget is between $60,000 and $80,000 with a goal to expand that to $90,000 to $100,000 in the coming year.

Seeing the impact that AVANCE has on the Kindergarten program in the two communities will bring more support from locals (in the United States). Funding for the startup of the AVANCE curriculum will come from the grant. Funding after the one-year training will come from the increase in support from local funders who want to be a part of making a difference in the Honduran school system, and more importantly, in the lives of Honduras children and families.

Evidence of impact Honduras Hope has attained to date:

Honduras Hope’s community development model is based on cooperative partnerships with the villages they serve. Rather than directing programs from their stateside perspective, they seek involvement from the Honduran people in identifying the most important projects and implementing programs together with local villagers to achieve lasting results. This model helps ensure that the precious resources they provide have long-term impact, help build stronger and more resilient local communities, and enhance self-sufficiency.

Since its’ startup in 2001, Honduras Hope has: Built one elementary school, significantly renovated and added an addition to a second

elementary school, and built a community center Built and manages a health clinic that serves 5 rural villages Purchased a boarding house, added 2 dormitories, and manages a girls and boys

residential program for students who could not otherwise attend middle and high school Constructed a culinary and hospitality school Created a women’s cooperative to seed cottage industries and to offer life-skills training Created a feeding and nutrition program for women and preschoolers Started a sustainable agriculture cooperative and built a barn for crop storage Provided cement floors and roofs for over 90 houses Helped 100+ children attend secondary school by providing uniforms, books, supplies,

and financial support Funded a kindergarten program Built a compostable latrine for 75 local homes Installed solar lights in a village without electricity Provided funds to help 13 students attend college Purchased chimneys for cooking stoves to reduce smoke causing respiratory issues in

women and children Installed 25 pilas to ease daily work life for women

Each of these services provided by the organization impacts the communities in which they serve by making them stronger, more resilient, and self-sufficient.

Description of how the AVANCE model fits with the current organizational structure and philosophy:AVANCE is dedicated to serving marginalized communities and strives to empower families to break the cycle of poverty through a proven two-generation approach combining early childhood development and parenting education. Bill Briggs, founder and now Coordinator of Honduras Hope, founded the organization when he was looking for the poorest and most marginalized people in the Yoro, Honduras area, resulting in a partnership with the villages of Plan Grande, a Tolapan Indian reservation, and San Jose, a mountain community of squatters. Working with community members, Bill soon learned that education was one of the greatest needs. Recognizing that families play an important role in the lives of their children, often influencing

their attendance in school, Honduras Hope would benefit a great deal from integrating the AVANCE program into their Kindergarten program.

Although Honduras Hope is not located in Texas, where AVANCE typically provides funding, its headquarters are in the United States. Honduras Hope is an organization with projects that AVANCE would typically support, with the ultimate purpose of educating the Hispanic population in order to create a long-term sustainability plan for the people so that they can become contributing members of society. Additionally, it is recognized that the typical age range for children that AVANCE targets is 0-3. Honduras does not have programs for children before the first grade. Therefore, it is rare that San Jose and Plan Grande have them. As mentioned earlier, this was made possible by Honduras Hope who created and partially supported the program. It is extremely difficult to come across organizations in Honduras that are already providing services to families at such a young age. This is why the AVANCE program is a perfect fit for the Kindergarten program because it is the earliest point, as of now, in which the skills within AVANCE can be taught to parents and children in Honduras.

Description of how the AVANCE model and curriculum is expected to impact the organization and families servedA partnership between AVANCE, Honduras Hope, and the Honduran Kindergarten program in the two communities will teach families new skills. Parents will build resilience, interpersonal connections, networks, and access to education, jobs and other opportunities. Children will then have parents that are truly engaged and who will support them throughout their lifetime.

One of the main issues is that parents need help around the home. As children get older, it is common for families to keep their children from going to school because they are needed with house work and taking care of siblings. Teaching parents that it will benefit the family more in the long run if they support their children through school, if not financially then only emotionally, will increase the rates of children who stay in school. This will enable families to create a more stable future for themselves, breaking the cycle of poverty that has been passed down for so many generations.

Other information about you r organization, such as achievements, awards, endorsements, etc., that would be pertinent to the qualifications for this RFPHonduras Hope has been added to the list of charities that have earned the prestigious Seal of Excellence from Independent Charities of America. The Independent Charities Seal of Excellence is awarded to the members of Independent Charities of America and Local Independent Charities of America that have, upon rigorous independent review, been able to certify, document, and demonstrate on an annual basis that they meet the highest standards of public accountability, program effectiveness, and cost effectiveness. Out of more than 1 million charities operating in the United States today, it is estimated that fewer than 5 percent, meet or exceed these standards, and of those, fewer than 2,000 have been awarded this Seal.