Picture 1: In the launch event at the School

This week we held the English Summer Camp launch event and invited all the staff, teachers and the 120 students who will be participating in this amazing program. In my opening remarks, I highlighted the commitment and dedication of all the students who chose to participate in our program during their school vacations. In fact, as a team, we are proud and happy because of the great reception of the English Summer Camp and the amazing response from the people of Cali. I also encourage the children and teenagers who will participate in this program to follow their dreams and discover the importance of English as a second language, which can open many doors and opportunities for all of us.

Picture 2: Fabian Polanco, Academic Coordinator of the English Summer Camp.

On June 26th, during the inauguration event, teacher Fabian Polanco, who is the academic coordinator of the English Summer Camp, talked about the innovative educational program we have and how we want to connect English with the everyday life of the students. Our goal is for them to connect with this language in a very practical way, so they can discover this new tool and love this language. After this experience, we hope to contribute to the new skills acquired by these young people and make an impact on their lives. In this sense, they can get more opportunities and aspirations to transform their lives and their surrounding communities.

Picture 3: Launch Event of the English Summer Camp.

Furthermore, in this inaugural event, we had the participation of two students from the Politecnico Municipal School who shared their talent and sang songs in English, as well as a Colombian English teacher who led activities with the students who will participate in the program. We offered some dynamic games so they could participate in different teams and follow some instructions given by the English teacher. This was our first opportunity to play with them in another language and the starting point for getting to know each other better. The students who won each competition received a special gift from International House–swag we brought from the U.S.–and each student also received some I-House souvenirs at the end of the event. During the break, we gave the students some snacks to share in the school cafeteria.

Picture 4: Photo 4: Getting ready to start the English Summer Camp with the team at our first face-to-face meeting.

Before this big and important event, Ximena Valenzuela Cabrera, who is our summer associate sponsored by the Pearson Institute at the University of Chicago, arrived in Cali from Chicago on June 25th. On the same day, we had a welcome dinner with all the team and our first face-to-face meeting. In this dinner we gave each of our team members a welcome package. It included a tote bag branded with our summer camp and Proyecto 2E logo, I-House souvenirs, and a thank you letter.  We had a great opportunity to get to know each other better and share our experiences and goals for this summer program. Ximena brought some extra things from the States we needed for the opening ceremony and helped us set up everything we needed to start the English Summer Camp classes. We appreciate all your support and commitment, Ximena!

Picture 5: Proyecto2E: Educacion + Empleo (Project2E: Education + Employment)

As the leader of this amazing team, composed of people from different disciplines and areas of expertise, I can say that I am more than happy to bring education and new opportunities to 120 students in Cali, Colombia. I felt very grateful with the work of each member of the team and the dedication they put into this. We hope that the Summer English Camp is just one stage of all the great activities we want to carry out with my organization, Proyecto2E: Educacion + Empleo (Project2E: Education + Employment). We all have the commitment to work for a better world, where all people have access to a better education, and with that, better aspirations that will lead them to transform the city where they live.

Figure 1. In the school with the banner we printed of the imitative running the project

This week, the whole team worked hard to receive the 180 students that were invited to the English Assessment. We contacted their parents so that all students had a specific appointment to take the exam, which aims to evaluate the students’ own perspectives of their English level, reading, grammar and listening skills in relation to the English language. We had a preliminary idea about the students’ English level. With this test we aimed to select those more motivated students and collect data for further research.

We ran the exams in the Politecnico Municipal school, with whom we partnered to deliver the summer camp. Other exams were administered in the Altos de Menga area. We explained to students that the purpose of the English Summer Camp is to create and develop bilingual capacities and skills that will eventually allow them to enter the job market and improve their living conditions, as well as to empower them to see English as a path for a brighter future. We also mentioned that during the project, the teenagers will receive 16 hours of classes divided into 8 sessions throughout the month of July. The main difference from other English classes is that during these sessions, engaging activities designed by educational experts will be provided.

Figure 2 Students taking the English assessment.

From Tuesday, June 18th to Thursday, June 20th, we received students for the English assessment. We developed different logistical strategies to achieve this goal and to complete the evaluations during the 3 different days set for this purpose. We evaluated students of different nationalities, as in Colombia there are current Venezuelan migrants enrolled in the education system. Our program is open to everyone and the main selection criteria at this stage is focused on students age (between 11 and 17 years old) and school grade (9th to 11th grade).

During this process we found something interesting, there were some few students who had a higher English level compared to the rest of the group. We talked to these students about the scope of the summer camp. Even though the program starts at a basic level of English so that everyone can participate in the program, these students were very enthusiastic to participate in this program and put all their efforts into strengthening their knowledge as well as helping other students in their process of learning English as a second language.

Figure 3 Welcoming postal

Finally, we decided who will participate in our English Summer Camp and sent them a message and an invitation to the opening ceremony that will take place next week. The students who will participate in the program are the ones who have taken the exam. We had 120 students who attended our exam sessions. This shows that discipline and willingness to follow our dreams can be enough to start down the path that can allow us to achieve our goals.

Figure 4 Selected English teachers.

We also completed the selection of the English teachers who will participate in this first phase of the Summer Camp and work with the 120 students. We received 9 applications and after the evaluation, the 2 teachers who will help us during the summer camp are Luz Stella Erazo and Daysury Granja Sandoval. Both of them are Colombians, born and raised in Cali, and they share a very important mission that is at the heart of our program: to create and stimulate in the students a specific interest in learning English, and to show them the importance of learning this second language and the opportunities it could bring them in the pursuit of their dreams.

I am grateful for all the experience we have gained so far and glad for being able to develop this project for the benefit of people who need it and appreciate all the efforts made to make it possible. As a team, we are happy to share our knowledge and experience and make a positive impact in our society, changing the mindset of these children who are taking advantage of a great opportunity that can improve their lives.

Figure 1. Baby iguana in my front yard in Cali

I am finally in Cali and so excited to be in this tropical weather surrounded by my family and familiar spaces. I arrived last Sunday almost at midnight. Monday was a holiday in Colombia, so I had time to rest, relax and take some pictures of the front yard of my house, were I saw a baby iguana, before starting my working week.

In the previous weeks we have been running operation activities, taking decisions with regards to the English program that will be taught, having multiple meeting with the different involved parties. For instance, meetings with the language institute, the different team members of the project.

We closed the registration period last May 31. The registration lasted two weeks. To our surprise, we received 428 registrations. We did not expect so many interested students; I guess the dissemination efforts in the field were a success. We also encountered some challenges with misinformation in our dissemination activities. For the context of the reader, in one of the teacher group chats where the sign-up form was shared, a teacher mentioned that the summer school was exclusively for students from a school: the one we partnered with. This information arrived at one of our partner NGOs, and the head of it wrote me to ask if it was true. I clarified to her that the program is open to all students in Cali, without regard to the school they attend. This was surprising, I guess a good surprise, as people who were eager to prioritize students at their schools were not what we were expecting.

Subsequently, this week, we are ready to launch the calls and invite students to our assessment. However, we had to delay this activity. This week, the teachers from all the public schools across Colombia entered strikes as a bill to change the education regulation is currently being discussed in Colombian Congress. Regarding this bill, articles with the ones the teachers do not agree with were included after political negotiations across Congress. To push changes in the bill, teachers ceased classes on June 12. This affects our project operations as if the public school we will use to implement the English assessment is closed, we cannot use it. As a plan B, and If the teacher strikes continue, we will launch the assessment in a private school nearby, with whom we partnered and where the classes were going to be given initially. Personally, as a student of Public Policy with experience in social project implementation and policy, overall it is interesting to observe how our project adapts to the political economy and politics of my own country. These are challenges when pursuing policy, as we discussed at some point during my first year as a policy student, and now being able to experience them live is a unique opportunity.

Finally, in my second blog post, I mentioned that I offered a non-paid internship position as a project manager to Harris School students at The University of Chicago to work along with me and the team in Cali during the execution of the summer project. Multiple students expressed their interest. This week, we welcome a new member to our project, Ximena Valenzuela. She is a Peruvian lawyer with more than ten years of experience, a first-year master’s in public policy student at the University of Chicago, and a Pearson Institute Fellow. The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts examines societies and people fractured by conflict. Ximena will be interning this summer with us thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Pearson Institute. She will be working hybrid and traveling to Cali for a couple of weeks during the upcoming month. To date, we are seven people working to deliver this project to the best of our capacities.

Stayed tuned for in-field activities development.

It has been a while since my last post, and multiple things have been happening with the project.

Firstly, we chose an identity and colors for the summer school and decided to call this project “ENGLISH SUMMER CAMP.”

Figure 1. Flyer of the summer camp

On May 14, we launched the registration for our summer project. The diffusion of the information was mainly through WhatsApp, an instant messenger app that is massively used in Latin America, and word of mouth. We have an advantage in our project: we are working with two teachers with more than 20 years of experience teaching in Cali, Colombia. They have a strong network of teachers who helped disseminate the project. Specifically, the invitation to register was sent by the different school WhatsApp groups of teachers around the city.

Furthermore, we printed flyers and posters to deliver to students and partnering institutions. Fabian, the academic coordinator of the project and full-time English teacher, went to different classrooms where he works to encourage students to sign up for the program. The registration closes today, and we hope we have plenty of sign-ups.

Figure 2. Fabian inviting 11 grade students to participate in the program.

I have worked in the program setting parallel to the dissemination activities. For instance, I searched for and met with vendors. I met with a potential person who will manage the social media of Proyecto 2E, the NGO I intend to launch. Creating content and exposure to the activities pursued in the summer project in a social media era is pivotal to taking the project and the organization to the next level.

Furthermore, we are executing different activities to design the curriculum for our English summer school, which consists of 16 hours of classes during July. Thanks to the connection of the International House, we partnered with the Language Institute of the University of Chicago to develop our curriculum. They advise us on the different activities to implement in our program and the objectives we aim to achieve. Designing the curriculum was also my first challenge and kind of bittersweet. At the beginning of the project, I aimed to design a whole A1 English level to continue replicating a bilingual training program after the summer school ends. I just learned that an A1 English level program requires selecting/developing classes for around 120 hours, which is the number of hours needed to complete the mentioned level according to the English Common European Framework. Developing this content requires more than a summer and additional economic resources out of the financial scope of the Davis Project for Peace Grant. For now, we will develop a program for the duration of the summer school. At the same time, I continue knocking on organization doors and talking with professionals who can design, with low budget/ partnerships, the A1 English curriculum.

Finally, the project team is getting bigger. A new member joined the group as a research advisor. His name is David Quiroz, and he is a current pre-doctorate fellow at the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago. With him on board, we will collect data while we pursue the student registration and English exams. We intend to assess the effect of this summer intervention. David is also from Colombia; his mother is a teacher, which is a huge win, especially as he understands the dynamics and challenges of the Colombian Education system through the lens of being a Colombian citizen and of his mother.

I am excited about the upcoming days, especially as soon as I will be traveling to my beloved city, Cali, in Colombia, to perform the field project implementation.

I want to share some updates on the project’s development since we were notified of the grant today, hoping to help other social entrepreneurs and project managers understand the behind-the-scenes of deploying a social program in the field.

Figure 1. Project management planning

I am all about planning and timelines. For my purposes and work style, it gives me a big picture of the project that allows me to start executing it, putting relevancy on activities closer to a deadline. I started this planning by searching Google for an adequate Excel sheet template for project planning. I found some excellent templates from Smartsheet, which I customized to meet my needs. In this sheet, I grouped the different objectives of the program into   activities and put an initial timeline for them. To facilitate the program development with my partner institutions, I shared this timeline in Spanish with them.

Furthermore, I started meeting with the different partners, NGOs, and people who will be helping me during the rollout. Now that I am not in the field, it is especially important to surround yourself with trustworthy, efficient, and knowledgeable people. So far, I have met with the founder of Fundación Talentos, Lonis Murillo, a potential content creator and a teacher willing to help me with different project management activities.

Figure 2 First meeting with Fundación Talentos

Lonis’s commitment to Social Change came across again during our call. Lonis is a social leader who, with truly scarce economic resources, has built her NGO in her own house and currently serves 50 students of school age with their academic endeavors. While on our call, she was taken from her home in Cali. It started to rain in the city, and she quickly went to the rooftop of her house/NGO to keep her clothes; it was sundry to prevent getting wet. I was amazed at how she could handle our meeting and her house duties at the same time. It also reassures me her commitment to social change as she runs her NGO in the living room of her house, located in a human settlement in Cali.  Now that I have the platform of UChicago, the International House, and the Davis Project for Peace, I hope to make visible all the social change makers and heroes in the communities that strive each day to work for a better future for our kids.

Lastly, I came up with this crazy idea to bring to Cali for the summer project some of my fellows in the Master of Public Policy for their summer internship, especially as Harris School has a fund to finance non-paid internships in NGOs. I was in doubt about offering the position, as my peers might be interested in more significant projects as they come with a well-rounded professional experience advising the governments of their own countries and/or working in big non-profits or private sector companies. Anyway, I gave it a chance and sent a message through a WhatsApp group of 390 master candidates from my cohort. To my surprise, eight people wrote to me requesting more information, and three close friends who are Latinos and Spanish speakers expressed their interest. For now, I accepted one intern who committed to learning more Spanish in the upcoming weeks to properly join the project in the field; this subject is to be approved for funds by Harris School.

In the meantime, I will continue with the project’s backstage planning with the partner organizations. I stayed tuned.

It was the beginning of my spring break at UChicago, and I was in Mexico for my holidays. I remember the morning, at a mall plaza with my friends, when I opened my email on my phone and read the great news. I was granted the Davis Project for Peace to Undertake my project called “Breaking Violent Areas with Empowered Students.” I couldn’t hold my excitement, so I started to jump and instantly told my friends. The grant of the funds means the pinnacle of the work I have been undertaking for the last five years in my home city, Cali, located in Colombia, to promote equality of education. It also means a boost of hope for the different grassroots organizations I have worked with and those on the fight line longer than me, working with scarce resources. Breaking Violent Areas with EmpowerEd Students is an education program that aims to prevent underprivileged high school students from being involved in violent situations during their out of school time and to nurture a bilingual (English Spanish) youth workforce in Cali. Bilingualism is critical as it has allowed me to have opportunities I never imagined working in Washington, D.C., and studying at the University of Chicago. Additionally, bilingualism becomes relevant to the city’s economy as multiple transnational companies opening operations in the town offer formal and well paid jobs. Unfortunately, not all Colombian high school students have the same opportunities to be trained in English, and just 1 in 10 high school students graduate with a B+ English level (ICFES 2022). Therefore, to promote equal opportunities among youths, it is essential to encourage bilingual skills.

Through this grant, I plan to reach 120 high school students between 11 and 17 years old from Siloé and Altos de Menga, two violent and low income neighborhoods in Cali, Colombia. To do so, I will partner with two NGOs: Colegio de Adultos Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes and Fundación Talentos de Altos de Menga, organizations located in the mentioned areas. Additionally, we will build a small language computer lab to teach and measure participants’ English levels. An A1 English level curriculum will also be designed and delivered to the partnering institutions. This curriculum will be taught during the summer English school. It will be uploaded online on a web page designed during the project. Furthermore, we will consolidate our online community of Proyecto 2E. I am excited for the summer as this is the first time, I will travel to my city for a different reason than visiting it. I can’t wait to explore the communities, meet the students, and work in person with the partner institutions.