These communities have a history of a collective and collaborative spirit. Nuevo San José and Fátima were created after a long labor struggle. Houses were built, electricity brought in, streets paved as community projects. The families work together to decide priorities, identify goals and figure out how to achieve them. The School and its related nonprofit, La Montaña Fund, provide some financial and organizational support. You can help them attain their goals of a better future for their children Maintain the Momentum – DONATE ONLINE.
Women in the community have organized together to create a collaborative gardening endeavor. Their first effort is growing vegetables and raising pigs.
During the covid pandemic, the families lost most of their sources of income. They hunkered down and relied on the monthly food distribution that La Montaña Fund donors so generously supported. But women wanted to find ways to supplement these staples with fresh produce and meat. They also wanted to find solutions that could be ongoing and last beyond the pandemic. They decided to raise more of their own food. And they found creative ways to garden – using recycled soda bottles and pvc pipe as containers for their plants.
Schools in Guatemala are not free. Our scholarship program supports teens from more than 15 neighboring communities by paying a monthly scholarship to help with their school fees and expenses. The scholarship recipients commit to maintaining passing or higher grades and to demonstrating leadership through participation within their communities. That might include involvement with local youth groups, grassroots organizations, church youth groups or activities at the Escuela de la Montaña such as leadership training or helping with the Arte en el Campo program.
A small library on the grounds of the Mountain School was built and furnished with funding from the Calgary Rotary Club and La Montaña Fund. The library offers much more than shelves of books. Adults in the communities staff it for several hours after school to give kids a place to do their homework, work together on projects, get help when they are stuck, and enjoy some alone time reading. A computer lab in the library provides internet access for families that don’t have this in their homes, and computers for everyone to use. This is especially invaluable for the teens, who need computer skills in order to make it through school. The computer equipment has aged though, and we are hoping to be able to update the equipment and bring in faster internet service.
In 1998 we started giving informal free art and guitar classes to two talented local children.
This grew into the Arte en el Campo program (Art in the Countryside), an extension of the work of the Luis Cardoza y Aragon Cultural Centre run by PLQ. Free classes are held on Saturdays, with all materials and instruments provided. We employ two local teachers to offer art and music (guitar, keyboard, marimba) classes. We cultivate a love and appreciation for traditional art and culture, which was repressed during the long history of military regimes in Guatemala. This program is jointly funded by PLQ and La Montaña Fund donations.
A new school in Fátima focuses on the food industry and offers bachelor’s degrees in sciences and letters with an accompanying certification in gastronomy and ecotourism. Targeted at youth in the municipalities of Colomba and San Martín Sacatepéquez, the school places social and environmental education at the center of the curriculum. In this way, “we empower our students to value their lives, families, communities, and environment, and to graduate with the skills needed to continue at university as well as to develop projects of their own design.”
The school grounds include a small hillside planted with coffee, where we are able to provide some employment for locals to farm the coffee each year. For several years the workers pooled their money to pay for community-wide projects like electricity and paving.
Now that most of their projects have been completed, the Escuela pays the workers in Fátima semi-annually, and they divide the funds depending on who has done the work during the year to weed, prune, fertilize and pick the coffee.
Our coffee is shade grown with no chemical pesticides or fertilizers. We have replanted coffee and shade trees with the help of Mountain School students. The cafetal is thriving, with a harvest of almost 600 pounds of coffee. Coffee is sold at the School and is a tasty treat for students to take home with them.
Students at the Mountain School thought so too, and created a U.S. nonprofit organization, La Montaña Fund, to keep the momentum going. The people we met were warm, generous, optimistic, and so welcoming to us that we wanted to give back. You too can help them achieve their dreams of a better future. Choose which project you want to support.