Our Approach
Championing a new chapter in education for Guatemala.
best practices
We believe in education for all.
Our vision is for every child to have access to a quality education. We advocate for best practices in education and teacher training at all levels, including in partnership with local education leaders. Also, we share evidence of the effectiveness of our program and our expertise in teacher professional development to help drive reform and adoption of new approaches.
Currently, we work in Guatemala, a country that has some of the highest illiteracy rates, income inequality, and economic poverty in the Western Hemisphere. We have defined and refined our approach to teaching literacy and bringing about lasting cultural changes.
A scalable model
Growth creates opportunity
Child Aid’s model is a team based, dispersed management model. This approach allows us to efficiently add new capacity to our program, while maintaining the culture and self-sufficiency of our regional offices that makes our literacy efforts effective.
When we began work in Guatemala, we focused on understanding education in Guatemala – capturing what was working, and what wasn’t. From that we developed our curriculum to address what wasn’t working and to enhance what was. This is how our “Reading for Life” program was born. After demonstrating that it was improving literacy outcomes, we knew we needed to grow the program to truly effect change.
To facilitate this, we decided to open regional offices. Each regional office has one or more small teams of four literacy trainers and a supervisor. Each team works together on a portfolio of schools. We hire staff who live in the region, speak the local languages and understand the cultural community.
Our scalable model enables us to open new offices in the remote communities in a rapid, “turn-key” manner as reources allow us to address demand.
Building strategic Partnerships
We can’t do it alone
We recognize the importance of building effective working relationships to create a supportive environment for innovation and change.
When we begin working in a new district, Child Aid makes a commitment to work with every school and teacher. In the planning phase, our organization meets with school principals to share our past results. We also explain how our program will benefit the teachers and students in their schools. Our goal is to build understanding and acceptance of our approach and to gain the trust of district leaders who play a vital role in supporting teachers and improving student outcomes.
This relationship building is key to the long-term success and sustainability of our program. When principals and district leaders are engaged in our approach, teachers are more open to participating and feel more supported when they do. When teachers participate in workshops with colleagues from other schools in their district, teachers are better able to share ideas and resources, and the community has a great capacity to work together toward the shared goals of improving student learning.
What’s next
Child Aid is at an inflection point, the growth of our program in Guatemala has led to some exciting developments and paved the way for our next chapter as an organization.
Since launching our literacy program in 2010, our team has grown and evolved to meet the program’s needs. Child Aid started in North America, in Portland Oregon to be specific, when our co-founders decided they wanted to do more than deliver books to rural elementary classrooms. They wanted to make sure students had the ability and passion to enjoy those books.
At the start, Child Aid relied upon the training and expertise of leaders from the United States. Our first in-country leadership team was made up of Americans dedicated to our organization and its mission. As the program grew, so did the in-country capabilities – and we are at a point now where each of our Guatemala offices are led by local, Indigenous Guatemalans, most of which are female.
In 2023, the strength and independence of our in country team led to another important milestone – our first in country Co-CEO, Graciela Landa Pichyá who had been in other roles with the organization for 13 years.
It was always our hope that our country program would grow to a point of autonomy and establish itself as an independent program, supported by the local government and institutionalized to the extent that it was operating independently of our North America office, and we are now close to achieving this.
So, what’s next?
With our Guatemala program running under the leadership of Co-CEO Graciela Landa Pichyá, we are able to look beyond Guatemala, to look at other rural populations where children are going to school but not learning. It is an exciting prospect – scaling our model further for greater impact.
Make A Difference