Isa Mundo is heading to Peru

Isa Mundo will be heading to Peru at the end of the month and will be visiting three great local organizations in the city of Cuzco and its surrounding area. First, we will visit the SOS Children’s Village along with one of their Social Centers. SOS Children is the world’s largest orphan focused charity; they raise orphaned and abandoned children and help poor families care for their children. Through their family strengthening programmes they hope to empower families help themselves and create a better future; a future where they are independent and self-sufficient. We will then visit an organization called Inti Runakunaq Wasin, which has developed several programs for the many street children of in the Cuzco region. Finally, we will be traveling to a small community outside of Cuzco with members of the Peru’s Challenge organization to visit various initiatives they are doing with local communities. The organization focuses on creating opportunities for children in education, health and community programs in a safe environment.

For more information on these organizations visit their websites at:

http://www.soschildrensvillages.ca/Where-we-help/Americas/Peru/Pages/default.aspx

http://streetkidscusco.org/home.html

http://www.peruschallenge.com/

Summer Camp Photos

As promised, here are some great pics from the School of Champions 2010 Summer Camp. Thank you again for making a difference in the lives of those children.

In our community

In our quest to find gift certificates and donations for our upcoming auction, we discovered that Isa Mundo headquarters is surrounded by small businesses and community members that are very supportive of philanthropy work. As our readers know, Isa Mundo is a small not for profit and our philosophy around building partnerships aligns well with community involvement and community support. We are pleased to involve the local community in completing projects to better the lives of those less fortunate.

The joys of summer!

Thanks to your generous support we were able to fund 15 children to attend the summer camp at the School of Champions. We will be receiving photos shortly and will post them on our blog, please stay tuned. Thank you for your ongoing support! If you are interested in funding this activity on a yearly basis, please send us an email!

Summer camp anyone?

Are you interested in sponsoring a child to attend summer camp? Isa Mundo will be sponsoring children through Feed the Children Vallarta (formerly known as Children of the Dump) to attend a 4-week summer camp at the School of Champions, beginning July 12 through August 6, 2010. The children will receive breakfast and lunch and will attend classes in arts and crafts, computer, dancing, indoor games and a soccer tournament. The School is located near the now closed Puerto Vallarta dump. The closure of the dump has left people jobless and hungry. You can help feed the children and give them an opportunity to have fun!

For $25 you can sponsor a child for the full four weeks. If you are interested, please donate on our website before July 12.

Happy summer!

Local Community Project - Marine Mammal Rescue Program

The Isa Mundo Foundation completed its first Local Community Project in Vancouver,BC. The majority of our projects have focussed internationally in less fortunate communities in developing countries, but we also believe that it is important to support local community projects that are making a difference. The Marine Mammal Rescue Program (MMRP) is affiliated with the Vancouver Aquarium and provides housing and care for ill, injured, or abandoned marine mammals and rehabilitates them for release back into their natural habitat.

Isa Mundo visited the MMRP facility to assess how we can support their initiative. We learned that the MMRP is in need of various supplies, materials and equipments and one of their priorities was a cooler to store food and supplies. Isa Mundo was able to partner with Saputo, the largest dairy processor and snack-cake manufacturer in Canada, to provide a cooler to the MMRP. Saputo kindly donated the cooler as part of their commitment to support local causes and organizations in order to give back to the communities who have sustained and helped them grow. On May 14th, Alan Yau, Saputo Sales Representative
and Isa Mundo delivered the cooler to Lindsaye Akhurst, Manager of MMRP.

To learn more about the MMRP, please visit their website at: http://www.vanaqua.org/mmrr/

To learn more about Saputo and their products, please visit their website at: www.saputo.com

Isa Mundo in Cabeza de Toro

A recent trip to Dominican Republic brought Isa Mundo volunteer, Maxine Croteau, to the town of Cabeza de Toro, located near the resort town of Punta Cana. Cabeza de Toro is a small community that is sustained economically by a handful of resorts that provide jobs to residents. It is here that we met one of Isa Mundo’s most recent collaborators, a local business owner and environmental scientist called Juan Carlos.

Juan Carlos gave us a tour of the town and talked to us about a school that is in need of help and that is mostly supported by charitable donations. Many of the students who attend Centro Educativo Cabeza de Toro are originally from Haiti and are between the ages of 6 and 17. Juan Carlos mentioned that both teachers and students are in need of school supplies and that several of the children that come from less fortunate households also need clothing, shoes, toiletries and toys.

Volunteers from Ottawa put the word out and collected a total of four huge suitcases! We could not believe the warm response that they received and the generosity that came from family and friends! Our volunteers got together with Juan Carlos, who brought them to the school to meet the Principal Professor Bonifacio. Once inside, the director proceeded to go through all of the collected items one by one, explaining to the volunteers how each of the donations will be used by the teachers or students. For instance, the soap and shampoo that was donated would be used by a handful of kids who regularly shower at the school before class because they do not have the means to do so at home.

Upon a brief tour of the school, our volunteers noticed the lack of computers in the classrooms. They were told that although the electricity and wireless internet is presently donated by a local electricity company, the school does not have enough computers and the ones that they currently have for students are not connected to the internet. The director hopes to someday have a room filled with computers to teach the children how to use basic word processing programs and how to use the internet to do research for their school projects. The tour also revealed a very limited library of older books. Prof. Bonifacio mentioned that one of his highest priorities is to obtain new books written in Spanish on all school subjects for the school’s library. He also mentioned hopes to expand the school yard to enable more students to play simultaneously, and to build a wall around the yard to prevent adults from giving or selling drugs to the kids through the existing wire fence. The execution of these projects will however depend on future volunteer aid and funding to the school.

Isa Mundo would like to thank everyone who donated items to the Centro Educativo Cabeza de Toro!