Thanks to being awarded a HOPE Scholarship during 2007, more than 90 sponsored youth were able to finish vocational courses taken during the summer. Auto mechanics, cuisine techniques, customer service and English, electrical installation and Web design were the courses offered.
“I took the web design course since I am studying the specialty of design at my technical high school, but this course was much better; I learned to use new programs my school would have never taught me because it has much fewer resources”, said Priscilla Rojas, one of the graduates.
Taking these courses offers our sponsored youth more possibilities of getting a job after graduating from high school, and it also gives them guidance regarding what they would like to do in the future since it gets them interested in a specific field.
Priscila O'Shee is the Communications Coordinator for Children International's agency in Valparaíso, Chile.
If you’ve been acquainted with Children International for very long, you are most likely aware that our work targets areas where people live in extreme poverty. Our primary focus is uniting individual sponsors with individual children, and using this network of support to provide access to essential services such as health and dental care, educational assistance and nutritional rehabilitation to the more than 320,000 children we serve.
But we also have more far-reaching goals. Eventually, we’d like to do such a good job of helping reduce and eliminate poverty that we put ourselves out of a job.
With the degree of poverty that exists in the world, that’s not likely; but we can make a real difference. And that’s why we take our youth program so seriously. We feel we have the most outstanding youth program in existence – bar none. Our staff around the world is pouring its efforts into providing quality training in values formation, vocational education, career counseling and leadership for our young people…and it’s paying off.
One year ago we brought two youth delegates from each agency with a mature youth program to our International Youth Conference in Kansas City. These delegates were democratically elected by their peers to attend the conference – with the expectation that they would then return to their home countries and share their new-found skills in leadership, teambuilding and participation with the thousands of other young people who make up our youth program around the world. And from the reports we’re receiving, they’re doing a great job of living up to that expectation.
While they were here in Kansas City, the delegates got together and made a recording. The remarkable thing is that at least three or four languages were represented in the group, and only about half of the group could communicate with each other in a common language. But that didn’t stop these outstanding kids! Click on the video below to see and hear them sing the Conference’s theme song, “Sing It to the Mountains.”
