Fostering the Future of Ecuador

Some photos of the Mano Amiga Foundation:
http://picasaweb.google.com/DRosen34/ManoAmiga

The Mano Amiga Foundation takes children off the streets and out of risky living conditions and provides them with a high-quality education so that they can fulfill their life's potential. Given an education in academics, art, leadership, and civic engagement, they would otherwise have spent their childhoods roaming the streets or working to get by.

Only lacking to this exceptional education is a proper diet. The children primarily eat rice and plantains, missing nutritious vegetables, fruits, milk, and protein. This has resulted in almost every child being anemic. With your help, this project will change that.

On nearby farmland, the Mano Amiga Foundation and a Rotaract Club from Colorado will work together to create a working, profitable farm. The result will be vegetables, milk, and fruit - all foods that are expensive to buy (at least compared to rice and plantains). In addition, a pigsty and all extra food will provide a source of revenue that can pay for some of the daily expenses of raising 50 children.

We have already raised $5000! With your help, we will reach our goal of $9440. With this investment, we will:

* purchase 2 cows for milk
* purchase a plow for planting and harvesting crops (tractor has been donated by friends of the foundation)
* purchase 6 water filters for clean drinking water at the foundation
* construct a pigsty
* construct a small house for a local family to tend to the farm
* purchase vegetable and fruit seeds

To read more about Mano Amiga, see below...

The Mano Amiga Foundation is run by social entrepreneur and Ashoka Fellow Juan Andrade. Juan was selected to join an elite Fellowship of Social Entrepreneurs, including Muhammad Yunus - Nobel Peace Prize Winner, who are using innovative solutions to the world's most pressing social problems to change the world (http://www.ashoka.org/node/3499).

Juan is a leader with the vision and know-how to make the lives of others better. In a country like Ecuador, with an inefficient government, social change comes from citizens - from those who can be creative and who have the deep understanding knowledge to understand the complexities of poverty.

Juan's vision is a holistic one. He first created an organization dedicated to improving human rights in rural areas. In this case, human rights had to do with health care, with financial independence, and with being able to access the justice system. Soon after, he founded Mano Amiga, which addresses the youth who are at-risk and abandoned because of the economic hopelessness of the rural poverty they are born into.

Juan's next project is the Incubator for Young Social Entrepreneurs (Manantial de Emprendedores Sociales). Young adults from around the region will come to a 2-year leadership institute to develop microenterprises for their home communities.

Friends of Social Entrepreneurs, Inc. is a start-up non-profit organization dedicated to connecting U.S. citizens and citizen groups to social entrepreneurs in South America. We believe that investing in high-impact non-profits in developing countries is the most effective way to create social change abroad because it plays off the strengths of local communities and local leaders. Citizen groups in the U.S. can play a major role by creating a funding base for these innovative non-profits.

Friends of Social Entrepreneurs is incorporated as a non-profit organization in the state of Massachusetts and is awaiting 501(c)3 tax-exemption status. Please contact Daniel Rosen, daniel@friendsofsocialentrepreneurs.org, 617-901-3095 with any questions.