July/August 2020 Newsletter
Dear Friends and Partners,
If you’ve found the narrow and steep path to handle school this August, you’re lucky. While we all want to stay healthy and keep safe, we need to find ways to give our youth – particularly the most vulnerable and under-served – with an ability to sustain their education and learning.
Undeterred, we at UNLAD have sustained our commitment to lead and participate in efforts to provide our under-served youth access to educational opportunities, keeping faithful to the hope that these opportunities will improve their lives.
In the Philippines…
Basic needs, sustainable food source
In addition to the challenge of sustaining education and learning, the vulnerable communities still grapple with the necessities of food and protection from COVID-19. In the community where the Baruyan Elementary School, site of our first after-school programs, UNLAD has been providing 42 families with basic food and soap supplies. With our encouragement, this community has also begun to extend their farming beyond the staple rice, and within their backyards, planted vegetables as their own source of food.
Strategic Partnership: Impact and Scale
We believe that working with strategic partners will enable us to achieve our mission more effectively and create deeper, broader, and more sustainable impact. In this spirit, we have continued to support, advocate, and work with Save the Children, Philippines.
On August 11th, we hosted a virtual conference, “Protecting a Generation of Filipino Children: A Call to Action”. During the conference, Save the Children, Philippines shared a ground-breaking and novel low-cost program to deliver virtual learning to under-served neighborhoods. This program’s name, “Project ARAL” (the Tagalog word “aral”is“study”in English) stands for Access to Resources for Alternative Learning. The program will cover parent training, the distribution of learning equipment and material that require little to no technology, with regular monitoring and tracking of results. Our goal is to spread the word, building the understanding and momentum necessary to support this important program thus ultimately providing our underserved youth with sustained access to education and learning.
In the US…
We are partnering with the Charlottesville City Schools Athletics and Arts Departments and like-minded organizations - Computers4Kids and Cville1stGen - to invite and welcome scholarship and collaborative opportunities to provide our underserved youth with access to their programs.
Small acts matter!
We remain committed to our mission, ever grateful to our generous donors and friends. These are unprecedented difficult times that call upon each one of us to remain hopeful and helpful. Let us unite to provide our under-served youth with the educational opportunities they need and deserve. Together, we can make a difference.
Thank you, maraming salamat po!