Dear Friends of UNLAD,
If you’ve found the narrow and steep path to handle your family’s school needs this August, you belong to the lucky few. 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 initiate 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.
We are providing basic food and safety supplies…
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 in the Philippines, UNLAD has been providing 42 families with basic food and soap supplies.
With our encouragement, this community is now more actively planting and harvesting vegetables within their backyards, planted vegetables as a sustainable source of their family’s food.
In the Philippines…
On August 11th, we hosted a virtual conference, “Protecting a Generation of Filipino Children: A Call to Action”. During the conference, with participants from the US and the Philippines, Save the Children, Philippines presented 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 and is being launched in August, 2020.
The program covers 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 under-served youth with sustained access to education and learning.
In the United States…
We are partnering with the Charlottesville City Schools Athletics and Arts Departments and like-minded organizations - Computers4Kids and Cville1stGen - to provide our under-served youth with access to programs that will otherwise not be within their reach. Programs that will build their confidence, fuel their aspirations and motivate them to lead fulfilling and rewarding lives.
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 underserved youth with the educational opportunities they need and deserve.
Together, we can make a difference.
Thank you… Maraming salamat!
Terry and Allen de Guzman