MAYA EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION

MEF's aim is to promote educational opportunities for the Maya people in the countries we serve.

There is a great hunger in the young Maya people to better their fates and to become successful in their societies. We support the students' heritage and culture while giving them the opportunity to have access to higher education.

We are convinced that with a good education, the Maya students and graduates will be better equipped to make good lives for themselves right in their home countries. Long-term, these efforts will combat poverty, malnutrition and other ills that still plague the indigenous communities in the countries we serve.

MEF has a special interest in helping girls and women and students from rural areas. We support workshops that bring informal education to rural areas where many women have never had any or just a few years of formal education. Topics may include marketing their woven products, collaborating in groups to be stronger, cultural and medical knowledge.

MEF also believes in fostering Maya cultural and historical awareness and respecting the Maya languages, traditions and values. MEF supports the cultural institution CIRMA in Antigua, Guatemala in their preservation efforts of Central American heritage.

Our main strategy to success is that we partner with local Maya project leaders in the region we serve and put them and other qualified community members in charge of the criteria of the scholarship programs and for running them locally, with MEF site visits and regular contacts and reports from the leaders and the students.

We raise funds and regularly appeal to the US and international public for donations. We receive support from organizations and individual donors who know the region we work in and understand that the Mayas as a whole still face many obstacles on their way to becoming equal citizens in their countries, with equal opportunities.

We connect to our audience by sharing students' stories with the public and by showing graduates. We have steadily and greatly improved our outreach via Facebook and e-Bulletins. See www.mayaedufound.org We've helped to bring groups and students to the US who gave theater performances and talks, which were very well received. We'll do more of that as we can find the funding for such cultural exchange activities.

With a very small, mostly still donated, staff we work with our volunteer Board of Directors, our project supervisors in the countries we serve, an assistant in Guatemala, a consultant, and other volunteers to get work done that other organizations have more staff for.

Through direct fundraising efforts - grant applications and public outreach (Bulletins, Newsletters, Social Media), we receive grants and donations. We also receive major funding each year from our supporting organization, the Plumsock Fund if they approve our application.

Our Board members actively work on moving us forward by helping with fundraising and strategic planning. They all are familiar with the region, several have worked there, and almost all of them speak Spanish. They help by making site visits and speaking about us at conferences, esp. the Guatemala Scholars Network.

The board also works on long-term tasks in committees, together with the Executive Director.

We hire extra specialized help as needed for website, secure donation processing (Network for Good) and more.

Hundreds of graduates: from basico and high schools, including vocational high schools (accountants and teachers), and from universities in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.

Thousands of graduates from six-month indigenous language workshops in Chiapas, Mexico and from vocational training courses at partners FOMMA and Sna.

Hundreds of students learning English in yearly two-week courses US volunteers bring to Antigua, Guatemala.

-We are increasingly developing partnerships with other US nonprofits to boost our goal of providing university scholarships to Maya students.

-Each graduate in our programs is a great accomplishment. We have rich data about students and graduates from our programs that await our longitudinal data committee's sorting and interpreting and seeing if we can't follow the graduates for a few years after graduation. This is a work in progress.

We are currently modernizing our website, which was homemade with the help of a talented colleague in Guatemala who is not a web designer. It has served us well and gives donors a button to click for an easy way to donate safely on the site (via Network for Good). It also gives information to people interested in particular areas of our work. It also invites you there to our Facebook page. www.mayaedufound.org It is projected to be ready by mid-2019.