Over the past two years, Julio Louis has been an AllPeopleBeHappy foundation Fellows Program award recipient working with Yspaniola in the Dominican Republic.  As the Director of Operations of the Batey Libertad Education Center, his main tasks have been to 1) help the children of Haitian immigrants born in the Dominican Republic to obtain their identification documents to legally reside in the country, 2) recruit and support the students of the University Scholarship Program, strengthening and overseeing the program, 3) lead the Experiential and Service-Learning Program, welcoming to the community many groups, ranging from smaller groups of just six visitors, up to a group of 50 individuals from Yale University Alumni Service Corps, and 4) serve as a bridge between the community and the organization for the planning and development of community projects.

Sunsar Maya is a small non-profit working in Nepal to improve the livelihoods of disadvantaged children and women through community-based services.  They directly serve 185 children and women in Mahalaxmi (Lalitpur) and Jorpati (Kathmandu).  Two AllPeopleBeHappy  Project Grants were awarded to Sunsar Maya in 2018 and 2019 for its SuMa Women’s Literacy Program.  This program teaches 100+ women conversation and written English, Nepali, and mathematics.  The English skills enable students to use communication devices, i.e., cell phones and computers which use English characters.  By building the women’s literacy and numeracy skills in their native language, they are able to more easily manage daily tasks, such as shopping and paying bills, and perform life skills such as navigating government offices, using a bank account, and participating more fully in their communities.  In 2020, due to Covid-19, a third Project Grant has been awarded to support SuMa Women’s Literacy Program switching from daily tutoring to a once a month workshop format.

Seasonal migration of coffee farm families exposes children to fragmented education and child labor.  Since 2015, Project Alianza has been building schools and providing educational programs and scholarships for children growing up in rural coffee farming communities.  The AllPeopleBeHappy foundation has just awarded a second $10,000 grant to Project Alianza to support its Community Allies Program (CAP), which trains local women to teach literacy, hygiene, gender equity, and environmental conservation to 1,600 children in 25 schools in Nicaragua and El Salvador.  The funding will be vital in covering the costs of distance literacy learning materials for children, community educator stipends, equipment for remote training, as well as toothbrushes and soap, which is essential especially during this pandemic.

Indego Africa, founded in 2007, is dedicated to empowering artisan women in Africa through employment opportunities and education.  The AllPeopleBeHappy foundation has been a major supporter of Indego Africa through Project Grants in 2016, 2017, 2019 and a Challenge Grant in 2014-2016 which enabled it to expand into Ghana.  We have just awarded another $10,000 Project Grant in support of its initiation of the “Artisan Accelerator Program.”  The program is intended to be an entrepreneurial coaching and practical implementation of advanced clothing production and financing techniques for 180 artisan women in Rwanda.  The workshop program consists of 3 phases: 1) Vocational Sustainability Certification: Dyeing, 2) Access to Capital and Knowledge of Microfinance: Igiceri, and 3) Cooperative-Specific Business Goals.  The program, taught in two 6-month sessions, will help artisans accelerate the sustainable growth of their businesses by providing working space, hands-on business mentoring and support, direct access to financial capital, and a vibrant community of ambitious artisans and experienced local and international experts.

The Superkids Foundation has an innovative solution to improving education in Paraguay.  They mobilize children as agents of change by enlisting 4^th-6^th grade children as “Kid Teachers” to teach younger kids to learn to read.  Earlier this year, The AllPeopleBeHappy foundation awarded a second $10,000 Project Grant to support the salaries of their seven staff members (two directors and five facilitators).  With the arrival of Covid-19, the program was moved on-line, with The Kid Teachers continue their teaching virtually on Zoom.  These virtual classes began with facilitators sending videos to engage the youth, making sure to not lose any consistency in teaching.  They made their first collection of stories in Spanish and Guarani for Kid Teachers to use in their teaching.  They also created audio books in both languages for the children, too. Activities are being sent to kids through WhatsApp, including specific tasks for the day with small training and games from manuals, spelling exercises, and story writing exercises.  They were also sent a physical booklet to supplement literacy teachings.

The AllPeopleBeHappy foundation awarded Green Empowerment in 2019 a Project Grant for a WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) program in Ecuador.  The villages of Telembi and Chispero (~142 households/~730 people) currently use water from the Cayapas river (especially for bathing and clothes washing) or from small spring sources, with community members hauling buckets of water hundreds of meters to their homes.  In this project we are implementing new water systems in both communities, while integrating Telembi’s existing reservoirs in that system design.  Progress on the water systems came to a halt in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting national stay-at-home order.  While Ecuador was an early COVID-19 hotspot in South America, the country has been able to reduce the rate of new infections and is slowly ending travel restrictions and curfews in some parts of the country.  After engaging the communities about the various health concerns, all stakeholders agreed to resume project work in late June.

The AllPeopleBeHappy foundation has awarded a Fellows grant to Charles Ndyamwijuka, working with Global Emergency Care (GEC) in Uganda. With this grant, Charles, formerly Research Associate and Financial Manager with GEC, is being promoted to Operations Manager. In this new capacity, he will be planning, directing, and coordinating GEC’s operation in Uganda, which include the teaching and training activities at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Masaka Regional Referral Hospital, and Nyakibale Hospital. He is expected to also support the opening of 3 new Emergency Departments in Uganda hospitals annually (year one) and 9 by year three; greatly increasing access for unserved populations to 10,000 patients in year 1 and 60,000 patients by year 3.

The AllPeopleBeHappy foundation has awarded a Fellows grant to Nicol Chinchilla Cordero, working with Amigos de las Americas in Costa Rica.  AMIGOS has traditionally been a service-learning and cultural exchange program for US and Latin American students, but in Jan 2020, it launched a new initiative to expand to year-round programming for Latin American students in Perez Zeledon, Costa Rica.  This pilot program is being led by Nicol, who as Amigos Costa Rica Coordinator, teaches leadership development and community engagement concepts to 15-20 youths, and help student teams execute community service projects.

The AllPeopleBeHappy foundation has been a major supporter of Global Emergency Care (GEC), with 3 Project Grants in 2010 to 2012, and 2 Challenge Grants from 2014 to 2016, and 2017 to 2019.  Since medical doctors are in short supply in Uganda, GEC since 2007 has been training nurses to be Emergency Care Practitioners (ECPs) in order to allow many more patients to receive emergency medical care.  In 2019, Global Emergency Care began the process to transition management of the ECP training and education fully to local partners: the strategy involves transitioning full management of the ECP Diploma program to Mbarara University of Science & Technology, and transitioning oversight of the ECP workforce to graduates of the new Master of Medicine Residency Program for Ugandan Emergency Physicians.  The current $10,000 AllPeopleBeHappy Project Grant is intended to help support the salaries and administration of the 11 ECPs and 6 ECP trainers during this transition.

LifeNet International (LN) works to transform healthcare delivery in Africa by upskilling medical providers and upraising health facilities in more than 200 health facilities across four African countries (Burundi, Uganda, Malawi, and Democratic Republic of Congo). Last year, 2.3 million people received improved quality of care from LN clinics. In 2020, LifeNet International was awarded a $10,000 Project Grant from the AllPeopleBeHappy foundation to create deep, permanent change in a health facility in the Burundian district of Bugendana. Over the course of one year, LN will provide high-impact, capacity-building monthly trainings in medical and management best practices. Health workers will acquire life-saving abilities to reduce infections, correctly diagnose and treat disease, perform interventions for maternal and neonatal complications, and more. In turn, upskilled workers will extend better quality treatment to the 25,000 vulnerable patients who rely on them for life-saving care.