Community Development in Acahualinca (Managua, Nicaragua) - Lessons & Projects linked

Starting on slide 3-4: Throughout the summer of 2020 I worked with Huellas de Paz as a development intern. My responsibilities varied throughout the length of the internship because I had to work closely with Huellas de Paz program coordinator, youth activists, and other/interns on different projects and based on the availability of my team. Since this internship was fully remote and our team was spread out across four different time zones (Pacific, Central Standard, Central Daylight, and Eastern Times), I was able to work asynchronously and synchronously with a schedule running between 11am-6pm ET which was filled working on 5 different projects and engaging in cultural exchange sessions.

Slide 5: Huellas de Paz is a social justice community center in Managua, Nicaragua that supports young adults to become advocates and leaders in their community as they enrich the lives of children through: Creative Expression, Wellness, and Academic Support, as it focus in Managua's poorest neighborhood of Acahualinca —which used to be the municipal domestic and industrial waste-disposal site; it is now a modern waste dispose system regardless not everyone works there leading to a larger of income loss.

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Slides 8-10: My projects entailed:

(i) to build a database of educational resources from kindergarten to highschool and schedule them to be posted on a facebook learning group;

(ii) to create a survey that will assess the impacts of Covid-19 in the community and areas of assistance;

(iii) to conduct and record interviews with the youth leaders that serve as life updates to their sponsors and to use as crowdfunding campaign content;

(iv) to assist with crowdfunding creation and translation to support mental health and covid relief in Nicaragua; and

(v) to engage in grant seeking for the year of 2020-2021 in the areas of education, arts, youth development, and social services.

Slide 11: Adapting to the extenuating circumstances of COVID and the Nicaraguan team was a little challenging because there were instances where rescheduling meetings and interviews became difficult due to scheduling conflicts from both sides. We had to deal with bad internet/wifi connectivity and delayed video and audio. Nevertheless this helped me to plan how to adapt to uncertainty and still get things done. Another challenging aspect of the internship was grant seeking, even though I had access to databases such as grantstation and the foundation center most grants I filtered out didn't have Nicaragua in their targeted geographic area. I learned that when it comes to grant seeking it is important to reach out to the highly specific workers of foundations in order to connect, establish a relationship, asks questions about what I did not find in the application, and/or follow-up with discrepancies found on the website.

I have learned from first hand experiences how Non-Profits establish and maintain funding sources specifically small international Non-Profits.

The majority of Huellas funding comes from the United States and it reminded me of the power dynamics that exist between North and South that can make it hard for Non-Profits in Central and South America to get funding when a partnership has not been established. All of these ties to the concept of anarchy in the international system as well as the importance for youth development when working in sustainable community development.

This internship was really flexible with co-creating opportunities, it was based around motivation to help Managua’s low-income community transitioning to remote learning and gather PPE now that the community center is close because of the pandemic. As someone seeking to become a development practitioner in the area of human development, this opportunity allowed me to work closely with different members of a community and learn how to manage a non-profit that cares about children's education and people's well being.

NOTE: The videos created for the crowdfunding campaign can be found here:

COVID-19 Outreach in Nicaragua

Supporting Mental Health in Nicaragua