Diques.lab & Anonos.lab
Costa Rica
We are thrilled to be partnering with Lifting Hands in San José, Costa Rica!
Lifting Hands is a non-governmental foundation based in San José, Costa Rica, doing great work with the elementary school children in El Bajo De Los Anonos, a community that has been declared uninhabitable by their government.
Over the last 3 years, MWI and Lifting Hands launched Anonos.lab, a Teen Outreach Center to attract young people away from gang violence and the narcotics trade. Our programming has been so successful in preventing young people from joining the narco economy, that we've expanded our project into a separate location in Costa Rica, and Los Diques community of Cartago. Our partner is actively looking for donors to fund a permanent facility in this community.
Valeria García - Program Director
Anonos.lab Coaches
Journey to Thriving Young Adults.
Our objective, in partnership with nonprofit Lifting Hands in San Jose, Costa Rica, is to successfully develop personal vision, culture of achievement and skills that combine to overcome generational poverty and attraction to the narcotics economy and other risk behaviors. Our target group is adolescents in the 11-24 age range residing in Bajo de Anonos.
We are developing a systematic program where adolescents of Bajo De Los Anonos will be taken on a journey to thriving young adulthood that focuses on 3 main areas (Core Competencies):
Narcotics traffickers and organized crime groups recruit adolescents from communities plagued by poverty and violence. It is estimated that 50%-60% of all adolescents from the target community of Anonos are convinced to engage in narco sales, violence for hire, and sex trafficking. In the adolescents we surveyed from the community, nearly 98% of them live in fear of safety for themselves and loved ones, creating a "survival" mentality that hinders their ability to dream for a life outside of their day to day challenges. We believe this is unacceptable and a problem within our collective ability to solve.
Join us in helping to bring vision and solution-based programming to this region of the globe.
“Change will come from the inside-out. The environment may not change, but thinking and behavior can. Our primary focus is internal change that has an outward impact.”
Measure & Share.
In partnership with Lifting Hands, we've developed a psychometric assessment (tested for validity and reliability) that will measure growth of adolescents through the program, guided by young adult "coaches" we've recruited and will be training from the San Jose community.
In our initial pilot data, conducted between August of 2021 and December 2021, we found measured success in the areas of E, D, and V. With some tweaks to our weekly classes, recruitment of additional adolescent coaches, and modified scheduling to increase consistent attendance, we scaled up Anonos.lab to over 100 students in January 2022.
Our students will be evaluated using our EDV assessment again yearly, with the goal to replicate a data-proven model to other regions of Costa Rica and beyond.
All of MWI’s research, methods, and curriculum will be packaged and freely shared as “open-source” for the use of other NGO’s, governments, and faith communities throughout Latin America.
Our partner.
Hear from Mariola Fumero, Executive Director of Lifting Hands. Join us along with Lifting Hands to bring personal vision, opportunity, and hope to the teens of the Los Anonos community in San José, Costa Rica.