June '22 Fellow Q&A

As you probably already know, our founders are Resolution Project Fellows since 2019 when they presented E-ROQ PROJECT INC in the Social Venture Challenge at Harvard HNMUN. Last week, our Board of Directors was invited to answer a Resolution Project Q&A and we thought it would be a good idea to share it with you all.

Where are you currently finding inspiration and joy?

We find joy in work well done, and we get inspired by the communities that we serve who trust us to learn something completely new to them. For us it has been incredibly hard to manage our responsibilities as students/doctors with our project, nevertheless, we find real gratification when both our volunteers and our students enjoy the classes. It has taken a lot of time to learn education, finance, and administrative concepts that we didn’t completely manage before, but knowing that we started with only the four of us, and this year we will count on a team of 100 volunteers, is just breathtaking.?

What role do young leaders play in the world today?

In youth, there is energy and creativity, when we started the project we studied which is the population that has a better learning process and why, and we were glad to confirm that it is the children. Young people have better capacities to absorb new information and introduce it into their routines, learning languages more easily for example. Therefore, we decided to invest our time to develop a pilot project that was directed at children, and after a year more than 70% of the kids involved passed their last year's evaluation exam.?

We believe this trend is not only relevant to learning new languages, given the youth’s enthusiasm the creation of new things is not assumed as a struggle but as a challenge, almost as a game, and due to the current rules of society, the reinforcement of respect to their pairs makes them more aware of their surroundings. If the older members of society understood this, they would invest more time in listening to the youth, interchanging ideas, and investing in their education. The youth are participating actively in the development of new techniques and ways to prevent the damage to our planet, overcome conflicts in different and less violent manners, and be more inclusive of those who have been ignored, rejected, or discriminated against over the years. And as we take more responsibility, we also need to be considered relevant actors in our society. The world is currently led by former children and will be led by the current youth.

What inspired you to start your social entrepreneurship journey?

Our inspiration came from different sources, but one thing united us, we were all friends traveling to a Model United Nations competition and looking forward to creating a real solution to local issues.?

Rafael has always said he wanted to pay it forward to a community that received him with open arms and cared for him while he finished his medical training. For Bettina, Los Roques has always been her happy place, where she first learned water sports like Kitesurf, where her family vacationed, and where she goes with her boyfriend and friends for a relaxing weekend, so as a tourist herself, she could see the project being a success from the beginning. And she could also see firsthand how the locals were not benefiting directly from tourism when they could absolutely do it if they had the training for it.

Aranza was raised in a home where social work was part of the routine, some families go on long vacations for self-indulgence, but hers would go on long vacations to remote communities in Venezuela to serve the underserved. Social entrepreneurship was a challenge and an opportunity for her to create a systematic program to help those in need while also spreading her will to serve new volunteers. Isabel on the other end was looking for a project that didn’t feel like a temporal solution, working in different healthcare nonprofits that traveled to remote communities to provide healthcare and then left them without a doctor and continuous medical support felt frustrating for her and unjust to the communities; so this was her opportunity to collaborate on a project that aimed to provide tools to overcome poverty and lack of education instead of a temporary solution that would fade away as the project attempted to move to new communities.

What excites you most about the Resolution Fellowship? -or- how has the Resolution Fellowship impacted you directly and your venture?

We were all really excited to meet our guides, to get to work and know such professional and powerful women in business was a complete inspiration. The Resolution has been a key support in all our professional ideas, helping us by providing us grants and scholarship opportunities and letters of support to apply for them.?

What advice would you give to other young leaders who are looking to start their first social venture?

Just go for it!

It will be time-consuming and hard, but trust that if you have a clear idea you will be able to make it come to life. Build a team with people you trust and allow them to make their own mistakes, this will give you the liberty to explore new things and create a support system for both yourself and the organization.?

Can you tell us how your venture has directly impacted those whom you aim to serve? How has Resolution contributed to this impact?

Without the Resolution’s seed funding we wouldn’t have been able to start, or at least it would have taken us longer to do so. They gave us a clear idea of the research we had to conduct before we started to protect ourselves and the organization legally given that we are working with children and recruit new volunteers yearly who travel to remote communities, which has been really helpful during the years.?

Our organization is currently serving the 2 most touristic communities in Venezuela, Canaima and Los Roques. We are actively teaching more than 260 locals, and have done multiple evaluation trips to an alternate community that could benefit from our project. We created and imparted a course to stimulate the return to classrooms after the pandemic quarantine in 2021. We have developed 2 English syllabuses demographically adapted to our communities for children and 2 for adults. Since 2019 we have trained over 55 volunteers on teaching techniques, children psychology, group management, tourism, environmental conservation, and teaching people with special needs.