the MayaCREW Annual Appeal

Happy Holidays to all my friends! … I hope you all are in the first days of the merriest and most rewarding Holiday Seasons ever.   As for Mary and me, we’re going to hunker down and spend Christmas day alone … I think.  It’s actually my favorite way to do it … just a lazy day with a self-indulgent meal of some sort and some enjoyable music and a special bottle of wine.  We may have family obligations the day before.  And as it turns out, the Wednesday after Christmas, we’re headed up to Dorsett, Vermont, for a nice meal with good friends.  But Christmas day itself will be just for us.

Anyway, the point of this particular correspondence is not to send a Christmas greeting, but rather to beg for a donation of any size to our project in Guatemala.  I’m sure you know we’ve been doing this for a long time, but I would assume you don’t know any of the details, because we don’t tell them very often.  So just to give a little historical background to let you know why this one is special to us, the scholarship program and the two NGOs that support it (ACEBAR in Guatemala, and its US 501c3 fundraising counterpart, MayaCREW) all started with Mary and me carrying out-of-pocket scholarships  for 5 primary and one 1^st year junior high girls in 2001.  At about $50 per student year each, it wasn’t much of a burden.  Over the next couple years, several people heard what we were doing and how cheap it was to support a scholarship, and wanted to help.  So, by 2003, when I led a group of Lutherans around the country on an education-themed tour, we were paying and/or administrating scholarships for 36 kids.   At the end of that tour, a couple in the group approached me to ask how they could help in a bigger way.  Together we developed plans to raise money in the US, and to form a 501c3 to support the scholarships and ad hoc kinds of relief efforts when needed.  In the next few months Mary and I worked with a Guatemalan team to create the Asociación Centromaya Para la Educación, el Bienestar, y la Asistencia Rural which roughly translates to what the 501c3 created the next year – the Maya Center for Rural Education and Well-Being – was named (hence, ACEBAR and MayaCREW).

In 2004, with the couple from the tour’s vigorous help, we started off with more than 150 scholarships, focusing on girls (that focus continues, although we have up to about 20% boys nowadays, and given the progress of girls in the system we may turn more attention to boys in the future).  In the next few years we granted up to 345 scholarships per year.   For about the last 8 years we’ve held the number down to the 250 to 275 range, in part because of funding limitations, but also because the programs get too unwieldy if they’re larger than that.  To comment briefly on funding issues, each year the cost of education has gone up (almost all secondary kids have to attend cooperative schools that have tuition).  But beyond that, our working model and strategy has changed from simply giving away a bag of school supplies and paying registration fees and tuition, as we used to do.  Rather, nowadays we use a more expensive but more effective model of working closely with the students themselves, their families, community leaders, and local school district committees to help primary and secondary kids past some of the hurdles that result in an ongoing pre-junior high dropout rate of about 60% in the poorer and more remote of the 83 rural villages and 4 small towns in which we work. 

So, we are impacting the educational achievement, albeit in a small way, of one large, sprawling “municipality” of the Maya Highlands.  What does that mean?  Well, more than half of our scholarship recipients graduate from college-prep curriculums, and more and more frequently go on to full-time or weekend study college study programs to become teachers, accountants, social workers, business professionals, or engineers of one sort or another.  Another quarter or so of our recipients do a vocational/trade track secondary program, and go straight from high school programs to work as electronic technicians, builders, welders and metal fabricators, mechanics etc.  Another quarter or a little less we lose track of and frankly don’t know what they do.

But even though some fall off our radar screen, here’s what we do know: statistically, having finished high school they are MUCH more likely to have significantly fewer children and to have healthier families.  They are also MUCH more likely to read about and understand political issues, and to participate in the local and national political life of the community and nation, and to be MUCH more aware of and concerned about environmental issues.  We hope that our scholarship recipients are able to find lucrative, stable employment in the dysregulated job market of Guatemala.  But regardless, we know that the benefits of promoting education even in a small way are global and profound.

Anyway, we maintain these 250+ kids on a budget of about $65,000 per year for the last few years.  Of the money raised, MayaCREW – the only source of funding – spends only a few hundred dollars a year on unavoidable costs like banking fees, and some truly nominal expenses related to our annual funding appeal in December.  Board members receive no compensation or even reimbursement for expenses to occasionally visit Guatemala.  So our in-country fundraising and overhead expenses run extraordinarily low – I’m guessing 3 percent or less?

Of the funds distributed by MayaCREW to ACEBAR, meanwhile, about 65% goes directly to scholarships.  The rest is used to maintain a very modest office space and a staff of a social worker who directs the educational projects, a bookkeeper, an office assistant, and a night watchman who sleeps there.  What’s left from that is used for QM and research to ensure that our programs are working and that we’re being responsive as possible to the communities in which we work; and also to fund our “social work” component, consisting of personal counseling with students and families, and conducting seminars and trainings with students over such subjects as family planning, domestic violence, living with alcoholics in the family or community, environmental issues, understanding community politics and policies, etc.

ACEBAR – which administratively is an independent Guatemalan NGO, has no other source of funding other than MayaCREW.  And of the funding given by MayaCREW, more than 95% comes from small to medium size donations ranging from as little as $10 to, until last year, one dependable yearly donation of $10,000 (Unfortunately, that generous donor died in 2016, so we’re scrambling to make up the big hole that losing that donation leaves).

Which of course leads back to the reason I’m sending this letter – to beg for your help in maintaining the great work we do in Guatemala.  Really and truly, anything you could spare would be GREATLY appreciated.  It’s easy enough to donate – you can give via PayPal online at www.mayacrew.org, or – to save the PayPal fee and maximize your donation, there’s an addressed envelope enclosed with our annual appeal card.  There is more information available on the website, by the way, if you would like to learn more about MayaCREW and what the organization does.

Again, Happy Holidays and a Joyous New Year                                                                                          Max Kintner
Vice-President, Maya Center for Rural Education and Well-Being