Construye Tus Sueños

Now a few weeks ago, excuse my laziness (I’ll blame the frequent loss of electricity recently), 2 groups from my community were invited to a conference called Construye Tus Sueños. I’ll back track and explain that this is the business course that is a secondary project for many volunteers (especially in my sector, Community Economic Development) that teaches community members, especially jovenes/youth how to start a micro business. So there was the course, then any groups that wanted to could submit their plans, and the top 24 plans were chosen to participate in the competition in mid October in the capital.

We ended up with a total of 100 youth, representing 45 plans (we invited those that completed good plans to come and participate although they could not compete). Then the 24 groups first competed in front of a small group of judges then the top 8 were selected to present a second time in front of everyone, and the top 4 were chosen to have their business plans fully funded.

I personally had 2 groups come from my classes to participate. The first are 2 boys who created a plan to develop an egg producing business. Their research of the area discovered that all the eggs sold in the eastern part of the country were produced by a huge company in the north of the DR. They realized they could purchase hens that 1-2 eggs a day and sell those at a lower price then the competition, and also be selling a better quality egg then the eggs that we currently consume.

My other boy worked alone to plan a motor repair shop our in our campo. The importance of his shop is that almost everyone in the area depends on motorcycles for transport into town, to go work on their farms, etc, and the roads are so bad that the motorcycles are often damaged. Then they have to find a way to get their motor back to town to get it fixed because there aren’t any options in the campo.

Both groups did a fantastic job presenting, I was definitely the proud mama in the background with my fingers crossed the entire time.

The motor repair shop was able to make it to the finals, and did a great job presenting in front of everyone (he was really nervous and up until the night before was reading everything off his notecards and spent the whole 10 minutes without breathing or looking up, but on the day of presenting he was smiling and looked at the notecards minimally, it was fantastic! I was so proud!).

Then the big drum roll……HE WON!

He barely got in the top 4 so my campo will soon have an up and running motor repair shop! Which is fantastic and will hopefully help out the community a lot and will give my boy a job and income!

This is 2 of my friends and I working at the conference :)

Now that the conference is over, we are working to get all of the budget finalized and the money will be distributed at the end of the month! The volunteers are also starting to work together to form a team that will take on the planning and organizing of next years conference and program. Construye Tus Sueños only have about 5 years of existance so we are still developing the program a lot. I am working and planning to help with the development of this program and be on the team so that we can work to fund more plans, find strong partner organizations (especially Dominican), find ways to encourage well thought out (not extravagant) budgets, and continue to work to improve accountability (instead of just saying that it will improve the community, how do we know that it is true). The prize money varies because it depends on what their budget is, but it can rise up to 60,000 pesos, about $1,600 dollars, so the program can definitely continue to have a huge impact if we are able to structure it correctly.

Anyways, that is a good solid update about one of the projects I am working on. It is one of my favorite parts about my service because I can see everything that they are learning and to me learning good business skills can make a huge difference in your life, and now I am also taking that material to teach it to adults with businesses in the community, and hopefully will be able to continue to have a positive impact.