Evaluation, Paraguay

This year, Shine a Light is doing an extensive evaluation of the successes and failures of our work over the last decade, so I have been interviewing many of the children and teenagers we have taught to make music and video, as well as with the organizations that serve them.  I'll be posting a couple of updates on this process, starting with an interview yesterday with several people who work in the Paraguayan national government.

In 2008 and 2009, we worked with advisors to the new Paraguayan president, Fernando Lugo, on developing new strategies and policies for work with marginalized children, and then helped to create a film school for street kids and indigenous kids.  The consequences have been fantastic:

• Thanks to a proposal we developed with child leaders in 2008, there is now a 2500 member children's national assembly which proposes policy and evaluates and audits national policy.
• Our suggestion to emphasize the arts in work with marginalized children has resulted in the creation of music, theater, and visual arts programs serving 13,000 kids
• Though the film school itself never gained enough funding to be permanent, local filmmakers inspired by the project have worked with the government and a dozen NGOs to train kids as filmmakers and actors.
• This week, several street kids from Paraguay traveled to Berlin to present their film, Calle Última, at the Berlin Film Festival, a stunning honor.

I'll continue to update the results of our evaluation (not all of which will be so glowing, I trust) as they come in.