Enseña Chile: Transformational Teaching
I am part of a vibrant team of high qualified professionals who are dedicating one year of their professional & private lives in locations all over the world creating direct social impact on the field. The amazing and highly motivated team is the iCats Fellowship 2013 of LGT Venture Philanthropy, an impact investor supporting globally organizations with outstanding social and environmental impact.
After 20 years working for large multinationals (18 years in large banks) on complex IT projects, I have decided to combine my best professional skills with my ever most motivating personal activities: social engagement.
Since March 2013 I´ve been working in the South American city of Santiago at the NGO Fundación Enseña Chile. This not-for-profit organization is a successful member of the global network Teach For All / Teach For America. The social goal of Enseña Chile is to close the educational gap of access to universities by young poor Chileans from vulnerable regions across the country. Enseña Chile attracts the best graduates from the most prestigious universities in Chile, and through a rigorous process of selection and training, place them as transformational teachers & leaders at the lowest ranked schools. These outstanding group of people devote two years full-time teaching and transforming the lives of disadvantaged youth students in poor regions instead of getting enormous job opportunities at the regular market place.
Enseña Chile is a 5-years old NGO. So far it’s been doing very well with all resources available to achieve its mission. However it’s facing the two situations: 1) it is not anymore just a start-up organization; 2) it has an ambitious plan of scale up by 2015. Thus Enseña Chile must have strong professional processes in place, mainly because the level of requirements from all stakeholders are getting even higher.
My position at Enseña Chile as Director of Business Process & Intelligence is to support the organization in becoming more process oriented and efficient, through the capacity building of process definition & knowhow, as well as IT Consulting to support the organization plan of growth. Additionally my contribution is to bring some corporate best practices into the organization.
Since my start at Enseña Chile I have been fully dedicated to go over the whole organization, get deeply involved in its mission/vision/principles and meet several stakeholders. At this point I’ve met most of the team members. I’ve participated in strategic meetings. At my second day I was invited for a meeting at the Chilean presidential office with the secretary of ministries. However the most important and exciting meeting was: I visited three Enseña Chile´s teacher at their schools during classes’ hours.
I’ve already started developing the job I’m supposed to do to make a significant impact in the educational landscape of Chile/Latin America. Since my first days I found at Enseña Chile a great team with very high levels of energy. The team is very committed in doing a great job and very concentrated in achieve Enseña Chile’s mission.
Santiago city is still a good place to live and Chile a quite beautiful country. However as other Latin American countries, cost of living has exploded since recent years, making the inequality poor vs. rich even higher. Even though social mobility is a reality in place in Latin America, mainly Chile and Brazil, the unbalanced social welfare is still the core and biggest problem. The portion of poor and vulnerable are still the largest majority. Enseña Chile aims to cure this insistent disease, and definitely it’ll.