WHAT WE DO
Awareness of the rights of children and adolescents
- We create awareness campaigns in the media, interviews and forums on: Protecting children from exploitation and abuse in all its forms, as well as focusing on the importance of education and nutrition in early childhood.
- We create social consciousness by providing spaces for youth participate and express their ideas and their talents to benefit humanitarian causes.
Child nutrition
- We support early childhood nutrition programs by providing supplemental nutrition to children under 5 years of age at higher risk of malnutrition.
- We restore and equip primary schools cafeterias that serve vulnerable populations.
Comprehensive Education and Training of Adolescents
- Our "Tools for Life" training programs strengthen self-esteem, successful interpersonal relationships, ethical and moral values, teamwork, social awareness.
- We encourage and organize citizen participation through social work for the benefit of primary school students in urban-marginal areas.
- We provide the opportunity for university scholarships to benefit outstanding students for their artistic and audiovisual production talent.
- We restore and equip classrooms of primary schools in urban-marginal areas, providing them with didactic tools to improve the quality of teaching and learning for boys and girls from 3 to 5 years old.
Promotion of Culture and development of artistic talents
- We promote and develop young artistic talents.
- Our program facilitates an artistic platform in multiple categories for young students with abilities in the musical an audiovisual production areas.
- Our training program specializes in composition, stage performance, choreography and audiovisual production skills.
- We provide real life experiences with a list music and entertainment industry professionals.
- We created "Classrooms of Dreams" as a safe for rescued kids that were exploit through child labor. This space, equipped by musical instruments and staffed by music teachers, created an ideal environment for exploring their dreams through the discovery of hidden talents and served as a boost for their self-esteem and morale.
HOW WE DO IT
Through innovative strategies, we create programs and events that use art and entertainment as a form of expression and as engine for achieving the following results:
- Youth mobilization supported by professionals from the artistic medium, social media and social networks, with an annual program of activities and events.
- Establishment of alliances with private companies and different civic organizations and government institutions that allow optimizing the results and achieving the sustainability of the efforts.
FUNPAEE PROJECTS
Sustainable Families
Faced withthe critical situation of poverty and lack of food that affects 24% of thePanamanian population, the Puertas Abiertas (Open Doors) Foundation initiatesthe Sustainable Families program.
The goal ofthis program is to assist people living in extreme poverty by giving them thetools, knowledge and support needed to produce their own food and achievehealthy nutrition.
The programis based on vegetable gardening and poultry farming, on their family plots. TheFoundation provides the materials, supplies and support required to start andsustain it.
Each familyreceives 3 days of training throughout the process and they are guided byspecialized technical personnel for up to 4 months, so that they cansuccessfully achieve the proposed objectives.
In a jointeffort with the private and government sectors, as well as supportive citizensand volunteers, More than 250 families and 1,337 people from October 2021to date have overcome hunger and despair.
TalenPro
The Puertas Abiertas Foundation seeks, through the TALENPRO competition,to sensitize young students and motivate them to become agents of social change.By recognizing their abilities and personal capacities through a process ofindividual and social reflection, with a repeatable practical experience model replicable by other groups of students, the primary goal is reached.
In order to encourage young people in this effort, the President of the Foundation, Erika Ender creates this innovative strategy: A great student competition of artistic talents ¨TalenPro¨ (Talent with a Purpose), where young artists/contestants, must involve and commit their classmates and teachers in a theoretical and practical training program, including a social service, which will also be part of the evaluation for the great national contest.
TalenPro Challenge
An initiative created by Erika Ender for the Puertas Abiertas (Open Doors) Foundation as an immediate humanitarian response to the needs ofchildren at risk of malnutrition during the worst phase of the CoVid19 Crisis.
The 12 winners of the 3 generations of TalenPro, mentored by 12 Panamanian personalities, teamed up obtaining the greatest amount of donations, to feed up to 1500 children from 0 to 5 years of age for 3 consecutive months. The goal was reached and surpassed by benefiting 3788 kids.They achieved that through:
1. A challenge competition through social media (Tik Tok& Instagram) called ¨The Spoon Choreography Challenge¨, symbolizing the element that would bring food to the kids in need. This challenge required adonation for the cause and the invitation for others to participate.
2.The campaign went viral in Panama and served as a platform for a national TV show, that served as a bigger fundraiser. The show compiled the results to date and led to a talent competition among the TalenPro winnersand their celebrity mentors, generating online votes that were supported by donations.
Butterfly Project
The Butterfly Project was the main campaign that helped create the ¨Classrooms of Dreams¨.These classrooms were safe spaces equipped with musical instruments, where children and young people with limited resources received music classes by professional teachers complemented by workshops on values and motivational talks, in orderto create awareness, discipline and culture. About 200 children were benefited.