The Barefoot Foundation was founded in 1995 by Shakira to make education universally available to all children regardless of circumstances. It operates schools and programs in Colombia that provide education, nutrition, counseling and job training to over 30,000 children and community members annually. The foundation advocates for prioritizing education globally and supports the work of organizations like UNICEF and the Global Campaign for Education. Through schools, community programs and Shakira's advocacy efforts, the Barefoot Foundation aims to empower children through education, overcome barriers to learning like poverty and violence, and promote education as a basic human right for all.

1. Pies Descalzos
{ By: Miguel Gonzalez

2. ABOUT BAREFOOT
•
FOUNDATION
Barefoot or Pies Descalzos is a US non-profit organization whose mission is
to make education universally available to every child no matter the
circumstances.
• It is our duty to support sustainable and innovative education programs
while working to educate policy-makers about the importance of education.
• The mission is inspired by our founder Shakira, who is not only an
international recording artist, but as well a leader who is changing the
world through her humanitarian work. Back when she was 18, Shakira was
able to investigate her own community and promised herself to help
children who have been victimized by poverty and displacement like the
ones she would see in her native Colombian’s streets. She began to make
that promise to become real, when she launched Pies Descalzos Foundation
in 1995. With the help of her partnership with UNICEF, the Global
Campaign for Education, Shakira was able to planned and launched
Barefoot Foundation in 2008 which is a separate entity from her Colombian-
based Pies Descalzos Foundation, but both organizations support the same
mission which is to ensure that every child can exercise his or her basic
right to a quality education.

3. BAREFOOT FOUNDATION
SYMBOLIC ARTIFACT
 Pies Descalzos – or Barefoot – has a
double meaning.
 1. It is the name of the record that
made Shakira’s music
internationally known.
 2. It also recognizes the
thousands of children living in
poverty that they cannot even
afford shoes and walk through
the streets barefooted.

4.  Our mission is to make
education universally available
to every child.
Values/Mission
 We value learning therefore we
 Values believe that simply providing
teachers and schools is not
- We value education because enough when children are
we believe education is the faced with extreme poverty, so
we work to ensure that they do
key to a better world for not have to learn with empty
everyone, not just stomachs and broken homes.
underprivileged children.
 We support worldwide
Education is not just books education and encourage
and facts; it is also social and governments to increase
spending on universal
emotional growth that will education programs in
help us to seek meaning and developing countries.
potential in life.
- We value basic rights and we
help children exercise and to
understand their basic right to
an education, paving the way
for their growth in society;
thereby unlocking their
intellectual, emotional and
social potential.

5. Shakira’s Impact
with Pies Descalzos
• As our founder Shakira gained international success with her
album, Pies Descalzos, in 1995 she began to make a difference
in the lives of Colombian children.
• In the year 2003, the first Pies Descalzos School was built in
Quibdó, a city along the Pacific coast where displacement
rates are 35%.
• Since 2003, our foundation, Pies Descalzos, has opened six
schools serving disadvantaged
children and their families through
education, nutrition, income-generating
projects and counseling.
• Our founder continues to make a difference
as she brought her education advocacy to
UNICEF as a Goodwill Ambassador and
became the Honorary Chair of the Global
Campaign for Education.

6. More of our Founder
• In 2006, she helped to create ALAS Foundation(Latin
America in Solidarity Action) an organization that
promotes early childhood development in Latin
America. She continues supporting actively to date.
• After the earthquake that hit Haiti, Shakira visited Port
au Prince and pledged to work on strategies to help the
country in its educational environment. A school is
destined to be built there in the near future.
{ • In 2011, Shakira was appointed by the President of the
United States, Barack Obama, as Member of the
Presidential Advisory Commission on Educational
Excellence for the Hispanic population.
• In the present, Shakira continues to participate in
various events about education around the world
where she propagates and sends the message of the
importance of providing quality education to all
children where a better future awaits them all. She
continues to take inform action by being
knowledgeable of the importance of her message of
education to the world. By doing so, she is able to make
well-reasoned judgments about what to do next in her
foundation and believe that education is a priority.

7. Education Advocacy Program
 With our program Education Advocacy, we make
education a top priority around the world.
Unfortunately, millions of children believe that
education is a far to reach dream in their lives even
tough education is a fundamental right. Their way
of thinking makes them have fallacious conclusions
about their potential in life.
 We work with international organizations like
Global Campaign for Education in order to keep
our priority of education being a top priority.
 With our program and the support of many
supporters who donate and have their companies
sponsor our programs such as Education Advocacy,
we have inaugurated schools that within each
community the program adapts to serve it with
unique sub-programs within the program.

8. Inputs
 We raise public awareness about education being a
fundamental right. To be informed about education
being a fundamental right, we start to start making a
difference.
 We educate policy makers about the importance of
education and make them aware about how important it
is for them to reflect on decisions they make because
they are the one’s that can help to shape society.
 We seek to influence donor governments to live up to
their promises and close the $10 billion annual education
funding gap.
 We support the establishment of a Global Fund for
Education to ensure that there is unified and to
aggrandize international support for education.

9. Our staff and our Inputs
continue…
 We are fortunate to have a distinguished, talented and committed staff whose
contributions make our work possible. Our staff includes:
 Howard Buffett
 Ceci Kurzman
 Haim Saban
 Claude Wasserstein
 Our Colombian partner, the Pies Descalzos Foundation's staff includes:
 Bruce MacMaster
 Antonio Celia
 Samuel Azout
 Alejandro Santo Domingo
 Maria Emma Mejía
 Patricia Sierra
 Beggy Gómez
 Alexandra Sánchez
 Obeyls V. Suárez Lozano
 Adriana Cecilia Benítez Sánchez

10. Process
 We work with boys and girls whose lives have been disrupted by
violence and poverty. By doing so, we educate children with
municipal teachers. These teachers undergo training to improve
their professional skills.
 We teach children dressmaking, ecotourism, arts, crafts, and
bilingual education.
 We work with the community and the schools with
comprehensive projects such as Project “Open School Doors”
which allows students and young people to participate in
activities, and other Youth and Literacy Programs.
 With the schools that have been built, we help the community by
offering vocational training, health services and other programs
for the entire community.

11. Process continue…
 The schools that have been built are improved facilities that
provide enough space for the children to continue to engage
actively and continue being enrich with education with the use
of art, music and recreational activities that are offered within
our program.
 Children get help with extended school days and homework
assistance.
 We also provide children with psychological counseling and
support for themselves and their families. We help them to
overcome emotional barriers that they might have had suffered
through violence in the streets.
 We fight child labor by providing economic opportunities for
families.

12. Outputs
 We currently support six schools which are run by our Colombian
partner, the Pies Delcazos Foundation, in different Colombian regions
of Barranquilla, Altos de Cazucá and Quibdó.
 More than 30,000 children, their family and community members
benefit as more than five thousand children receive nutritious meals,
education and psychological support services from our schools.

13. OUTCOME: Words of
change through education
 “The Barefoot Foundation, which I created when I was
eighteen years old, is currently implementing a
program to help 28,000 victimized children, their
families and their community in my country, providing
them with nutritious meals as an incentive so that their
parents allow them to attend school. By doing this, we
help to reduce the number of children ages ten through
twelve who are forced to work in the streets, enter
prostitution, or join the guerrilla groups and become
criminals. No child should be excluded from a quality
education.”
– Shakira
*

14. Outcomes continue…
 We have helped both children and parents with income-generating programs
with the methods that are being involved in the program.
 We are helping to transform societies such as Colombia into peaceful societies
that are committed to its most vulnerable citizens by helping children through
education.
 The families that we have helped have improve their socio-economical
conditions.
 We are positively affecting children’s lives by making them aware about their
human potential and intellectual.
 Through education, children begin to be active in shaping their own world and
start thinking about ways they can help their communities as they learn about
themselves and their potential.
 We have created 250 new jobs as we transformed our income-generating
initiatives into parent cooperatives and many other jobs with our vocational
training we provide to the communities.
 Communities are being aware about their health through our health services that
we provide.
 Children become educated and their future is brighten as they learn about art,
music, and many other subjects when they are in our schools. They smile more
as their skills are being refined through our program because they have a more
positive attitude about striving to improve in order to enjoy and reach success.

15. Community Need
 Every human being has the basic human right to
education. Unfortunately, obstacles such as poverty,
violence and mal-nutrition can become a problem in
people that have the potential to succeed in life and to
make a difference.
 In 2008, nearly 43.6 million people Americans
lived in poverty (about 13.2% of the
population); 12.9 million were under the age of
18 (11 Facts about Education and Poverty in
America).
 Children in societies such as Colombia are more likely
to be homeless. If they are homeless, their lives will be
lost forever and their human potential will be lost as
well. They must attend school in order for their lives to
succeed and become more skillful and mentally
disciplined.
 35,000 children are homeless and living in the
streets of Colombia (Barefoot Foundation).

16. Community Need
 We, the Barefoot Foundation, are devoted to ensure that no
child is left behind and they can exercise his or her basic right
to the education they deserve. We are also devoted to improve
the education and quality of life for the millions of children that
are not given the opportunity to fulfill their potential. Step by
step we are and will continue to make a difference together in
the world and set EDUCATION a priority for every society.

17. A word from Shakira to
the Community’s Need
 “We know how to address this, and it is within
our reach. And we can truly be the cause of
change and be the first generation in human
history to bring education to all children
everywhere so no child is left behind.”
Shakira -

18. Shuttleworth Foundation
 Shuttleworth Foundation is  Barefoot Foundation values…
committed to…  Barefoot Foundation defend
 1. To adopt projects and the right for an equal
award fellowships that education to all no matter the
carry the common focus of circumstances. It provides the
fundamental space (schools)
defending the rights of
in order for children and other
individuals in terms of people to gain knowledge and
information access and become educated. Children
knowledge while providing become aware of their
policy formulation. intellectual, emotional and
potential in life and seek to
change the world while
growing in society. They start
to seek the truth about the
benefits of education with
intellectual energy and with
integrity and start to seek
success in life.

19. Shuttleworth Foundation
 Barefoot Foundation values…
 Shuttleworth Foundation is
 The foundation itself is an
committed to… innovation to fight for those
 2. Innovation
who are disrupted by
poverty, mal-nutrition and
violence and allow them to
become discipline in their
 3. Leaders that are education and the bright
willing to help to stars they are meant to be in
life.
change the world for
 Our founder Shakira is
the good. making a difference in the
world by spreading the word
of education through all the
world, making others see that
education is a human right
and it is the key that will
foment success.
 Together as a foundation we
are educating the next
generation, the future for the
world.

20. How you can start making a
difference
 We know that educating takes time and patience. Take the chance to change a
child’s live and see how you can help a star to shine. You will see that with
your help, we will educate children in order for them to become productive
members of society. We know that without your help, we wouldn’t be standing
right now! In the following we explicate ways you can start making a
difference and become a committed and responsible learner about our
foundation.
 1. Donate- You can support one of our programs with a donation of money or much
needed supplies by doing so, you will help us build a brighter future for others.
 2. Spread the Word- Spread the word about our Foundation , doing so will make
others to hear about our great mission about education. Shakira’s voice will be spread
as well.
 3. Volunteer- We welcome all passionate, enthusiastic volunteers who are willing to
make a difference.
 4. Sponsor a Child- We give you the chance to become a Godparent to reflect the
supportive, encouraging nature of the relationship and make a difference not only to
the child’s life you would sponsored but to yours as well.

21. Barefoot Foundation Promoting
CRITICAL THINKING
 We, Barefoot Foundation, with our mission and initiative to educate the
world about the importance of education we are making people to start to
think critically. We have began our mission since 1995 and have helped
people to understand education as the key to success. The schools that have
been inaugurated throughout Colombia and our future schools will sure
continue to help children to overcome emotional barriers that are preventing
their potential in life. As they become informed and educated with our
programs within our foundation, students are becoming aware about the
need to change their lives. This awareness enables them to seek truth with
intellectual energy and with integrity with the help they are receiving
through the education they are receiving from the foundation. The
education being received makes them discipline in their learning thus
creating committed and responsible learners. Another great thing being
promoted through the foundation is their attitude in general, but better
yet, they start to have a more positive attitude about striving to improve
in order to enjoy success in life. Overall, they learn what to do with their
lives as they gain intellectual knowledge and start to make well-reasoned
judgments about what to believe.

22. Personal Connection
 I relate with the mission of Barefoot Foundation. I strongly believe that
everyone is destined to make a difference in the world. In order to
make that difference, one must be educated. Education plays a great
part in life when it comes to be successful. Education undergirds
success. I have been faced with poverty back when I was younger and
lived in Mexico. I still remember when my family at times didn’t had
enough money to buy food. I did went to school when I was living
over there, but I was mistreated by those who called themselves
“teachers.” Those unscrupulous “teachers” were my violence back then
because I was not allowed to learn if I was hit if I did not learned.
Things started to change when I moved to California and was able to
see and deciphered that I can become the person I want to be with
education. I understand that education is the key for success but I am
also aware that it takes time to see results. I must be strong and
continue with my education because I want to make a difference in the
world.