Honduras Hope, a 501c3 non-profit based in NH and Honduras, is requesting funding to integrate the AVANCE early childhood education curriculum into their existing kindergarten programs in two rural Honduran communities. Honduras Hope has been operating for 13 years, providing a range of services including education, healthcare, infrastructure development, and economic opportunities. Their kindergarten programs currently lack a standardized curriculum. Integrating AVANCE is expected to strengthen family engagement and early learning, improving long-term educational outcomes for children in the communities.

1. AVANCE REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL
Jessica Hipchen MNPO 7010
Spring 2015
STATEMENT OF QUALIFICATIONS:
History of the Organization
Honduras Hope is a 501c3 non-profit organization serving the department of Yoro, Honduras
with headquarters in Franconia, New Hampshire. Their mission is to empower economically and
politically marginalized people in rural Honduras to create stronger, more resilient, self-
sufficient communities. Founded 13 years ago as a small project in Newton, MA in response to
the devastation in Yoro caused by Hurricane Mitch, Honduras Hope has expanded over the years
to meet the needs of families, primarily women and children, such as health and wellness,
education, infrastructure development, economic development, and community engagement.
Today, Honduras Hope has helped hundreds of children obtain an education through the
distribution of scholarships, the building and renovation of local schools, and the purchase and
reconstruction of a boarding house used for a residential program for students who could not
otherwise attend school given the distance they would have to walk.
In order to meet the expansive needs of children, Honduras Hope created and funded a
kindergarten program; a service the country does not provide. Through support from community
members, Honduras Hope has been able to launch kindergarten programs in Plan Grande and
San Jose. In Plan Grande, Honduras Hope pays the salary of the kindergarten teacher directly. In
San Jose, Honduras Hope provided services and materials in exchange for the government’s
addition of a kindergarten teacher.
By partnering with local schools and empowering women and children to understand the
importance of education while nurturing a sense of shared responsibility for the greater well-
being of the community, Honduras Hope gives people hope and shows them their opportunities.
Integrating the AVANCE curriculum into the kindergarten program in Plan Grande and San Jose
will broaden the impact that Honduras Hope has on these families.
Contact Information
Address:
Honduras Hope
PO Box 60
Franconia, NH, 03580

2. Program Coordinator:
Bill Briggs
Wbriggs507@aol.com
603-616-2133
Grant Consultant:
Jessica Hipchen
jhipchen1225@gmail.com
912-242-2572
Services currently provided by the organization, to include demographics of families
served, facilities/space available, and community support partnerships :
Honduras Hope works through local community boards in Plan Grande and San Jose to
determine needs, prioritize projects, and evaluate programs. Based on the collaboration between
Honduras Hope and the boards, five broad service categories have been created.
 Health and Wellness
 Education and Vocational Training
 Infrastructure Development
 Economic Development
 Community Engagement
Health and Wellness
Three factors affect the health and wellness of the people Honduras Hope serves: living
conditions, poverty and education level, and social services. Recognizing these factors, Honduras
Hope has three health and wellness projects.
The first is the San Jose Health Clinic. In its eleventh year, the clinic promotes general well-
being and disease prevention in the community and serves five surrounding villages. Honduras
Hope built the clinic facility and covers the cost for medicine, facility maintenance, and the
salary of a nurse. Without the health clinic the nearest facility is a four-hour walk away. In
coordination with the Health Department of Yoro, the clinic provides vaccinations and medicine
on a regular basis. The clinic provides free vitamins to all children under the age of twelve, and
free prenatal vitamins to expecting mothers. The clinic nurse conducts outreach classes regarding
nutrition, sanitation, and health education. She provides birth control shots to some women and
family planning education.
The second project is the Nutrition and Feeding Program in Plan Grande. Women from the
community get together three times a week to prepare meals for the children under six years of
age. Vitamins for the improved nutrition of children and mothers are also available. Honduras

3. Hope is in the process of expanding this program to San Jose and adding a kitchen gardening
element to the program.
The final running project in this area is the Compostable Latrine Project pilot program, launched
in 2013. Many of the houses use holes in the ground as latrines. Unfortunately with heavy
rainfalls, the waste often runs off to those people living downhill. The compostable latrine
provides a more sanitary method for dealing with human waste. The pilot latrine was built at the
school in San Jose where children were trained on usage. Since then, the project has expanded,
building a total of 75 latrines in local homes.
Education and Vocational Training
Honduras Hope has programs focused at all levels of the education system; early childhood,
primary, secondary, vocational training, college, and adult education. About 60% of their annual
budget is spent supporting education programs. In total, there are seven programs up and
running.
Prior to Honduras Hope’s arrival, Plan Grande had no elementary schools, and the San Jose
school needed significant maintenance and expansion. Now that Honduras Hope has built each
town an elementary school, the government is supplying 1st-6th grade teachers, and all children
can attend. Honduras Hope has a program in place to identify kids who are not coming to school
so they can help remove barriers to enable their attendance.
The focus of this RFP is to integrate the AVANCE curriculum into the already existing
Kindergarten program. As mentioned previously, the Honduran government does not provide a
kindergarten program. Through the contributions and support of community members, Honduras
Hope has been able to launch kindergarten programs in both schools. In Plan Grande, Honduras
Hope pays the salary of the kindergarten teacher directly and in San Jose they provided services
and materials in exchange for Honduras’s addition of a kindergarten teacher. Working in
collaboration with Honduras Hope and the two schools in Plan Grande and San Jose, AVANCE
will create an even larger impact than there is now.
Secondary school is optional in Honduras. While it is publically funded, there are costs
associated with attendance; shoes, uniforms, books, fees, supplies, and loss of family support
with childcare or farming. Honduras Hope helps enable any student who wants to continue their
education by covering the costs of these fees and working with parents to foster their support.
Students from San Jose have to walk four hours each way to attend middle and high school.
Honduras Hope has built and manages a boarding house and dormitories in Yoro, so San Jose
youth can continue secondary school. The boarding house can accommodate approximately
thirty people. The Boarding house has house parents who provide a warm, family-type

4. environment for the students. Honduras Hope covers all expenses for room, board, school fees,
supplies, house maintenance, and salaries for the house parents and helpers.
Honduras Hope supports two alternative secondary school programs. These include a weekend
education program and a home schooling radio-based program. These programs make it possible
for students who need to participate in family life and family farming during weekdays to go to
school. These options are also available to adults who want to continue their secondary school
education but were unable to earlier in life. Approximately forty-five students have participated
in this program.
Honduras Hope currently assists thirteen college students pursuing degrees: eight young women
and five young men. Each arrangement is uniquely based on their course of study, the school
they attend, and their personal ability to assist with the costs. They have had a few students
graduate or discontinue their post-secondary education. In all cases the students are now able to
provide financial assistance to their families.
Yoro has a private vocational school, CEVER, that Honduras Hope helps to support. It was
founded 40 years ago through the congregational church but is now severely underfunded.
Honduras Hope sees this school as a critical job-training program and is working to help
revitalize the school. They have contributed equipment and supplies to enhance the quality of the
existing programs. They have also built a culinary and hospitality school to prepare youth for
jobs in the hotel and restaurant industry. Meeting its goal of opening its doors in the summer of
2014, the culinary school has been operating for almost one year. Most of the programs at
CEVER attract boys. Honduras Hope is at the early stages of creating a cosmetology school at
CEVER to help provide job opportunities for girls.
Infrastructure Development
Over the years, Honduras Hope has helped numerous families improve their living situation.
They have provided over ninety roofs and concrete floors, and have helped build concrete homes
for numerous families. Honduras Hope has also installed 25 pilas (water storage devices that are
used for washing clothes, bathing, and doing dishes). Currently, neither town has electricity. In
the past, Honduras Hope has helped to install solar lights for Plan Grande. Now they are working
on funding an extension of the electric lines from the city of Yoro into Plan Grande.
Clean water is also an issue. In San Jose, the current source of water is dirty and drying up.
Honduras Hope is working to fund a project to pipe water from 3 kilometers away into the
village. Once they have a reliable water source they will then work to install water filters in each
home for clean drinking water. They successfully piloted these low cost water filters in the
boarding house and are also going to provide them to the homes in Plan Grande.

5. Honduras Hope will continue to look at improving the four-hour walking access from San Jose
to Yoro. There is a stream crossing that requires a footbridge for high water times. This project is
a discussion item for prioritization in the coming year.
Economic Development
Honduras Hope has made notable economic development progress in Plan Grande. The
Women’s cooperative has developed two products with resale value. The first product, Tree of
Life silver pendants are made by the women of the cooperative, then sold in the U.S. to provde a
profit for their makers. Additionally, the cooperative has developed a fleece baby blanket
product for which they purchase fleece at a subsidized rate from the U.S. to make and sell
blankets in the local market. Honduras Hope is exploring ways to source no-cost fleece remnants
so that the women of the cooperative will have a higher profit margin.
Plan Grande has also formed an agricultural sustainability cooperative. Honduras Hope works
with the group on sustainable farming practices, sourcing seeds so that they can sell their crops
after the harvest, and providing used hand equipment from the U.S. Honduras Hope has
attempted small ventures in the resale of coffee in the U.S. but have yet to find a large scale
venue.
Community Engagement
Engagement is how Honduras Hope lives their mission to empower economically and politically
marginalized people in rural Honduras to create stronger, more resilient, and self-sufficient
communities. They seek opportunities at each step along the way to partner with the
communities they serve through:
 Self-determined projects
 Local leadership boards who help prioritize and evaluate direction
 Representative subcommittee for addressing problems and needs
 Regular town meetings for planning, reporting, and hearing from all constituents
 Physical infrastructure that is a shared asset in the community such as the building of the
community center, health clinic, schools, and, in the near future, a lending library
 Leadership training and opportunities
 Standing with communities over time to role model commitment and shared
responsibility
 Discussions about vision, dreams, and how to get there
Ultimately it is through Honduras Hope’s motto – “Juntos todo es possible”, (Together
everything is possible) - that they model and live out their community development efforts, and
transfer the ideas and principles of shared responsibility and community engagement to their
partners.

6. Conclusion
The wide array of services provided by Honduras Hope show that they are capable of taking on
new projects. Not only do they have the capacity to expand, but they also prove to be effective in
each of their services provided, as noted in the section above. Honduras Hope would benefit a
great deal through a partnership with AVANCE, and would continue making a positive impact
after AVANCE personnel are no longer assisting the organization directly.
Sustainability Plan to include funding resources and demonstrate long-term viability:
Honduras Hope evaluates programs qualitatively and quantitatively. For the Kindergarten
program, with which AVANCE will work, qualitative success is measured through satisfaction
levels of the participating children and their families. Quantitative success is measured through
factors such as increases in grades, increases in the number of students enrolled, and the number
of children who move on to first grade.
Honduras Hope successfully runs a number of projects. The positive yearly outcomes that result
from each of the programs provides evidence that Honduras Hope has the capacity to not only
manage new projects, such as AVANCE, but to also do it well. Honduras Hope is an
organization whose expansions are proven effective. Honduras Hope’s partnership with
AVANCE will last much longer than the year that it takes to teach Honduran educators the skills
to implement the program. AVANCE’s impact on the Kindergarten program will last for a
lifetime.
With a history of increasing graduation rates from both high school and college, the AVANCE
program will be evaluated through the use of school readiness surveys for children moving to the
first grade and impact on mother’s surveys. Because most families in Honduras do not move
regularly, it will be fairly easy to keep a database that follows children through graduation of
high school and college. This will be done to evaluate long-term impact of the AVANCE
program on the Kindergarten program.
Currently, Honduras Hope receives funding through independent donations, small civic
organizations, donations from churches, fundraising events, and purchases of Honduran coffee
and crafts. Their annual operating budget is between $60,000 and $80,000 with a goal to expand
that to $90,000 to $100,000 in the coming year.
Seeing the impact that AVANCE has on the Kindergarten program in the two communities will
bring more support from locals (in the United States). Funding for the startup of the AVANCE
curriculum will come from the grant. Funding after the one-year training will come from the
increase in support from local funders who want to be a part of making a difference in the
Honduran school system, and more importantly, in the lives of Honduras children and families.

7. Evidence of impact Honduras Hope has attained to date:
Honduras Hope’s community development model is based on cooperative partnerships with the
villages they serve. Rather than directing programs from their stateside perspective, they seek
involvement from the Honduran people in identifying the most important projects and
implementing programs together with local villagers to achieve lasting results. This model helps
ensure that the precious resources they provide have long-term impact, help build stronger and
more resilient local communities, and enhance self-sufficiency.
Since its’ startup in 2001, Honduras Hope has:
 Built one elementary school, significantly renovated and added an addition to a second
elementary school, and built a community center
 Built and manages a health clinic that serves 5 rural villages
 Purchased a boarding house, added 2 dormitories, and manages a girls and boys
residential program for students who could not otherwise attend middle and high school
 Constructed a culinary and hospitality school
 Created a women’s cooperative to seed cottage industries and to offer life-skills training
 Created a feeding and nutrition program for women and preschoolers
 Started a sustainable agriculture cooperative and built a barn for crop storage
 Provided cement floors and roofs for over 90 houses
 Helped 100+ children attend secondary school by providing uniforms, books, supplies,
and financial support
 Funded a kindergarten program
 Built a compostable latrine for 75 local homes
 Installed solar lights in a village without electricity
 Provided funds to help 13 students attend college
 Purchased chimneys for cooking stoves to reduce smoke causing respiratory issues in
women and children
 Installed 25 pilas to ease daily work life for women
Each of these services provided by the organization impacts the communities in which they serve
by making them stronger, more resilient, and self-sufficient.
Description of how the AVANCE model fits with the current organizational structure and
philosophy:
AVANCE is dedicated to serving marginalized communities and strives to empower families to
break the cycle of poverty through a proven two-generation approach combining early childhood
development and parenting education. Bill Briggs, founder and now Coordinator of Honduras
Hope, founded the organization when he was looking for the poorest and most marginalized
people in the Yoro, Honduras area, resulting in a partnership with the villages of Plan Grande, a
Tolapan Indian reservation, and San Jose, a mountain community of squatters. Working with

8. community members, Bill soon learned that education was one of the greatest needs.
Recognizing that families play an important role in the lives of their children, often influencing
their attendance in school, Honduras Hope would benefit a great deal from integrating the
AVANCE program into their Kindergarten program.
Although Honduras Hope is not located in Texas, where AVANCE typically provides funding,
its headquarters are in the United States. Honduras Hope is an organization with projects that
AVANCE would typically support, with the ultimate purpose of educating the Hispanic
population in order to create a long-term sustainability plan for the people so that they can
become contributing members of society. Additionally, it is recognized that the typical age range
for children that AVANCE targets is 0-3. Honduras does not have programs for children before
the first grade. Therefore, it is rare that San Jose and Plan Grande have them. As mentioned
earlier, this was made possible by Honduras Hope who created and partially supported the
program. It is extremely difficult to come across organizations in Honduras that are already
providing services to families at such a young age. This is why the AVANCE program is a
perfect fit for the Kindergarten program because it is the earliest point, as of now, in which the
skills within AVANCE can be taught to parents and children in Honduras.
Description of how the AVANCE model and curriculum is expected to impact the
organization and families served
A partnership between AVANCE, Honduras Hope, and the Honduran Kindergarten program in
the two communities will teach families new skills. Parents will build resilience, interpersonal
connections, networks, and access to education, jobs and other opportunities. Children will then
have parents that are truly engaged and who will support them throughout their lifetime.
One of the main issues is that parents need help around the home. As children get older, it is
common for families to keep their children from going to school because they are needed with
house work and taking care of siblings. Teaching parents that it will benefit the family more in
the long run if they support their children through school, if not financially then only
emotionally, will increase the rates of children who stay in school. This will enable families to
create a more stable future for themselves, breaking the cycle of poverty that has been passed
down for so many generations.
Other information about you r organization, such as achievements, awards, endorsements,
etc., that would be pertinent to the qualifications for this RFP
Honduras Hope has been added to the list of charities that have earned the prestigious Seal of
Excellence from Independent Charities of America. The Independent Charities Seal of
Excellence is awarded to the members of Independent Charities of America and Local
Independent Charities of America that have, upon rigorous independent review, been able to
certify, document, and demonstrate on an annual basis that they meet the highest standards of

9. public accountability, program effectiveness, and cost effectiveness. Out of more than 1 million
charities operating in the United States today, it is estimated that fewer than 5 percent, meet or
exceed these standards, and of those, fewer than 2,000 have been awarded this Seal.