How to start a free volunteer prep community for Paraguay government scholarships: what we’ve learned so far
Last Tuesday, I was folding crumpled practice exams at the back of our borrowed community center room when Mario leaned against the doorframe, holding a cracked notebook. He’s 17, moved from a small town outside Encarnación three months ago to stay with his aunt so he could study for the national government scholarship exam, and he can’t afford the 300,000 guaraníes a month private prep courses charge downtown. That’s more than his aunt makes cleaning houses half the month. He pulled out a half-finished algebra problem, said the internet cut out halfway through the YouTube tutorial he was trying to watch last night, and could we go over it one more time.
Three months ago, it was just me, a high school biology teacher, and two friends who wanted to do something. We kept hearing from kids that the only way to get targeted prep for the exam is to have money, and 80% of the kids applying for these scholarships come from families that can’t swing that. So we started with 8 kids in my empty classroom after school, no budget, no formal plan. Now we have 42 kids, 3 regular volunteer tutors, and a lot of questions we’re hoping others can answer.
Last Saturday, we ran out of desks, so 12 kids sat on the concrete floor working through past exams. A parent of one of our students brought 30 empanadas for everyone an hour into the session, because she heard none of the tutors get paid and we all stay late after our own jobs. Her daughter Lila had to quit her private math tutor two months ago after her dad hurt his back working construction, and she says she gets more help here than she ever got there. The tutors don’t rush her to move on to the next topic if she doesn’t get a concept, she told me. Private tutors have 10 students an hour, so they can’t wait.
So far, the low-cost stuff we’ve tried that actually works is pretty simple, and if anyone else is thinking of starting something similar, these are the first things I’d tell them to try. First, don’t start big. We didn’t rent a space, we didn’t launch a big social media campaign, we just told the kids at my school and asked them to tell friends who were studying. We didn’t need 100 kids the first month to be useful. Second, recruit past scholarship recipients as tutors first, before you look for certified teachers. Our best tutor is Sofia, 22, who got the scholarship two years ago to study engineering. She remembers exactly what tripped her up on the exam, and she explains concepts using the same slang and examples the kids use. She made up a little rhyme about logarithms that all the kids can recite now, something a textbook would never do. Third, ask for in-kind donations first, before you ask for anyone to give you cash. We got all our extra chairs from a closed restaurant down the street, our whiteboard from a local insurance office that was renovating, and the print shop downtown gives us all their leftover scrap paper they would have thrown away. Most people don’t want to send cash to a brand new volunteer group when you’re just starting out, but almost everyone will give you something they don’t need anymore that you can put to use right away.
That said, we’re stuck on a lot of things, and we’re looking for any input from people who’ve done this before. The first big problem is consistent volunteer coverage. All of us work or study full time. Last month, our chemistry tutor got a new full-time job in Ciudad del Este and can only come once a month now. We had 15 kids show up for chemistry two weeks ago and no one to teach, so they just sat around doing their own homework. We’ve had people offer to help remotely, but most of our kids don’t have reliable enough internet to join Zoom sessions, so that doesn’t help much. We don’t know how to structure remote help to actually benefit our kids, right now.
Second, we want to help more kids from rural areas outside Asunción. Right now, we have three kids that take a 2-hour bus every Saturday to come to our sessions, but they can’t afford the bus fare every week. We thought about setting up a small stipend fund, but none of us have experience managing money for a volunteer group, and we don’t want to risk any missteps that would break the trust the kids and families have in us. We’re not even sure what a fair stipend would be, or how to track it without spending hours every week on paperwork we don’t have time for.
Third, we struggle with keeping kids showing up over the six months of prep. The exam is super competitive – only 200 full scholarships get given out across the country every year. A lot of kids get discouraged after the first practice test, when their scores are lower than they expected, and they stop coming. A lot of them have part-time jobs to help their families pay bills, so if their hours get shifted, they can’t make our meeting times and they don’t come back. We don’t know what to do to keep them connected short of changing our schedule every week, which doesn’t work for everyone else.
After Sofia walked Mario through his quadratic problem last Tuesday, he stayed late to help me stack chairs and sweep the floor. He said if he gets the scholarship next year, he’ll come back and tutor math, no questions asked. That’s the part that keeps us showing up every week, even when we run out of paper or don’t have a tutor for the night. Every kid here works as hard as any kid that can pay for private prep, they just never got the same head start. We’re making it work one week at a time right now, but we know we could do better if we had a few tips from people who’ve walked this path before. If you’ve run a small, free learning community for low-income students, especially somewhere like Paraguay, we’re listening.
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