How We Started a Free Volunteer Scholarship Prep Community in Paraguay (And What Advice We Need)
Last Saturday, I wiped a half-spilled coffee off a wobbly folding table in the back of a community church on the edge of Asunción. Seventeen teens crammed onto wooden benches, three or four sharing a single tattered copy of the 2024 government scholarship exam guide. Mario, a 16-year-old who walks 45 minutes to get here because he can’t afford the bus every week, leaned over and asked when we’d have more past exam papers to practice. I didn’t have an answer for him.
Three months ago, three parents came to me after my regular shift at the public high school where I teach. Their kids all graduated last year, wanted to go to university, and had the grades to qualify for the government’s national scholarship program. But the entrance exam is tricky, and private prep courses cost 1.2 million guaraníes a month—more than most of these families make total. No one in the area offered anything free, so they asked if I’d help. I put out a call on a local teacher Facebook group, and three other high school teachers and four college students who’d gotten the scholarship themselves a few years back said they’d volunteer. The church let us use the back room for free on weekends, and we started. Eight kids showed up the first week.
One of the college volunteers, Sofia, brings homemade empanadas every Saturday. She knows half the kids skip breakfast to save money for the ride in, so that’s one less thing their families have to cover. We keep a small jar of change for bus fare, and it’s usually empty by the end of the second week. We post updates on a public Facebook page, and kids just show up—last week we had 22, and we ran out of chairs.
We’ve already figured out a few small things that work. Early on, we assigned 10 pages of reading and five practice problems for homework each week, and only two kids turned it in. We didn’t get mad—we know most of these kids live in two-room houses with four or five siblings, no desk, no quiet space to study. A lot of them work 20 or 30 hours a week selling candy, washing cars, or helping their parents with farm work. So we scrapped homework entirely. All practice work happens during our four-hour Saturday session, so if they can’t do anything outside of that, they don’t fall behind. That’s made a huge difference in attendance, even if it means we cover material a little slower.
We also pair new students with returning students who’ve been with us for a month or two. The older students get to review material they already learned by explaining it to someone new, and new kids don’t feel embarrassed asking basic questions in front of the whole group or me, their teacher. It doesn’t cost anything, and it’s cut down on the number of kids dropping out in the first month by more than half, from what we can tell.
But we’re hitting a lot of snags we don’t know how to fix, and that’s why I’m writing this—hoping someone who’s done this before can weigh in.
First, materials. The government updated the exam syllabus last year, so all the old guides are useless. The new official guide costs 150,000 guaraníes a copy, which is almost $20. We could only afford to buy three, so we scan pages and share PDFs, but not every kid has a smartphone big enough to read the problems, and printing is 500 guaraníes a page, which adds up fast. We’ve had a few people offer to donate money to buy more books, but none of us are registered as an organization, so we don’t have a bank account to put donations in. We don’t want to deal with all the paperwork to become a nonprofit right now—none of us have time for that between our jobs and classes. How do other small, volunteer groups handle small donations without all the red tape?
Then, attendance inconsistency. Kids miss two, three, even four weeks in a row all the time. It’s never because they don’t care. Last month, Lila missed three weeks because her mom got sick and she had to take over her mom’s street food stall. Another kid missed two weeks because his dad’s moto broke, and he couldn’t get into the city. We don’t want to turn anyone away when they come back, but it means we have a huge range of progress in the same group every week—some kids are halfway through the algebra section, others are just starting. How do we structure sessions so no one gets left behind, without burning out our volunteers who have to plan three different lessons every week?
We’re also already feeling the strain of being all-volunteer. All of us have full-time commitments— I teach 30 hours a week, the college students are taking five classes a semester. We can only do four hours on Saturday. We get at least one request a week for after-school help during the week, or extra one-on-one help for kids who missed years of high school when they had to drop out to work. We can’t cover that right now, but turning kids away doesn’t feel right. What small steps can we take to expand without burning everyone out?
After we stacked the chairs and locked up the church room last Saturday, Mario stayed behind to help me carry the stack of textbooks to my car. He told me he wants to study civil engineering, so he can help build better roads in his neighborhood, where the mud gets so deep during the rainy season kids can’t walk to school. He said before we started this group, he’d already decided he’d never be able to afford university, so he was just going to drive a moto taxi like his dad. Just having a place to sit and study, with people who will answer his questions, that’s already changed things for him.
That’s enough to keep us going, for now. We know this is a small project, and we’re all just making it up as we go. We don’t need big grants or fancy offices—we just need a few tips from people who’ve walked this path before. If you’ve run a small, free volunteer prep community for low-income students, what worked for you? What mistakes should we avoid? We’re listening.
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