How We Started a Free Volunteer Scholarship Prep Community in Paraguay: What We’ve Learned (And What We Still Need Advice On)
It’s 8 a.m. last Saturday in a borrowed church hall on the outskirts of Asunción, and the only fan in the room hums so loud you have to raise your voice to be heard over it. My thermos of bitter black coffee is dented on one side, and 17 high school seniors are crammed around folding tables we dragged in from the church’s storage closet. Seventeen-year-old Sofia leans forward, eraser smudges all over her notebook, and asks me to walk through the logarithm problem she’d stayed up until 10 p.m. trying to solve after finishing her shift cleaning a doctor’s office downtown. Sofia can’t afford the 2 million guaraní (around $270) private prep course that most kids who take the national government university scholarship exam sign up for. For low-income kids like her, passing that exam isn’t just a chance to go to college—it’s the only chance. That’s why three of us got together last year to start this free, volunteer-run prep community. We’ve learned a lot along the way, but we’ve got a lot of questions left, too.
None of us started with a big plan. I’m a high school math teacher at a public school a few blocks away, and I kept noticing how many of my top students wouldn’t even apply for the scholarship because they couldn’t afford prep. Two of my former students, both scholarship recipients who were now studying engineering at Universidad Nacional de Asunción, offered to start tutoring a few kids in my living room after work. Within a month, we had 15 kids showing up, and the church offered us this hall for free on weekends. All of our volunteers are former scholarship recipients or current university students who remember what it was like to go without prep. Luis, who runs our history and civics sessions, takes a bus an hour each way every Saturday from his apartment on the other side of the city. He grew up in a small rural town outside Concepción, and he tells the kids he would have never passed if a teacher hadn’t given him extra hours for free after school.
We’ve gotten by on small donations: a local office supply store gave us our beat-up whiteboard, a retired teacher donated a box of secondhand textbooks, and parents take turns bringing empanadas for snack break on Saturdays. We don’t charge anyone anything, ever. Even when we print out practice sheets, we only ask for a small contribution to cover ink and paper, and we just give them away for free if a kid can’t pay.
What we’ve found works so far is pretty simple, stuff anyone starting something like this can use. First, don’t wait for a perfect space or perfect funding. We started with 8 kids around my coffee table, and that was enough. Second, ask for help locally first. Most small business owners, church leaders, and former scholarship winners will give you an hour or a ream of paper if you just explain what you’re doing. Third, scrap any strict attendance rules. We used to require kids come at least twice a month to stay in the group, until we realized most of the kids who miss a lot are working extra shifts to help their families pay for food and rent. Now we don’t cut anyone off, even if they only show up once every couple of months. Even an extra hour of practice is better than nothing.
But we’ve hit a lot of snags we don’t know how to fix, and that’s why I’m writing this looking for input. The biggest one is inconsistent attendance. Most of our kids work between 20 and 30 hours a week, and kids from rural areas who travel in for sessions often miss weeks because of harvest seasons or bus fare running out. We need to cover the entire syllabus by the October exam, but we can’t just pause the whole group every time half the kids can’t make it. We tried splitting into two tracks, a slower one for kids who miss a lot and a faster one for those who come every week, but that means we need twice as many volunteers, and we only have six people who can commit to regular sessions right now.
Another big issue is access to past exams. The Ministry of Public Education and Culture sells complete packs of the past 10 years’ exams to private prep academies, but they haven’t replied to any of our three requests for free access for our group. All we can find for free are scattered old exams on random government websites, so we’re missing whole sections, especially the newer general knowledge questions that focus on current Paraguayan policy and indigenous history. We can’t afford to buy the official pack ourselves, since every cent we get from small donations goes to printing and bus fare for volunteers.
The third problem is reaching kids outside of Asunción. Most of the kids who need this the most are in small towns two or three hours outside the capital, who can’t come to our Saturday sessions. We tried Zoom, but most don’t have enough mobile data to stream a two-hour class, and the only free wifi in most towns is at the municipal library, which is only open for four hours a day. We recorded our classes and put them on YouTube, but most can’t download the whole video to watch later. We thought about doing quarterly one-day workshops in regional community centers, but we don’t have money for bus fare for volunteers or for printing enough notes for everyone who shows up.
As I was locking up the church hall last Saturday, Sofia stopped me by the door. She pulled out her latest practice test, and she’d gotten 72%—up from 54% when she started with us two months ago. She said she never would have gotten that score studying on her own, because all the free prep stuff online is for university entrance exams in Argentina or Mexico, not the Paraguayan scholarship test. That’s why we keep doing this, even when it feels messy and we don’t have all the answers. Right now we’re helping 17 kids, and that’s 17 more than would have had help otherwise. But we know there are hundreds more across the country who need this. If you’ve built something like this in a low-resource community, or have ideas that might work for us, we’d love to hear what you’ve learned.
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