How We Started a Free Volunteer Scholarship Prep Community in Paraguay: What We’ve Learned And What We Still Need Advice On
Last Saturday I wiped up a spilled tereré off a scuffed folding table in our rented community room, and counted 17 students crammed into a space meant for 12. Three showed up an hour early to claim the only spots near the working fan. Two texted at 6 a.m. they couldn’t make it because their bus fare ran out after paying for school supplies. One 17-year-old who moved to Asunción from a small town in San Pedro asked if he could leave his backpack of notes here all week—he sleeps on a friend’s couch, and doesn’t have a secure spot to keep his things. That’s where we are right now, three months in to our little experiment.
Three of us started this: two local high school teachers and me, a parent whose son missed the cutoff for the government university scholarship by three points last year. That scholarship is the only way most low-income kids here can get a university degree. Private tuition costs 10 times what a minimum-wage worker makes in a month, and public university spots are so competitive the entrance exam matches the scholarship exam difficulty anyway. Commercial prep courses charge around 2.1 million guaraníes a month—more than many families pay for rent. We looked around, saw dozens of kids turning away from the shot at a degree just because they couldn’t afford prep, and thought: we know the material, we have a few extra hours a week, why not do it for free?
At first we thought it would be simple. A teacher friend had access to 10 years of past exams, we booked the smallest room at the neighborhood community center, and put up flyers at the public high schools. We got 27 inquiries in the first week, that’s when we realized we’d underestimated how much need there is. We started with 20, and three dropped out in the first month for work reasons, which we expected. What we didn’t expect was all the small, unplanned barriers that pop up every week.
One thing we figured out pretty fast is that flexible attendance isn’t a favor to kids—it’s a requirement. More than two-thirds of our students work 20 to 30 hours a week, everything from bagging groceries at the corner market to helping with family harvests in the surrounding departments. We don’t mark anyone absent, we don’t penalize anyone for turning in practice problems a week late. We post all lesson notes and recorded 15-minute recaps of lectures in a free Google Drive folder, and we start every Saturday session with a 30-minute question block for anyone who missed weekday sessions. That’s one change that made a huge difference, and it didn’t cost us anything but a little extra time to record the recaps. We also added a monthly paperwork night, because we lost three potential applicants last cycle just to mistakes on forms: one kid uploaded the wrong ID, another didn’t know he needed a certified copy of his high school transcript. A retired school admin volunteers an hour that night to help kids fill out forms, and she even drives them to the courthouse to get documents stamped for a small fee that we cover out of our own pockets right now.
Right now, though, we’re stuck on a few problems that we don’t have good answers for, and that’s why we’re putting this out there for advice. The first is small, steady costs that add up faster than we can cover them. We get 50% off printing at the local copy shop, which helps, but we still go through 10 reams of paper a month, plus we want to start giving small bus fare stipends—last week three kids missed a session because the city bus fare went up 150 guaraníes, which sounds negligible, but that’s the cost of a loaf of bread for their family that they can’t spare. We don’t want to charge students, that defeats the whole point of this. We’re not a registered non-profit, so local businesses won’t give us donations, and we don’t have the time or money to go through the long, expensive registration process right now. What do other small volunteer groups do to cover these small, regular costs without formal registration?
The second problem is our mixed skill levels. We have students who are retaking the exam for the second time, who just need extra practice with advanced math and essay writing. We also have 16-year-olds still in their last year of high school who haven’t even covered half the material on the exam yet. We only have three volunteer teachers; most full-time teachers here already work two jobs to pay their own bills, so they can’t spare extra time to volunteer with us. We tried splitting into two groups, but that means we’re running between two rooms and can’t give anyone the attention they need. How do you structure low-effort sessions for mixed skill levels without adding more teachers?
We’ve had 11 of our 17 students hit the practice cutoff score in our last mock exam, which feels like a win. Most of these kids would never have had a shot at that if they were studying on their own. A lot of people talk about kids just needing opportunity, but we’ve seen first-hand that opportunity is made of a hundred small, cheap things: a printed practice test, 500 guaraníes for bus fare, someone to check your application form before you send it. Those small things add up to a spot at university that changes everything for a kid and their family.
But we want to do better. We want to be able to take 10 more students when the next application cycle opens in August, and we want to make sure none of our current students drop out because of a $2 bus fare or a gap in their study prep that we can’t fill. We also know that a lot of other small groups have built this kind of thing before, and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
If you’ve built something like this, especially in a low-income community in Latin America, what worked for you? What mistake did you make early on that we can avoid? We’ve got the time and the commitment, we just need a little practical input to keep this going.
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