Shared vision for the North of Mexico

Leidy Cabrera has a degree in International Relations and a master's degree in International Business from EGADE Business School. He has studied Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the Carolina University in Prague, Czech Republic and Foreign Policy at the National University of La Plata, Argentina. Since 2003 she has been an activist for the rights of migrants and refugees in the United States, collaborating with organizations such as Latino Memphis and TIRRC.

After building a career in the financial sector, where she held the position of Area Manager for Provident Financial Services, she joined the social sector. From 2014 to 2016 she taught in Fundación Alfa program for gifted children. Since 2014 she works at Teach for Mexico, where she currently holds the position of Regional Director for North of Mexico. Teach for Mexico greatest challenge is to combat educational backwardness through the incorporation of a network of young leaders.

Access to education in Mexico does not warranty social mobility because multifactorial issues are pushing students to drop out school and the ones that keep in school are not acquiring the skills they require to assure job security in the future. The solution to this multifactorial issue requires the involvement and leadership of all members in the community who play a crucial role in supporting students to excel. We believe that by enhancing the leadership of the community -parents, teachers and students- that had been marginalize over time in the decision-making proces, and by creating a share vision to work towards, real progress in education outcomes can emerge and social mobility can be a reality. Inspiring a shared vision helps people within the community see a deeper meaning in their daily work, instead of feeling as if they are performing routine tasks that don’t contribute to solving the bigger issue.

For decades, Mexican children´s economic backgrounds have determined their educational outcomes and prospects in life. The education sector in the North of Mexico, poses a variety of complex, but self-evident challenges: 79% of the nearly 1,210,000 students have low performance grade in Mathematics, 61% of students have low performance grade in Communication. According to the National Report of school desertion from the Education Ministry, every day 198 students drop out school, placing us as the region with the highest rate of school desertion. The school dropout problem is a crisis because its impacts not only individuals and their education, but because of the economic and social costs local communities have to deal with. The North is already suffering from a lack of productive workers and higher cost associated to poverty and inequality. 

Given this trend of low completion rates, lack of student achievement, and systematically underperforming school systems, our project is championing an innovative approach to help provide for support, guide, and promote a better life for youth. We are enhancing leadership to address education inequity inside and outside the classroom to provide every teenager with an opportunity to attain an education that would help them improve their lives.

We equip people that live in vulnerable communities with the ability to make change by enabling leadership to turn its resources into the source to achieve their goals. We believe that the school is the unit of change within a community therefore we work from there to enable their leadership: starting from students to parents and teachers and neighbors. We bring all this people together with different stakeholders to create a shared vision that would arise the greatest hopes for their children and youth. As a result, people work together to achieve their collective goals to assure a better life for their kids and youth in the community and for everybody in general.

Past decades changes have turned the North into a highly urbanized region at the expenses of rural areas. Such migration brought high challenges like inequity and segregation. Ensuring that children have access to education and support to catch up and integrate, can improve their prospects and avoid a future underclass.

We recognized that the education issue in Monterrey is multidimensional, therefore we acknowledge the importance of working under a systemic thinking approach by appraising the knowledge of the communities where we collaborate and respect them by listening to them because they have the right answers to their problems, they just may not have the resources to solve such problems and there is where we can help them.

When we first join a community, our work is to listen to the community by becoming a guest within their own dialogue spaces. This is important because that is how we build trusting, long-lasting relationships with the community. The second step is to identify individuals that can become leaders within the community who can later enable other leaderships to work together towards a common goal. Finally, we equip people with the right set of skill to create the change they want to see.

We work with the people that´s marginalized in the decision making to understand how we leverage their strengths to improve their lives. We work from the inside of the schools to build bridges between different members of the community so they engage in the destiny of children. Parents believe that education is a responsibility of the authorities and we believe that the schools belong to the community and everybody is responsible for the education outcomes. We are looking to change attitudes towards the involvement in education of children because the school can be the unit of change in the community.

I work as a regional director in Teach for Mexico since 2016 and two years ago I realized that I was making a huge mistake by coming to the communities to tell them what is best for them and their children with no big results to show.

I arranged a visit with Teach For All staff, including members of the Community Impact Lab.  My aim was to learn from experts to generate a bigger impact in education outcomes.  With a hint of embarrassment, I remember turning to Kaya Henderson, former Chancellor of schools in Washington, DC and asking, “You know everything, you have changed the destiny of schools [in Washington, DC], tell us what to do.” 

Kaya’s response was simple and direct, but not what I expected. Kaya said, “Why are you asking me?  Ask them.  They are in the schools and the community.  They know the answers.” 

Immediately I saw the wisdom in that approach.  While I admit to feel ashamed in that moment for asking a visitor to solve the problems that the community was best positioned to solve, I also took this as an opportunity for personal growth and one that shaped my work going forward. 

I believe that education is the only way to pursue social mobility. I know that because of my own personal story. My mother couldn´t finish elementary school and my dad barely finished high school. They both didn’t find the opportunities to leverage their strength in Mexico and migrated to the United States for a better living. Thanks to their perseverance and hard work I was able to get a much better education than they did. I earned a masters degree from the most prestigious university in Mexico. After finishing high school in the United States, I came back to Mexico with a clear objective in mind: support youth and children from the most marginalized communities to find the opportunities that would make them excel. I joined Teach for Mexico as a fellow in 2014 and got the opportunity to teach students from 10th grade in Monterrey that lived near the state prison. I was lucky to be able to join a special program to teach gifted kids from very poor background. Such program made so much research around these kids and found out that such kids, when dropping out school, were recruited by the organized crime because of their talent.

I am the regional director of a strong and well position non-profit in the North of Mexico. I had been in this role since 2016 and thanks to my initiatives I had been able to growth the operation of the organization by 100%. When I joined in 2016, Teach for Mexico worked in 4 schools serving around 450 students. Now we work in more schools and 26 schools, serving more that 4500 students and we increased our operation to serve children from preschool to high school students.

Additionally, I had been able to build strong relationships with grass roots and grass tops allies. I work closely together with the minister of education, at state level, to look for ways to work together to face the most challenging issues for our students. I had also joined deep conversations with students and parents that had led in small actions from them to solve some of the issues they see in their communities.

I also have a strong communication with donors, sponsors, and philanthropists in the North of Mexico and are willing to support my initiatives.

Clearly many experiences from my career before and my teaching time in the classroom helped my approach to the community, but I noted that working closely together with the Teach for All´s Community Impact Lab had caused a seismic shift in my work. Since then I had seen the power of enabling leadership within different members of the community to see progress inside and outside the classroom.

The current health crisis has become a huge issue for the education sector. As experts prognosticated: the lockdown of schools is going to cause major interruption in students’ learning; disruption in internal assessments; and the cancellation of public assessments for qualifications. Particularly, in Mexico things are getting worst because the federal government is cutting back the education money to states. Also, donors are very cautious in their social investments. At the beginning I felt very overwhelm by the situation and the uncertainty but after having a few conversations with education officials, a state education minister, and experts, I realized that this situation was an opportunity to strengthen our relationship with authorities to support our communities and students.

I was force to renegotiate most of the agreements we had with local authorities and schools to collaborate next school year. We are no growing our operation for next year but we had assured most of the money we need to serve the same number of students. In one month, we evolved our operation to support students, parents, and communities remotely. Also, we are training teachers and we created the education assessment guide used by the government to give final grades to students.

A donor called me in 2018 to bring Teach for Mexico to a community of their interest. We started working in one high school because they thought there was the problem because if a student drops out he has two choices: join the organized crime or find a poorly remunerated job in the informal economy. After a year there I realized that the problem inside that community was even deeper than the donor perceived. There were so many problems in the way of students like violence, food security, drugs, teenage pregnancy, and access to healthcare. As a result, students were no ready to learn in the classroom and we need the engagement of different members of the community to find solutions to the most pressing issues that were blocking students to stay in school and excel. 

By 2019 I got other 2 donors engage into this community to invest in students since kindergarten because high school seemed to late already. My team started to collaborate with two other local organizations to build trusting relationships with key members of the community and to support the parent´ school program. Now we collaborate with 11 schools and serve 800 students and 400 parents.

Very often organizations and entrepreneurs come to poor and vulnerable communities with solutions to the problems that they see from the outside but very rarely take the time to understand the roots that are the causing the problem neither take the members of the community as a source of knowledge. Shared vision for the North of Mexico is a project that recognizes the knowledge of the community and find ways to leverage the strengths of the community.

We are the first organization in the North of Mexico that builds local community coalitions with other NGOs, local government, local leaders, donors, teachers, parents, and students to find together solution to the most pressing problems that are stopping students from staying in school and excel.

As educators, we often focus on the learning and growth of our students.  We see their reading skills emerge.  We watch as their writing skills develop.  We chart progress as students gain facility with mathematics. We chart progress on assessments or see groups of students persist in school and graduate.  But in the Shared vision for the North of Mexico, we believe that educators are in the business of helping people develop therefore we recognize the value of involving every person that touches the life of the kids and youth to assure that they all understand the value of their work and how that has an impact on our students outcomes and futures. 

We are currently working in 4 states of the North of Mexico: Nuevo León, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Baja California. We are directly serving 10,320 students, 2,500 teachers and 3,050 parents in 66 schools

In one year, we will be serving 14,880 students in 91 schools.

In five years, we want to escalate our program to serve 32,000 students in 5 big communities where all the stakeholders work towards a shared vision for their child and youth.

 90% of our students will show a positive impact in their socioemotional skills (social awareness, growth mindset, self-efficacy and self-management).

90% of our students will demonstrate metacognitive thinking which increase their ability to transfer or adapt their learning to new contexts and tasks.

80% of our students will improve their academic performance by 20 percental points.

80% of our students will stay in school.

75% of the parents will be involve in the academic live of their kids.

We will offer our leadership fellowship to 95 teachers from the communities we serve.

We are currently working in all the previous objectives, we had made more progress in some that others and we are still looking for way to effectively measure all of them.

Inside the classroom we work together with the students to achieve better academic outcomes but we also assure that they develop the socioemotional skills that they need to build resilience and overcome adversity. However, our most important task is to develop the leaning autonomy and metacognitive process of the student so they become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, and group members. Alongside all this process we involve parents, teachers, and school principal to assure that they support and reinforce this with the students. On the other side, we look for ways to involve other members of the community like local authorities, companies, and donors to recognize their role in help our students to excel.

2020 has been a complicated year but we are happy to see that there are still donors that are willing to support us. The financial situation may get worst in the near future; therefore we need to be very caution in our growth plans. For the 2020-2021 school year, we are only investing in communities where we had committed a donation from the private sector but we had renegotiated the support from local governments. This financial situation may pull us back to a slower growing plan for 2021 and the following years.

Another barrier is cultural, in Mexico a lot of donors prefer to invest in short time solutions like charity and assistance-based models that, in most cases, reproduces the parameters of poverty. Investing in enhancing the leadership of the community sounds quite dangerous for a lot of the companies that prefer the status quo to prevail. I personally don’t think that they have bad intentions but they had tried so many possibilities with no great results to multidimensional problem that they now believe there is no way to really solve them.

Additionally, donors and authorities had preferred to invest in that one kid that is doing good at school and has more chances to excel. Seems safer to nail key talented people. We have underestimated the power of the community to solve multidimensional problems. One of our jobs is to change that mindset and build a shared vision with stakeholders that are touching the lives of our students.

We want to pursue a stricter evaluation of the progress in the community to show donors and authorities that is worthen to invest in enhancing leadership because they build agency to solve their own problems.

We will also work to change the mindsets so people recognize the value of listening to the communities and work together with them towards a shared vision to find sustainable solutions to multidimensional problems.  Our approach is to join dialogue spaces, education forums, and student leadership camps, where all stakeholders are involve and contributes from their own positions.

Minister of education of Baja California Sur

Conalep Nuevo León

Minister of education of Tamaulipas

Minister of education of Coahuila

Tec de Monterrey University

FEMSA foundation

Caterpillar foundation

BHP

Los Cabos Children Foundation

High Resolves

All the private partners support us financially while some public entities also do but in smaller capacity. The public institution partnership is key because this allow us to work from the inside of the schools towards all layers of the community. We also help the public education authorities to bring solutions to their main challenges like teacher training and parent involvement.

We had secure donations for the next school year and we are currently looking for donors for 2021. We mainly look for donations in local companies, local philanthropies, international companies, international philanthropies, grants, and government funding.

Minister of education of Baja California - $250,000 USD

Conalep Nuevo León - $15,000 USD

Tec de Monterrey University - $50,000 USD

FEMSA foundation - $55,000 USD

Caterpillar foundation - $50,000 USD

BHP - $200,000 USD

Los Cabos Children Foundation - $45,000 USD

High Resolves - $45,000 USD

We need $1,224,000 USD to operate our program in 2020, supporting more than 10,000 students in 4 states in the north of Mexico.