Limitless Horizons Ixil

If I am selected as a winner for the Elevate Prize, I would invest the funds in girls who, if only they had a great school to attend, can transform their communities and drive sustainable development in their countries. My organization, Limitless Horizons Ixil (LHI), is part of a global movement to send girls to school as a means of powering economies and driving gender equality. LHI is at a tipping point-- we have done the research and planning, and are now $500,000 away from building and launching a high-quality, empowering, and holistic middle and high school in our rural, indigenous community in Guatemala. Our vision is to develop a new generation of civic-minded youth while strengthening families, promoting a culture of gender equality, and improving educational quality across the community. LHI brings deep expertise in building local capacity to meet the educational gaps in their community. We believe our school, which joins local leadership with international expertise, will have a positive ripple effect in Chajul for generations to come. With the Elevate Prize, we can build a new school, and I would fully utilize the professional development opportunities to help strengthen my leadership to expand my impact.

When I first visited Chajul, I was one of very few foreigners for hundreds of miles to traverse into such a remote, rural community in Guatemala. I was shocked by the impact of the 36-year-long civil war on this and so many other indigenous communities in Guatemala and especially by the lack of educational opportunities. I believe access to education, especially for girls, is key to tackling social and gender-based inequality and contributes to a community’s overall well-being. My vision is for Chajul to be a thriving community with gender equality and widely available educational and employment opportunities, while maintaining its Maya cultural identity. Since 2004, LHI’s local team has supported 226 youth to attend and succeed in school with scholarships, academic support, and wraparound services and opened the first and only community library, serving over 500 youth every year. Through impactful programs, a dynamite staff, and an incredible village of global supporters, our scholars grow up to become leaders and changemakers. My goal is to bring an empowering educational model to Chajul that can be replicated in other disadvantaged communities, helping youth develop a strong academic foundation and the mindset and agency for barrier-breaking success and transformational leadership.

129 million girls around the world are out of school. In Chajul, where 93% of the population lives in poverty, girls face significant barriers to educational attainment. The cost of schooling presents a huge barrier for families to send their daughters to school. Girls who are able to attend school struggle with poor educational resources, leading to low rates of attainment. LHI was founded on the back of research demonstrating the power of educating girls on the development of communities and entire countries. Research from the Brookings Institute found that every additional year of school increases a girls’ eventual wages by an average of 12%, earnings she invests back into her family. Supporting girls’ education is a critical tool in breaking pervasive cycles of poverty and improving overall quality of life. LHI is a community-based organization which operates (1) a scholarship program with wraparound supports for youth to attend middle school, high school, and university and transition to careers; and (2) a community library. These programs have served to increase girls' graduation rates, delay the childbearing age, empower women, and instill a positive culture around learning and reading. Our next project is to open a new middle and high school.

LHI’s grassroots and holistic approach is key to our success. We have carefully developed a model to support the community to address their own needs, approaching international development in a culturally-sustaining and sustainable way. LHI’s role is to build local capacity through training and providing resources to indigenous female staff so they can design, implement, and manage our educational programs. When I started the organization, it was initially difficult to find professional employees, particularly women, in Chajul. We have taken a unique approach to “grow our own” through providing educational opportunities and support services to youth, creating a community development fellowship program for recent alumni to gain their first work experiences with us, and hiring for staff positions from within our own alumni. Today, our local staff team is almost entirely female — a first in Chajul, where women are traditionally expected to stay home. By developing strong female community leadership and challenging entrenched gender norms, girls can see first hand that women just like them have persevered in their studies and achieved economic independence. We are disrupting a prevalent patriarchal mindset and the limiting beliefs around a girl’s role in society, showing girls that a different life is possible.

When I first founded LHI, girls didn’t think they would be able to go to middle school. Now, 87% of LHI’s female scholars who enrolled in high school graduated within four years. Some of our earliest scholars are the first women in Chajul ever to graduate from university — and girls enter our program with big dreams of following in their footsteps. One alumna, Mati, is breaking ground in Chajul as the first woman to study science in college. Her goal is to make healthcare better for women. Through LHI, she had a set of experiences that empowered her to gain confidence to pursue her dreams. In a community where most children have never laid hands on a book, our community library has also built a culture of reading in Chajul, with 500 active members. Over the last 17 years, we have continually adapted our programming to address community-defined needs. Employing local staff has been instrumental in this process, as we take a “by the community, for the community” approach to our programming. Our local team is supported by international experts who help them deepen their technical skills, and they then adapt this acquired knowledge to the local context.