for year 2020
ANNUAL Report
Rates of primary-school completion and literacy for young people in Guatemala remain among the lowest in Latin America. Guatemala spends less than 2% of its GDP on education. Problems such as late entry, grade repetition, and early dropout persist. Indigenous (Mayan) adults have less than half the level of schooling of non-indigenous (Ladino) adults in Guatemala. At age 16 only 25% of Mayan girls and about 45% of Mayan boys are enrolled in school. (www.cdg.org) The primary reason for non-enrollment is financial. Your donations have the power to transform lives and impact generations through education!
MISSIONS
Through your donations, Nicolás Fund for Education continued education for 124 students in 2020 despite pandemic related school closures.
Becci Merritt Board Chairman and President
OUR MISSION
The Problem
Message from the board PRESIDENT
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God went ahead of us to prepare us for the pandemic in ways we could never have imagined. Our teachers developed education content in a digital format, and the final shipment of tablets arrived only weeks before the pandemic school closures. God's provision allowed us to have a tablet for every student to use at home. Ivan España (NFE National Director) said, "Our building is closed, but now we have 124 satellite campuses! In 2021, we will continue our "Study at Home" curriculum using tablets and our NICO (New and Innovative Content Offline) content on memory cards until it is safe for our students to return to in-person education. NICO is working well as a curriculum. Despite studying at home, in 2020 our students had a 10% increase in their reading scores from 2019! We continue to plan to return to in-person-education while fundraising for a new school building that will allow us to educate twice as many Mayan students in the Ixil region. Our prayer is to break ground on Phase One of the new school next year. Our donors have been incredibly faithful and generous. We now have a new, unique giving opportunity to donate to our new school building campaign on top of your steadfast support for our educational programs. We invite you to visit our website at nicolasfund.org for more details about the new school and to donate. You are changing lives and empowering these young men and women to break the generational cycle of poverty!

Empowering Mayan youth to break the generational cycle of poverty in the Ixil region of Guatemala through Christ-centered education.
2020 Achievements
Expand Donor Base. Build new partnerships with churches, other nonprofits, Guatemalan churches, Guatemalan businesses & Guatemalan donors. 3 Phases of fundraising for new school building project. (Total cost $2 million. Phase 1 (roughly $1 million) Build Phase 1 moves students in, we stop paying rent & have a permanent home. Phase 2 (500,000 includes chapel/gym, vocational training workshop. Page 3 ($600,000 includes a two-story building with administrative offices, library, lab space and an expanded kitchen. Further development of a comprehensive plan for sustainability. Improve quality of education.
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Nicolas Fund for Education has identified the following goals for 2021.
Prospective Front Elevation xFormwork and Mauricio De Valle Design, Inc. in collaboration with Building Goodness Foundation
In spite of the pandemic, YOU accomplished so much in 2020 though your support:
Goals for 2021
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13 students graduated on time from high school. Two young women in Villa Hortensia 1 were the first women EVER to graduate from high school! 23 students graduated on time from junior high. Since 2016, NCS has graduated 272 Mayan students from junior high & 101 students from high school! 48% of the student body were girls. 73 - 5th & 6th grade students received tutoring in 9 villages to prepare them for successful transition into 7th grade at NCS. Tutoring includes math, language, social studies, natural science, technology, engineering & citizenship. 47% of the tutoring students are girls. 3 students graduated from preschool in 2020! Only 11% of children in Guatemala have access to preschool programs. These Quiché-speaking children are learning Spanish 3-5 years earlier than children not in preschool. (Spanish is typically not taught until 3rd grade.) Improved literacy in Spanish will benefit students throughout their entire academic career & beyond. 2 brand new village libraries filled with books that YOU donated opened in Belen & San Nicolás! Additional village libraries will open in 2021. 1,250 people received critical food relief every two weeks beginning in March 2020 through May 2021! Severe food scarcity was caused by the pandemic, and then was compounded by Hurricanes Eta and Iota. We used our school food budget and had significant additional help from Bellevue Presbyterian COVID19 relief grants and contributions from Epiphany Parish.
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Our IRS Form 990 is posted on our updated website at nicolasfund.org. Nicolás Fund for Education cearned a 2021 Platinum Seal of Transparency! Now, everyone can see our strategy, metrics, and achievements. GuideStar USA, Inc. is an information service specializing in reporting on U.S. nonprofit companies. In 2016, its database provided information on 2.5 million organizations. Nicolás Fund for Education budget is too small to qualify to be rated on Charity Navigator or EFCA. This 2020 Annual Report for Donors is posted at nicolasfund.org, should you wish to share this information with friends.
Board Members 2020
The teachers at Nicolás Christian School so greatly believe in the mission of Nicolás Fund for Education that they are collectively sponsoring a scholarship for a student to attend NCS!
SELECTED FINANCIAL DATA
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Al Lopus Chair Emeritus Becci Merritt, R.N. President/Chair (2019 Chair Elect) Bill Safstrom, M. Ed. Vice Chair Lolo Levy Treasurer Carrie Nordberg Secretar Kathy Riper Donor Engagement Mary Young Treausrer Support Heidi Linch Reynolds, Ph.D. Building Design & 10 Talents Chair
Building Up, Reaching Out is the name of Nicolás Fund for Education’s capital campaign to build a larger school in a location close to where our students live. We are bursting at the seams in our current location and are losing that leased location when our landlord needs their space back in 2023. We need to find a permanent home. Thanks to a generous donor, we have purchased a beautiful piece of land near Cotzal. Nicolás Fund has been working with pro bono architects and landscape architects at Building Goodness Foundation, a nonprofit in Charlottesville, Virginia. Once we raise an additional $305,000 for Phase 1 for our new school, Building Goodness will send an onsite construction manager to oversee the hiring and training of local construction workers. Our construction will provide jobs, which are desperately needed in Cotzal right now, and Building Goodness will provide training in US construction methods for these local workers. When Phase 1 is complete, Nicolás Christian School students and teachers will move in. Phases 2 and 3 construction will happen as fundraising continues. If we could raise $305,000 by October 2021, we could break ground in January 2022! We are excited to have a permanent home soon!
Nicolás Fund for Education Annual Report
Building up, reaching out
P.O. Box 3724, Bellevue, WA 98009 nicolasfund.org (425) 243-3709