Project Launch:

Caño Negro is a beautiful town in Costa Rica with few opportunities for kids to be involved in the community. In 2010, World Connect’s Kids to Kids Program awarded a $500 grant to provide children at the town's school with disposable cameras to take photographs that could be turned into postcards to sell to tourists. Other kids participated in the project by voting to select the best photos to develop into postcards. The profits from sales of photographs were used to make improvements to the school and to support the project in future years. The process of taking photographs and having them turned into postcards provided a creative and fun outlet for the community's kids and funds from the postcard sales sent eight kids from Caño Negro to the an annual Arte por la Paz Camp where they learned new crafts and how to use art to resolve conflict and promote peace. The kids who went to the camp were given an opportunity to visit a part of their country that they saw for the first time. According to the Peace Corps Volunteer who launched the initiative, the project brought out confidence in the children that had not been seen before and the children whose photos were selected developed a new sense of pride and accomplishment.