Covid 19 Update – April 2022
Schools in Belize remain only partially in-person. The Student Center has been open daily from 8am to 2pm for our Secondary School students who have been studying online. Primary students will be learning from home using their textbooks and learning packets provided by the schools.
Our Financial Mission and Approach
Our primary goal is to pay the tuition for all of the primary and secondary school age children in our neighborhood. We pay these amounts directly to the schools themselves.
The financial approach of the Mano Amiga Belize Scholarship Fund is to keep things simple and streamlined. 100% of your donations go directly to families and programs. All work is done by volunteers, and our Student Center and office space, along with all utilities, are donated by one of our founders.
Once tuition is paid we assess our available funds for the year and distribute these amounts to each family based on the number of students and the relative costs for their school/grade. We aim to cover as much as possible of the cost of supplies as these are generally two to three times the cost of tuition. In past years we have covered between 35-50 % of the costs of supplies, in addition to tuition.
This simple approach allows us to keep our overhead to a minimum. We use volunteer professional bookkeeping. Our volunteer committee members cover all costs of maintaining this website as well as the costs of all office supplies and any transportation costs involved. Our only outlays besides tuition payments to the schools and payments to the families to differ some of the costs of school supplies, are for the fees associated with transferring money.