Welcome to Open Windows Foundation
OPEN WINDOWS is a dynamic children’s educational center (library, computer center, and more) in the town of San Miguel Dueñas, ten miles (15km) from Antigua, Guatemala’s famous Spanish colonial city.
Open Windows Foundation is a US non-governmental organization (NGO) that currently provides 1,500 children in the community with important educational services and programs to help improve their life options and to increase their self-sufficiency. It is a US-registered, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Dueñas is an agricultural town of 12,000 people, of which 4,000 are school-aged children and yet only 2,000 attend school. The rest do not go for various financial and cultural reasons: a lack of resources for the bus fare to school or to purchase pens and paper; or, the child being the sixth or seventh sibling or younger daughter, where no need is seen for them to be literate.
Although Dueñas is situated just twenty minutes from the wealthy tourist center of Antigua, it does not benefit from its proximity. It has a substantially lower standard of living (the average monthly income is less than $80, and many homes do not have running water or electricity) and level of education. The need to improve education is huge. In Guatemala the literacy level is only 71%, the average child completes only five and a half years of school, more than half fail 1st grade, and only 1% of the population reads for pleasure.
There are NO other libraries or computer centers in San Miguel Dueñas (not even the four local schools have either of these facilities). Open Windows, therefore, aims to improve the living conditions of the economically deprived children from in and around the town, by providing access to important educational resources through its services, which the community has come to depend on. These include:
- loaning books to individuals and local schools;
- tutoring and homework support;
- introducing motor skills to teach children dexterity with scissors, crayons, stitching etc.;
- basic reading and writing skills for children and adults;
- higher critical thinking skills through educational games and creative problem solving activities;
- encouraging creativity through art projects and manipulatives;
- learning to use computers for educational purposes;
- The Tom Sullivan Scholarship, which enables deserving students to go to high school;
- a bi-monthly medical center.
Open Windows is proud of its continuous development and the expansion of its premises. The foundation used to operate from two small rooms. It now includes a front learning center, a computer lab, and a new large library that was built in September 2005. There are over 7,000 books in the library available to the community. The second floor of the library, was completed in April 2007, is the new computer lab, which will hold 10 computers connected to the internet. Currently, there are over 1,000 community members enrolled at Open Windows.