Mariel Reyes
Investing in education and democracy across Latin America
Mariel Reyes and David Velez credit their families with instilling in them the belief that life’s meaning is derived from making a difference in other people’s lives. True to that spirit, their foundation – VelezReyes+ – has launched multiple programs to support education, economic opportunity, and democracy in Latin America. One such initiative is reprograma, a project Mariel launched several years before she and David signed the Giving Pledge in 2021. Reprograma supports vulnerable women to learn technology skills and develop the self-belief they need to gain financial independence.
Transcript
The service is something that has been within me forever.
My parents really wanted my siblings and I to always know that we are in this world to make a difference.
So I always say it’s in my blood.
My twin and I were sent to the hospital Delino, the public hospital, Lima, to the burned children’s wing, and that completely changed me.
The way the children’s eyes would light up when we would go visit them was transformational.
For me, it just made me realize that giving something that now I realize is very valuable.
Back then, I didn’t really realize, which is time.
Just being there for them, seeing them, changed completely the way I saw giving and also the reality.
I think the fact that somebody believed in me and gave me the chance to study was transformational.
So I want to give that chance to others, and this is why our philanthropic foundation VélezReyes+ focused on education because we have seen firsthand, David and I, how through education you basically changed someone’s lives.
Recently we started a program, a scholarship program, and we did in Colombia, we launched in Peru a few months ago hearing their stories, how they’re first generation university students.
They come from remote villages in the middle of nowhere in Peru.
We realized that you could work with teachers, with parents, but if at the national level you don’t make improvements in public policy that actually support better education, everything we would do might not even have the impact that we would wish for it to have.
So we started working in democracy.
We have a democracy program where we help in different countries, seven countries now in, in Latin America, support public leader development. Reprograma is the social entrepreneurship that I started in Brazil and the objective was to diversify the Brazilian tech sector and we focused on vulnerable women.
We started this program where we would train them in technology to code basically the self-love and the belief in themselves that they had and the financial independence that they gained from this for me was, wow, we should be doing more of this.
Many things that I have learned, but I would focus on creativity, humility, and maybe patience.
I think were three big ones.
Creativity. We learned that we don’t need to start from scratch and trying to decipher what can work from other regions.
Humility is fundamental to be humble in the sense that, you know, you will fail and it’s okay to fail, but hopefully, you know, from the two or three times that we get it right, we’ll get a lot from that.
And I think patience, because unlike a for-profit, the ROI you cannot really see right away.
We also need to be very patient to know that it might take some time.
The Giving Pledge is the perfect platform to do this. Belonging to this community that could support us as newbies, which just being very aligned with the values, with the purpose, with the ethics of it all, and the opportunity that it provides us a community to share what has worked, what hasn’t.
My husband and I, David and I hope to inspire other Latin Americans to join.
When you change somebody’s life, you’re changing your own life to the core.
