Pick the one that’s yours. Some are a single conversation, some are a role, some are a loan of something you already have.
02Who we need
Beyond El Salvador: the people who could help shape the whole model.
They are not job adverts. Some are founding roles, some are a single conversation, and one is money.
6.1 · Critical
A safeguarding and child-protection lead
A safe harbour means caring overnight for children in crisis. Somebody senior has to own safeguarding, with the authority to stop us.
6.2 · Critical
Someone who has licensed emergency or short-stay care in Latin America
Who may house a child overnight, for how long, with whose consent. Peru taught us the rules decide the size of the work.
6.3 · Critical
A kinship-care and family-strengthening specialist
The grandparents are our real counterpart. You have supported relative carers with guardianship, benefits and the everyday weight of raising someone else’s child.
6.4 · Open
An education lead who has run a school in a low-income community
The school is the front door to everything else. You know how to keep a fifteen-year-old in class when work is pulling at them.
6.5 · Open
Someone who can test whether families will pay
Market research, admissions experience, or having sold school places in Latin America. Item 5.1 is an assumption until somebody proves the demand.
6.6 · Open
Funders willing to back an unfinished model
Seed money for a first site and honest tests of 5.1 and the safe harbour, from people who would rather fund the finding-out.
6.7 · Wanted
Anyone with a serious objection to the premise
If you work in child welfare and think we have the model wrong, we want that conversation more than another supporter.
03The open question · unresolved
So what should fund it?
We want every Awesomage to fund itself. Our best current answer is that the school carries the rest. What remains uncertain is not a mechanism but a market.
Each option carries its status and the strongest objection we have heard. Option 5.1 is load-bearing. If you can break it, that is worth more to us than agreement.
5.1
The school pays for the school
Fee-paying and free pupils in one day school. Fees cover the operation; the free places are the mission. In several countries these children are less common in the poorest households, because migration costs money and remittances follow. Some carers may be able to pay part-fees.
Strongest objection: the fee market is untested, and fees cannot pay for crisis beds.
Proposed
5.2
An endowment held alongside the school
Raise a principal once and spend only the yield, used to guarantee the free places and the safe harbour through bad years.
Strongest objection: as a substitute it needs about $9m at a 5% draw to cover 100 children.
Modelled
5.3
Regenerative agriculture on the school land
A food forest becomes the kitchen, part of the curriculum and a saleable surplus. Designed in full for Peru; never run at scale by us.
Strongest objection: margins are thin and weather-exposed. Perhaps 15% of the operation.
Designed
5.4
A trading business wholly owned by the trust
A normal company owned outright by the nonprofit, profits covenanted across. Newman’s Own and the Tata trusts both work this way.
Strongest objection: it needs an operating business good enough to win on its own merits.
Untested
5.5
Something nobody has tried
The honest fifth option. We have been wrong about this twice already.
Strongest objection: none yet, which is exactly the problem.