REFINING THE REGIONAL STRATEGY

2012-2016

Latin America and the Caribbean

“Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and people”

Luke 2:52

Contents Jesus, our model of life.................................................................................................................................................... 4

“Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and people” Luke 2:52 ....................................................... 4

Executive Summary ......................................................................................................................................................... 5

Our new Context .......................................................................................................................................................... 5

Our conception of Life in all its fullness ........................................................................................................................ 5

Our Cause .................................................................................................................................................................... 5

The refinement of the Strategy .................................................................................................................................... 5

Our Refinement as an answer to the new context ........................................................................................................ 6

RWG recommendation: ............................................................................................................................................ 6

We are pursuing a National impact .............................................................................................................................. 6

Our Master Goal .......................................................................................................................................................... 7

RWG recommendation ............................................................................................................................................. 7

Focusing on the Most Vulnerable Children: .................................................................................................................. 8

On executing the Strategy ............................................................................................................................................ 8

About the Discernment and the Methodology used in the Refinement ........................................................................ 9

The Global Framework of our Ministry ........................................................................................................................... 9

Our Mission and Vision ................................................................................................................................................ 9

Global guidelines .......................................................................................................................................................... 9

The Global Goal...........................................................................................................................................................10

Our Support Offices ....................................................................................................................................................10

Our Regional context......................................................................................................................................................10

A young continent .......................................................................................................................................................10

Inequality ....................................................................................................................................................................11

Violence ......................................................................................................................................................................11

The progressive urbanization ......................................................................................................................................12

RWG Recommendation: ..............................................................................................................................................12

Natural Disasters and Climate Change .........................................................................................................................13

Context of children in the region .................................................................................................................................13

Our Strategy as an Answer .............................................................................................................................................14

A snapshot of our Context ..............................................................................................................................................15

The Answer: Our Strategy ...........................................................................................................................................15

Our Culture .............................................................................................................................................................15

Our three columns ......................................................................................................................................................15

Our People ..................................................................................................................................................................16

Organizational Effectiveness .......................................................................................................................................16

Corporate Governance ............................................................................................................................................16

The Organization: “Towards our ideal of a single body” ...........................................................................................17

Accountability .........................................................................................................................................................17

Our Sustainability ........................................................................................................................................................17

Regional positioning ................................................................................................................................................18

RWG recommendation:...............................................................................................................................................18

Strategic guidelines .................................................................................................................................................18

Accountability .........................................................................................................................................................19

Funding Sources ......................................................................................................................................................19

Our columns support our Ministry (What we do) ........................................................................................................20

Integrated ministry..................................................................................................................................................20

The agenda of each ministry line: ............................................................................................................................21

RWG Recommendation: ..............................................................................................................................................22

Our strategic goal, what we want ..................................................................................................................................23

We mobilize for a safer society: the cause and the master goal .....................................................................................23

The Threat of Violence ................................................................................................................................................23

Protection as the main topic .......................................................................................................................................24

Our cause and our advocacy work to create a movement for a just and safer society ..................................................24

The mobilization .........................................................................................................................................................25

The Value of our Cause to strengthen unity and the regional mobilization ..................................................................25

The Master Goal in our 2009-2013 regional strategy ...................................................................................................26

Our Master Goal for 2020:.......................................................................................................................................26

The global goal of 150 million children ....................................................................................................................26

RWG recommendation:...............................................................................................................................................26

Our Master Goal for 2016........................................................................................................................................26

Explanation of Numbers ..........................................................................................................................................27

STRATEGY MAP ..............................................................................................................................................................29

ANNEX A.........................................................................................................................................................................30

Our Three Operational Models ....................................................................................................................................30

Country Grouping (Conglomerates) .........................................................................................................................30

Centres of Excellence / Learning Centres .................................................................................................................30

Shared Service Centres ............................................................................................................................................30

ANNEX B .........................................................................................................................................................................31

Guidelines for the CWBA .............................................................................................................................................31

Child Well-Being Aspiration #1: Children enjoy good health.....................................................................................31

Child Well-Being Aspiration #2: Children educated for life .......................................................................................31

Child Well-Being Aspiration #3: Children experience the love of God and their neighbours .....................................32

Child Well-Being Aspiration #4: Children are cared for, protected and participating ................................................33

Jesus, our model of life “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and people” Luke 2:52

Our region considers Jesus as the Christian model of human fulfilment and believes that in his childhood He reflected the

holistic human development that guides us in our work in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In Luke 2:52 says that «… Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and people» and Luke 2:40 «… the

child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him ». These verses illustrate, in

short, a holistic conception of humans as multidimensional beings, and at the same time, present them as an indivisible

whole. Even when it comprises different dimensions, the human continues to be one. The human being, from this

perspective, is multidimensional and indivisible, in other words, a whole composed by multiple dimensions (biophysical,

psychosocial and spiritual).

Jesus developed in a harmonious and healthy way in all these human dimensions. In His life, the spiritual dimension was

essential while recognizing that the body was also important. He was careful with his physical growth, without

neglecting his emotional development, and the importance of affirming his relationship with God never led him to

disregard his relationship with his family and his community. For him, the development of his soul and body, his private

and social life, his spiritual and physical needs, had the appropriate balance for a harmonious development, according to

the will of the Father.

To this comprehension of an integrated human being, and Jesus the child as a model of holistic development of a

protected child, we add the conception of Christ the Saviour, according to what is written in Mathew 1:21: “She will bear

a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins”, and: “Blessed be the Lord God of

Israel, he has visited and redeemed his people and has attracted a powerful saviour in the house of David His servant"”

(Luke 1: 68-69). It is from this combination of a protected Child destined to redeem mankind, that we take our

institutional commitment for protected children promoting a more just and secure society.

In accordance with our institutional vision in Latin America and the Caribbean, we have established a Master Goal and a

Cause, to ensure that the strategic decisions are geared towards our children, in the context of their families and

communities. This will be set as a priority response to their need for protection, contributing to their empowerment, in

order for us to promote jointly with them and strategic allies, the transformation of our society.

These decisions will take into account, as a paradigm, the holistic development of Jesus, the Christ Child and the Lord,

whom we follow. This paradigm is a holistic human development continuum that includes four dimensions: stature

(CWB1), wisdom (CWB2) and grace with God and with the community (CWB 3+4). This last dimension takes us to the

child that is holistically developed and empowered to promote its own wellbeing. To foster this, our Christian work

based on the community, while striving to achieve the wellbeing of children, will propitiate the development of their

potential and their identity given by God. We will facilitate their participation through the organized mobilization of our

adolescents and youth to the age 24(1), in search of the transformation of their environment, to promote justice and

solidarity and reduce the structural causes of poverty.

Executive Summary

Our new Context Our Partnership is asking us to focus on our CWBA and Outcomes, children who enjoy good health and are educated for life, who experience the love of God and neighbours and are cared for, protected and participating. We will strive to achieve this within a context of effectiveness and with a management agenda based on results and accountability, in order to ensure a more effective ministry, strategic alignment and demonstrate concrete results. On the other hand, our Strategic Mandates compel us to reinforce our Christian foundations, to build our capacity in the field and ministry, to grow resources and influence in order to widen and deepen our impact; it calls for Advocacy’s enhanced importance in order for us to be an authoritative voice at all levels driving change, and to this end, we will have to adapt and redesign our organization and guarantee its sustainability. Our regional context is one of dismal inequality, extreme violence and very fast urbanization, where our CAYs are being especially vulnerable. Additionally, our region is showing gratifying technical progress in attending our children basic needs, but remains thirsty of structural, transformational changes.

Our conception of Life in all its fullness Life in all its fullness for each and every child is our highest aspiration. We in LACR conceptualize this vision as protected

children living in a just and safe environment. With the help of God, we want to drive a cause that promotes a more just

and secure society for this to become a reality. Through this Cause, protected CAYs are not only the reason for our work,

but also our partners. This is why we have received and revised a Master Goal that proposes the mobilization of millions

of CAY using a structure of networks as a platform, to promote our Cause all over the Region.

Our Cause

World Vision in Latin America and The Caribbean has decided to intentionally become a referent, a regional leader in

advocating for the protection of CAY, being also the primary holder of mobilization as a means to this end. Our regional

positioning will be directed towards achieving recognition and relevance and consolidating World Vision as an

organization that works for and with protected children to promote a safer and just society. Our Cause will be both, an

internal way to unify purposes, and a powerful tool of positioning, fundraising and advocacy. It will guide and propel our

external activity and relations, our marketing, our advocacy and the mobilization behind our master goal.

The refinement of the Strategy Since 2009, World Vision’s LACRO counts with a Regional Strategy widely consulted on a global level and with all the National Offices of the region. Our current Ministry will basically keep following the path defined by our 2009-2013 Strategy. We are proposing a refinement of the regional strategy which pursues four objectives:

1) Align our work to the new guidelines of the Partnership

1 According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adolescents are between 12 and 18 years, and the Convención Ibero-Americana sobre Derechos de la Juventud, defines youth between 15 and 24 years of age.

Our Cause “protected children promoting a more just and secure society” expresses the meaning, the way we in

LACR conceptualize our search of a “life in all its fullness” for our children.

2) Adapt to the new context of the region 3) Structure our actions giving great visibility to the CWBA 4) Make our work more manageable for better accountability, always within the flexibility necessary for the NOs to

follow these guidelines while considering their own contexts.

Our Refinement as an answer to the new context We are a Christian, child focused and community based organization. We are committed and responsive to the needs of the poor and to the transformation of our societies. As Stewards of resources that are not our own, our culture is one of effectiveness and results, because we strive for the greatest positive impact on the children and communities we work for and with, making the best possible use of the precious resources we are able to get; and in relation to our donors and Partners, our Culture is one of Transparency and Accountability. We will show concrete results and to that end, our Culture is also one of management, results and measurement. We value people as our most precious resource and our Culture is one of Learning, Building Capacity and Servant Leadership. Leadership is a cross-cutting dimension of the refinement. We will be empowering not only our people, but our CAYs as well, as our best Partners in this process of change. We will continue working arduously in our traditional fields of action. Three out of the current four CWB targets are related to health, nutrition and education, fields which constitute our basic promise and where new goals will be established, which should challenge us all, regardless of how advanced we might be in these subjects in some of our sub-regional contexts, while paying special attention to our most vulnerable communities (MVCs). Our CWB targets possess the tremendous advantage of being defined by measurable results throughout the life of our CAYs and they provide us with a path to achieve the wellbeing of our children. The gratifying achievements in our region in these fields allow us to move forward from mostly attending the physical wellbeing of our children and communities to a "holistic wellbeing". A fundamental element in our strategy will be the spiritual strengthening of children and their active participation as designers of their own destiny. We look for the unification of the holistic wellbeing concept as the combination of protection, participation and spiritual nurture, which means to evolve from a thematic approximation, to an approach focused on CAYs as promoters of change.

RWG recommendation:

The RWG affirms LAC’s strategic shift toward increased emphasis on CWBA 3 and 4 while continuing to improve current

performance levels in CWBA 1 & 2. To this end, the region will develop a robust business model to strengthen the

technical capacity and operational models in core areas, and will work with the Partnership to identify and pursue

necessary diversified funding streams to sustain the new shift.

We are pursuing a National impact Our third mandate (Grow our resources and influence to increase our impact) invites us to increase our Influence, and to this end, the Master Goal precisely looks for relevance, for regional incidence, leveraging our actions at local and especially at National levels. To make the Master Goal viable and effective, we must act on four fronts:

1) First, fully internalize the idea that the ADP is a means, not an end in itself. 2) Second, we need to act in partnership and sync with external partners: building strategic alliances, especially

with Churches and other important partners to mobilize the youth, donors, the media, civil society and the public and private sectors.

3) This front complements a third one, which is the domestic front, where we will be seeking: a. To develop sustainable programmatic models specific for urban contexts, given the accelerated

urbanization of our region. Then, promote the decided opening of urban ADPs in line with our strategy of urban mobilization.

b. To develop and implement a mobilization well beyond the ADPs. We look for a National impact, not merely an ADP impact.

4) A fourth front will be to continue the accelerated development of initiatives in Advocacy and incidence, and if we intend to mobilize our youth looking for real participation and incidence, to become real agents of change, our movement will give preeminence to our adolescents and youth, from 12 to 24 years of age, when they already have developed criteria to understand their context and needs.

Our Master Goal The Partnership has established as a goal: “Strive to achieve the well-being of 150 million of the world’s most vulnerable children by 2016”. As a region, we will seek to contribute in different ways and through different initiatives towards achieving this global goal. The partnership expects our decided contribution, although there is no global figure suggested for our region. We propose as our share in this objective, to positively impact the lives of 14.5 million children by 2016, the horizon of our current refinement. The Appendix I explains how we arrived to this figure. This objective involves a different definition in terms of the impact we are looking for. The 2009-2013 master goal basically refers to the impact generated by our RC’s on their families and local communities, and is strongly oriented to build a structure of networks to mobilize our CAY looking for relevance in our society. The Global goal refers to positively impacting children well beyond our RCs and those CAYs already considered in the 2009-2013 regional Master Goal. Its general definition understands positively impacted children as all CAYs who either, participate, are direct or indirect beneficiaries of our programmatic activities or somehow are benefited by processes of development or incidence related to the well-being of children and carried out by WV and/or WV partners. Therefore, Advocacy is a line of ministry central to our Plan. This 14.5 million CAY objective will be reached through Advocacy and Mobilization initiatives. The regional master goal is entirely based on the activism of our regional networks, whereas this global objective extends coverage to all those children that will be positively influenced in their wellbeing through our advocacy actions based on an integrated program approach. Our Master Goal now becomes:

RWG recommendation

World Vision seeks a more just society and will contribute to the protection and sustained well-being of 14.5 million of the most vulnerable children in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through the empowerment, participation, and mobilization of 3.7 million children, adolescents, and youth, World Vision will achieve national level impact using an integrated program approach.

To make the Master Goal a reality, we propose three integrated strategies:

1) The first one is the creation of coordinated networks of CAYs through relationships of solidarity, in a political movement organized following a common Cause. The networks will become key players in a process of social change to reduce violence and inequality. They will seek to create awareness and empower children about their rights and exercise their responsibilities as citizens. With our networks and mobilization we look for Influence, relevance. We are aiming at:

a. Influencing policy making and implementation: i. Promoting the enactment of new policy

ii. Improving current policy

iii. Improving policy implementation/practice

iv. Holding government/duty bearers accountable

v. Spotlighting violations of Children’s rights

b. Developing regional consciousness/awareness about children rights i. Massively educating on children rights

ii. Promoting assertiveness about rights violations

iii. Changing attitudes toward culturally “accepted” or “tolerable” bad behaviours

iv. Empowering communities to claim/demand their rights Therefore, these networks will also put pressure on the governments and the communities so that they meet their obligations. To this end, WV does not seek to establish parallel or repeated networks at any level (local, national or regional), but to join hands, work together and leverage our purposes, recurring as much as possible to existing networks. While it is true that WV will not pretend to impose our agenda on the existing networks in the communities, we will try to encourage the participation of the CAYs and complement the agendas in each network with the Cause WV is promoting.

2) The second strategy is the development of the leadership skills of our CAYs, to generate a real social, economic

and political impact in an organized way. Leadership will be a cross-cutting dimension. Central to our internal

organization and central to our regional mobilization.

3) The third strategy is related to the community bases as a launching platform for the Master Goal. These

communities will be the organized units in charge of fostering the implementation of the paradigm of integral

development of children.

Thus, a massive organized mobilization of actors is the chosen strategy for this search of relevance. We will integrate

our Ministry with this social movement of our CAY and the strategic alliances at all levels, within an organizational

positioning based on relationships of trust with the media, the civil society, the public and private sector, donors and

social investors.

Focusing on the Most Vulnerable Children: While the region will seek a nationwide impact, this plan will give pre-eminence to the most vulnerable children of the

region, defining this group in general terms as those children whose quality of life to develop their potential is affected

by extreme deprivation and violations of their rights, specifically in four main issues: Extreme deprivation,

Discrimination, Disasters and emergencies and Relationships characterized by violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation.

That is why issues like: child labour, all forms of child abuse, gender inequality, ethnic discrimination to indigenous or

African descent communities, children and parents with disabilities, among others, are cross-cutting themes throughout

the strategy and its implementation.

On executing the Strategy The strategy will have to be manageable. We want to go further than just a beautiful document that brings together a coherent set of aspirations or good intentions, to a structure of aligned strategic guidelines that allows for a definition of solid objectives and counts with a set of management indicators, in order to confirm if we are moving in the right direction at an adequate pace. The manageability of the strategy is a process of continuous improvement, and with this refinement, we intend to consolidate a culture oriented toward effectiveness and results. The Appendix No. 1 of the document summarizes our guidelines from the manageability point of view. It is worth highlighting that these figures, especially in terms of community bases, networks, CAY in networks and positively impacted children or advocacy multipliers, are our initial proposal. They will be adjusted according to the short and medium term achieved results in the NO’s and the lessons learned along the way.

About the Discernment and the Methodology used in the Refinement The discernment we practice in World Vision is a spiritual process through which we seek to discover the presence, the action and the will of the Lord, for our life and our actions as an organization. It’s a spiritual discipline, practiced as a community that seeks the will of God, which places us in his hands to receive it and to put it into practice. To discern is to see through the eyes of God, to judge with his criteria and to act according to his will. Therefore, discernment is the practice of stewardship in the presence of God, it’s a continuum, where we not only pray for his directions and guidance to develop a sound and coherent strategy, but we also ask for his support in its effective implementation bearing witness of his presence and showing his grace, in order to become what He wants us to be and to do what He has commanded us to do. To assemble the present document we identified and defined key points from the previous document supporting this refinement. Then we analyzed the new trends and the context of the Partnership and the region, in order to ensure the relevance of our work. Along this part of the process, we performed consultations with the Global Centre and with our Support and National Offices and then, the regional team developed the strategic guidelines and a management platform for accountability, incorporating our regional cause. Manageability is key to our plan. Framed within a philosophy of effectiveness based on results, we sought to articulate the different work areas by defining sectorial and functional strategic guidelines, and a set of simple indicators (aligned with those already in use in the Partnership) that prove useful for our NO’s without overloading their work, and that will enable them to evaluate the performance of our region along their implementation of this strategy.

The Global Framework of our Ministry

Our Mission and Vision World Vision is an international partnership of Christians whose mission is to follow our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice, and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God. Our Vision: for every child, life in all its fullness; our prayer for every heart, the will to make it so. Our Cause: Protected children promoting a more just and secure society.

Global guidelines The Partnership recently updated the document of the Global Strategic Framework. The Strategic Mandates and Goals have been designed to focus the work and the resources through a “management agenda”. The five Strategic Mandates: 1) To reinforce our Christian foundations, identity and witness. 2) To strengthen our grassroots field capacity and ministry. 3) To grow resources and influence to increase our impact with children, the communities and supporters. 4) To be an authoritative voice at all levels driving change. 5) To build our organization and its sustainability. Above all, our Christian faith is our primary motivation. World Vision will always be motivated to work with the poorest, in the most difficult circumstances. For this reason, the CWBA will remain the focus of our work, and through the CWB Outcomes and targets recently established, we aim to initiate a management process, providing the means to measure our contribution to children’s' wellbeing. The Partnership has committed to demonstrate concrete results from 2013, through figures that will evidence our contribution to increase the number of children protected from sickness, who are well fed, who can read and write and report a greater sense of wellbeing.

Our strategy must be an "ongoing dialogue of alignment". We can only make a big impact if each of us clearly understands our unique contribution to the fulfilment of the Partnership’s objectives.

The Global Goal Based on our five Strategic Mandates, we will work for the CWBA: children enjoying good health, educated for life, cared for, protected and participating, who experience the love of God and the their communities. The Partnership has established as a goal: “Strive to achieve the well-being of 150 million of the world’s most vulnerable children by 2016” and this goal will be achieved by pursuing five targets: 1) To contribute to the CWBA – CWB targets 2) To increase the number of children participating in our programs and the number of children influenced by WV 3) To increase the number of Advocates for transformation 4) To increase our income growth rate and the number of donors 5) To strengthen our global brand and our reputation

Our Support Offices Our Support Offices are key partners for our Ministry and their advice and plans are vital to us, because we must act in

very close collaboration, together. After gathering robust information from our partner offices, we identified many

common points with our new strategy, which will certainly motivate us to advance initiatives of common interest in our

search of a just and safer society for our protected children. Some of the topics that appeared in their comments are

listed below:

- Christian values as a tool for conflict resolution and reduction of violence.

- The family as the fundamental unit to generate values.

- The search of long term solutions involving capacity building and impact beyond aid, generating resilient

development.

- Health and nutrition, especially for children under 5 years of age.

- Better quality of education, especially for preschool and elementary school.

- Vocational training and development of skills to access job opportunities.

- When working with adolescents and youngsters, continue with the vocational and entrepreneurial projects.

- Child protection and the promotion of their rights at family, community and government level.

- Ministry greatly based on networks and alliances with institutions and key stakeholders, especially government

and churches.

- Networks as a platform for mobilization and incidence.

- Emphasis on empowered CAY.

- The need for improved accountability/monitoring systems.

Our Regional context

Overview of Key Aspects of the context in Latin America and The Caribbean

A young continent Latin America now is the continent of the young. According to the ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and The Caribbean), 27.7% of our region’s population was under 14 years of age in 2010, and 62% below 34 years, and by 2020 it is estimated that 63% will be less than 30 years. Our CAYs have a huge potential to propel social change in the region. It is for this reason that our Master Goal and Regional Cause see them as propellers of the continent’s transformation, protectors of our precious biodiversity, and key generators of economic growth. A young continent is synonymous of an immense potential to generate income and human capital.

Inequality The macroeconomic indicators of LAC have shown positive trends. However, this context of apparent prosperity hides dismal inequalities. Latin America and the Caribbean remains the most unequal region in the world, where healthy rates of economic growth coexist with astonishing levels of poverty. The UNDP, in its last report, highlights how our region exhibits the highest levels of inequality in the world. "It has been proven that economic growth is incapable of significantly impacting poverty or significantly reducing inequality. To reduce poverty, distribution is as important as growth.”2 The UNDP notes that while it is true that the region has substantially improved its score for some indicators of poverty and human development, there are substantial losses in the dimensions of living standards, education and health due to the phenomenon of inequality, which causes the battle against poverty to be structurally much more complex. Its report finds that 10 of the 15 most unequal countries in the world are in our region, while the measurements of the Gini index reflects that 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are among the 33 most unequal countries in the world. In LAC, the richest 10%, according to the Gini index, have 50% of all the income, while the poorest 10% shares less than 2 %. The poorest 40%, in a continent where the greater part of this segment consists of CAYs, counts with barely 10% of all income.3 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their recent bestseller "Inequality. An analysis of collective unhappiness." (2011) showed that the effect of inequality within a society can be devastating, regardless of the well-being or wealth of that society in relation to other countries. As for gender inequality, even though our situation is not as dramatic, LAC is still a very unequal region. The Gender Inequality Index (GII) of the Human Development Reports, which can be interpreted as a percentage loss to potential human development, stays at 49.2% on average worldwide. In our region we have some countries above that figure, such as Haiti with 59.9%, Guatemala 54.2%, Honduras 51.1% or Nicaragua 50.6%. Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico are not very much below though, with 48.2%, 46.9% and 44.8% respectively.4 Regarding the population with disabilities, the numbers are astonishing. According to the World Bank, at least 10% of

the region's population is disabled and 82% of them live in poverty (the most recent World Health Organization report

estimates that 15% of global population has some disability). Only 20-30% of children with disabilities are in school in the

region while 89-90% of disabled people in the region do not have a job.

The depth of inequality in the region, according to the regional Human Development Report for Latin America and the

Caribbean, heavily affects the indigenous and Afro-Caribbean descents placing them in a much worse situation than European descendants, with a great part of the population living on less than $1 USD per day.4 In short, our most vulnerable population is found especially among children, women, indigenous, Afro-descents and the disabled, where inequality is greatly concentrated.

Violence Our region is also characterized by a context of violence. "There is no doubt that Latin America and the Caribbean are

classified among the most violent regions in the world. For the first time in decades, crime has been highlighted as the

first concern among the population in the countries of Latin America" (IACHR/UNICEF/OHCHR, 2011). "In Latin America,

the highest rates of homicides for any age group are among individuals between 15 and 19 years" (Global Report on

Violence against Children, 2006). Violence is the main cause of death among young men, and affects the poorest 28

times more often than the over-privileged youth (Unicef-ECLAC,2007). Young people living in poverty are in turn more

likely to be associated with criminal groups such as gangs and mafias or become involved in organized crime and drug

2 UNDP Human Development report on Latin America/The Caribbean, 2009 3 ECLAC, Social Panorama of America Latina, Chile, 2009 4 UNDP, Regional Human Development Report for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2010

trafficking activities. LAC is the second region of the world in regard to violence and abuse against minors. (UN-WB,

2007)5.

Each year nearly 200 million of Latin Americans - one third of the total population of the region - are victims of criminal acts, and 6 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean are suffering from severe abuse, including abandonment. It is even more dramatic to know that 80.000 children under 18 die every year from abuse by their parents6. This panorama of violence is worsening quickly. Six out of the 14 most violent countries in the world are in our region, according to a very recent report published by the Secretary of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development (Violence, 2011) . These 14 countries concentrate one fourth of the world´s violent deaths. El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala and Belice are in this group, where mostly armed parallel armies or gangs, frequently linked to drug trafficking, are ravaging the countries. According to Keith Krause, professor at the Institute of International Studies and Development (IUHEID) in Geneva, this proves that the “vast majority of countries afflicted by violent deaths are not at war”. According to the report, 526,000 people are killed each year globally, but only 55.000 because of armed conflicts or terrorism. El Salvador is the most violent country in the world with over 60 deaths per 100,000 people. Between 2004 and 2009, in proportion, more people died from violence in El Salvador than in Irak. In fact, Central America, with 44 homicides per 100,000 population has the global highest average (UNDP, 2011), and Latin America, with only 8.5% of the world's population, concentrates 27% of homicides at a global level, and 29% of these are adolescents between the ages of 10-19. (UNDP,2011)

The progressive urbanization The region's population tends to remain predominantly in the cities. According to ECLAC’s 2010 statistics and projections, by 2015, 69% of our region will be classified as urban. It is estimated that more than 500 million people, 82% of the population of the region, will be living in urban areas by 2020. Unfortunately, the forecasts also indicate that 220 million will be living in conditions of poverty and 140 million in conditions of extreme poverty. It has also been estimated that 63% of the population (a total of approximately 610 million estimated for 2020) will be less than 30 years. Of these, 60 million will be in situations of extreme vulnerability, unemployed, without access to education and living in insecure areas7. These projections immediately suggest two strategies: to encourage the creation of urban ADP's, and give greater emphasis to adolescents and youngsters within the processes of urban mobilization. Additionally, specific approaches of ministry and financing for urban contexts should be promoted. However, this wonderful opportunity of having a young, dynamic, entrepreneurial human capital will be lost, if we as a continent show unable to reverse the extreme concentration of poverty, exclusion, lack of opportunities, unemployment, and propensity for violence that especially afflicts precisely this promising sector of our population.

RWG Recommendation: The RWG recommends that LAC develop a urban programming strategy that would define how the region would

respond to the new and evolving urban realities in national contexts. This strategy would also identify a business model

to sustain the said programming models.

5 Crime, Violence and Development. Joint Report by the United Nations and the World Bank, 2007 6 Violence in Latin America and The Caribbean, IADB, 2004 7 OIT: Trabajo decente y juventud, 2007; y Panorama Laboral 2006.

Natural Disasters and Climate Change LAC is the second region, very close to Africa, exhibiting the biggest annual average losses due to natural disasters, with

approximately 31 billion dollars lost annually between 1990 and 2010.8

The majority of disasters in LAC are category 1 and 2, which can be addressed by the NOs without external technical

support (i.e., the 2010 earthquakes of Haiti and Chile are the exception, not the rule), and of these Cat 1 and 2

disasters, many are related to flooding and drought (i.e., meteorological and hydrological events), that have a direct

impact on food security.

Statistical data shows that the increase in disasters due to natural hazards over the past 20 years has, for the most part,

been caused by meteorological and hydrological events. This increase has been largely assigned to climate change, that is,

climate-related hazards are being major triggers for the majority of disasters.

Context of children in the region One of the main problems facing children in Latin American and The Caribbean is that even when there have been positive outcomes in terms of reducing child mortality, malnutrition or access to primary education, there have been few, if any, structural and cultural significant changes. If we speak in terms of the CWBA, the children of the region in general enjoy good health and show higher levels of nutrition, the rates of child malnutrition range between 7% and 22% (there are still major challenges like Guatemala), vaccination rates are between 80% and 100% and infant and maternal mortality have been substantially reduced. In addition to this, our children know how to read, most of the countries of the region have high levels of literacy, ranging from 85% and 97%. The coverage of elementary education is about 90%. Nevertheless; there is a big difference in reach of education between rural and urban areas and quality remains a serious issue. In the region, “technical impacts” have been mainly accomplished, not so much in the cultural or structural areas. Despite significant efforts in Christian formation to show the love of God through positive relationships in the family, the community and the environment, available information about the results is limited and usually based on indicators of perception. Despite being well known that LAC is a region with a strong civil society, we also lack enough evidence of results in participation, advocacy or in the impact on networks, churches and movements. The issue of protection remains a sensitive one. There are high levels of abuse against women and children or child labour and the region still struggles to comply with children’s rights, although this topic is already on the political agenda of the countries. The regional and global responses have been predominantly cost-effective and may be not so much transformational. For this reason there are persistent levels of social exclusion, corruption and violence, which also reflect ethical, moral and spiritual problems (CWBA 3 and 4). Our societies haven't been able to resolve these structural problems, which especially today, are impacting so much the holistic development of children. Today, in the Latin American society, children attend school and have better access to education, health and recreation, in countries with modern legal codes that in theory protect the children. However, this is a region full of inequality and extreme violence, where CAYs are the most vulnerable population. In terms of education, young people find severe limitations to access quality education and vocational training. If completing their basic education is already a challenge, those last two factors make much less likely to complete a university degree and will impose serious limitations when trying to enter the formal labour markets. As a result, the region has demonstrated that is not enough to achieve outstanding results in meeting the basic needs, because this doesn’t guarantee the holistic and integral development of children in a sustainable way. Today, we must look for structural and cultural transformations, and this requires the leading role of advocacy and the establishment of strategic alliances to promote social participation and political incidence. To this end, the donor will also need to be transformed. Without the integration of “rich” and “poor”, the development of a more inclusive, just and equitable region will never be a reality. This is the reason why the metric of the Master Goal also includes sponsor children and children of sponsors.

8 EM−DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database − www.emdat.be − Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels − Belgium

Our Strategy as an Answer

Life in all its fullness

Our CAUSEMaster Goal

Good HealthTarget: Nutrition

Diseases, Infections

Educated for lifeTarget: Children that know how to

read

Organizational EffectivenessAccountability, Shared Services, Learning Centers,

RNOD, GNOD, Organizational Structure

Economic SustainabilityPositioning, Fundraising, (partnership, non-

partnership, grants, international corporations)

OUR PEOPLE

What we are

Our foundations

Culture, identity, Christian commitment, core values

“We are a Christian, child-focused and community based organization”

Love God and othersChildren show the love of God through positive relationships (family,

community, environment)

Protection and ParticipationTarget: Increase well-being

Impact: networks, churches, movements inside and outside ADPs

LEADERSHIP

A snapshot of our Context Our Partnership is asking us to focus on our CWBA and Outcomes, to strive for children who enjoy good health and are educated for life, who experience the love of God and neighbours and are cared for, protected and participating. We will strive to achieve this now within a context of effectiveness and with a management agenda based on results and accountability, in order to ensure a more effective ministry, strategic alignment and demonstrate concrete results. On the other hand, our Strategic Mandates compel us to reinforce our Christian foundations, to build our capacity in the field and ministry, to grow resources and influence in order to widen and deepen our impact; it calls for Advocacy’s enhanced protagonism in order for us to be an authoritative voice at all levels driving change, and to this end, we will have to adapt and redesign our organization and guarantee its sustainability. Additionally, our regional context is one of dismal inequality, extreme violence and very fast urbanization, where our CAYs are being especially vulnerable. Our region is showing gratifying technical progress in attending our children basic needs, but remains thirsty of structural, transformational changes.

The Answer: Our Strategy To summarize our Strategy, we have used the image of a building composed of essential and complementary elements to ensure it stability and strength. These elements add value to one another to accomplish our Master Goal and to drive our Cause, and the solidness of our building depends on the strength and completeness of every block.

Our Culture

The solid ground and foundation of our building is our Culture: What we are. We are a Christian, child focused and community based organization. Our identity takes shape in the way we live our faith every day, in our reasons to serve others and the depth of our Commitment with the Lord and his Kingdom. Our identity is a matter of embodiment of life values, as individuals, as an institution and as a community, following the Gospel. We are Committed and Responsive to the needs of the poor and oppressed, looking for the transformation of our societies. As Stewards of resources that are not our own, our Culture is one of effectiveness and results, because we strive for the greatest positive impact on the children and communities we work for and with, making the best possible use of the precious resources we are able to get; and in relation to our donors and Partners, our Culture is one of Transparency and Accountability. We will show concrete results and to that end, our Culture is also one of management, results and measurement. We value people as our most precious resource and our Culture is one of Servant Leadership, of empowering not only our people, but our CAYs as well, as our best Partners in this process of change. The Christian identity of World Vision is one of our main assets to develop important Associations to address the causes

of violence, poverty and inequality, to achieve a sense of transcendence and meaning that motivates us to develop the

necessary actions for the wellbeing of CAYs; all of this following our calling and vocation for Christian service.

Our three columns This building is supported by three columns. The central column represents our people, which constitute our most valuable resource and who, inspired by our culture, serve in the field. They relate synergistically within the organization and make our ministry real.

Our People The organizational strategies will only become a reality through our people. Our Mandates call for building our capacity, according to the specific needs and contexts of our region. Our Strategy will encourage Learning: The strengthening of technical and managerial capacities and the systematic identification and adoption of best practices throughout our region, based on the selection of key competencies necessary to excel at what we do in every role or position. In addition to the development of core competencies, we are establishing a Talent Management Program to develop competencies aligned to the new organizational culture and identity, emphasizing on the leadership skills that our new strategy will demand not only for our personnel in all areas and offices, but within our CAY in the context of the master goal. Our organization may need a new design and this will entail a strategy of Change Management and the redefinition of roles, lines of responsibility and functions. For this strategy, leadership constitutes a core concept, and as we will be working on the identification, training and development of promising internal leaders, our Master Goal requires a parallel process with similar methodologies, that will cover the thousands of leaders among our CAYs that will be promoting our regional Cause. Leadership will be a cross-cutting initiative and will cover the whole organization and all of our ministerial and functional activities. It will spread to our CAY’s and partners, because our goal is based on leading our whole Region behind our Cause of Protection and equality, aiming to improve child well being in every specific context within the region.

Organizational Effectiveness Our second great column is the organizational effectiveness; everything that allows us to be more effective in the service, more efficient in our ministry and to be accountable in front of our audiences through a manageable strategy. The Organizational Effectiveness is the platform that facilitates the relationship between the operation and the

empowered human talent. In order to generate impact we will require three conditions: identify and optimize the key

processes that help to add value, substantially increase the quality of the products and services, and an organization

capable of transforming itself and constantly developing its learning capacities.

The regional strategy (09-13) identified nine key principles needed in order to accomplish an effective organization: a

leadership and a strategic corporate government of service to internalize a shared vision; a solid set of spiritual

principles; customer orientation and a focus on results; a constant search of spiritual growth, learning and discernment;

to value our staff and our customers as partners in the pursuit of a common vision; the flexibility to adapt to change; a

commitment with continuous improvement and a systematic point of view to these processes of change; and

management systems focused in quality and responsibility.

Corporate Governance

The Partnership has defined government policies (National Boards Policy) and corporate guidelines (Corporate Governance Guidelines) that must be met; these are the rights and responsibilities of the Boards of Directors and Advisory Councils and the standards that must be observed as members of these Government Agencies. The Government Department has its “Critical Success Factors of Effective Boards”, that are also a frame of reference. The region will provide our NOs government bodies with the necessary support to improve their governance processes and procedures in order to make them more effective, as well as their establishment of agreements, performance evaluation and monitoring of their recommendations. Where possible, we will strive to enrol members with high personal, professional and community profiles to the Boards of Directors, in order to improve influence and effectiveness. To improve the work of the Boards of Directors and Advisory Councils we will give special emphasis to their strategic role and governance, the recruitment of its members, the processes of analysis and decision making, self-review processes, their managerial strategic agenda and the frequency of meetings, among other relevant issues. Additionally, we will focus on intermediate and completely inter-dependent National Offices providing support to the branches in Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile.

The Organization: “Towards our ideal of a single body”

The organizational structure is a response to the strategy in order to implement it and make it a reality. The strategy

identifies the main objectives that will make the vision tangible and the guidelines to accomplish them. It is necessary to

build a scaffold that will allow us to put into practice these strategic guidelines, composed by the organizational

structure, processes, and monitoring and evaluation systems.

Within this context, Organizational Effectiveness in LACR intends to implement a flexible structure that will facilitate and

promote Learning processes and Continuous Improvement in a culture of Service, Quality, Results and Efficiency. For this

purpose, Organizational Effectiveness will be supporting the National Offices with processes and technological systems

and tools, which include but are not limited to: Communities of Practice, Centres of Excellence and Shared Services, in

addition to information systems and clear mechanisms of responsibility and accountability.

The revised structure must ensure programmatic effectiveness, quality control and impact measurement and evaluation. Its main role is to ensure the delivery of ministry quality in the field, in alignment with the national policies and the regional and global strategies. To this end, it must guarantee the quality and efficiency of the transactional processes, including Administration, Performance Management (key performance indicators), Finance and Accountability. In addition to this, the administration of Information Technology and Communications will facilitate Knowledge Management. A short description of our Operational Models is included in our Annex A below.

Accountability

We need to be able to measure and report our performance against the proposed objectives and targets, while respecting agreed principles, policies and practices, regardless of our position in the organization. We recognize that we have responsibility towards others and we have to take responsibility for our actions and their consequences. In LACRO, we are interested on being transparent in our operations and in our relationships with partners, this implies open communication, clear processes of accountability and a strong focus on improving our performance and effectiveness on each of the things we do. The region and the NOs have embraced the initiative taken by the Global Partnership National Operations Dashboard (GNOD) and the Regional Operations Dashboard (RNOD) as part of our organizational culture. Both, the GNOD and the RNOD are management tools that allow us to measure the performance of the National Offices and the region through a set of balanced standard indicators that monitor all key aspects, processes and practices of the Plan and that can be compared on a regular time base, in our case, every six months. In view of the changes in emphasis arising from the present refinement, we plan to review our set of regional indicators for upcoming measurements, attending always to a clear definition of the concepts, the simplicity of indicators, the relevance in the measurement of key aspects of the strategy, the transparency of the results and the universality of the indicators, ensuring not only that all the NOs can measure them, but that the results can be compared.

Our Sustainability Our aspiration to transform our societies in favour of our poor, marginalized and the most vulnerable CAY´s requires sustainable funding from diverse sources. The current conditions of the world economy and the global trends of the aid funds make the panorama for economic sustainability uncertain and challenging. The region already has some experience in fund raising, whether local, private, corporate or multilateral. In fact, several NRDs are developing local marketing and fundraising activities, especially through sponsorship; however, these activities must be strengthened, especially now, when resources are increasingly scarce and there are so many competitors. Our local fund raising results as a region have been modest, mainly due to the just emerging culture of social responsibility in our region and the lack of adequate regional positioning. The help of

our Global Marketing Team, with marketing expertise and the capacity to leverage local funds, to help us build fundraising capacity and improve our ability to interact with corporations or other donors, will be highly valued.

Regional positioning

RWG recommendation: The RWG affirms World Vision LAC's plan to be recognized as a unique and leading voice in child protection, justice, and equality within the region to contribute to CWBA. World Vision in Latin America and The Caribbean has decided to intentionally become a referent, a regional leader in

advocating for the protection of CAY, being also the primary holder of mobilization as a means to this end. Our

Marketing and Communications efforts will be directed towards this goal: achieve recognition and relevance, and

consolidate and position World Vision as an organization that works for and with protected children to promote a more

just and secure society.

We will benefit from resources from public and private organizations, corporations, multilateral institutions and private

donors both for individual sponsorship as well as for major institutional projects. We will join their Corporate Social

Responsibility programs (CSR) in favour of the Latin American children, adolescents and youth. Additionally, we will

intensify our role in the Global Movement for Children (GMC), where there are nine organizations with whom we work

and who have a great intentionality to generate resources for the children.

Strategic guidelines

Sustainability is responsible for the regional positioning and market development. One of its main roles is to provide strategic guidelines to the region and NOs, and support the national strategies to obtain resources and propel the diversification of funds. As part of its strategic management, it oversees local brand management and fundraising plans, covering all lines of income, with special emphasis on regional grants and corporate initiatives. Its management will count with the support and guidance of GMT and of the area of Communications. Major objectives:

Strengthen World Vision brand at regional level with governments, the NGOs, business and the society, in order

to consolidate our institutional positioning.

Jointly with Communications support the NOs in situations of emergency response, by dealing with the media

and supporting the collection of funds.

Promote strategic alliances between NO and SO aimed at:

o Building capacities in marketing and fundraising and

o Developing bilateral funding/investment medium/long term engagements.

Develop technical competencies on sustainability in the NOs, especially in our NRDs, through the identification,

documentation and registration of best practices, establishing and monitoring standard performance indicators

from concrete baselines and the implementation of shared information systems in order to have available

robust databases that feed into a regional market intelligence system.

Carry out coordinated efforts between the RO, the NOs and the GC to increase the access to multilateral funds

and grants, and develop long-term projects with regional scope.

Look for synergies between the National Offices, with the philosophy of "One Body", to develop joint initiatives

of fundraising and marketing. This especially includes our NRD's.

Perform feasibility studies to convert other NOs in NRD's.

Increase collaboration capacity with the private sector and Latin Americans living outside of the continent.

Highlight the importance of corporate and government donors

o In Corporations, focus on major donors and small to medium size local enterprises.

Take advantage of the progressive growth of the Corporate Social Responsibility and donors motivated through

social networks.

Accountability

We will monitor key variables within our fundraising processes, from the number of new donors or the annual dollar

growth for each of the possible sources of funds, through a careful analysis of our costs to obtain new donors (CPA) or to

administer the current ones, to the donor retention rates or their default rates. We are aware that much of our

investment in donor recruitment is dedicated to replace the thousands of donors that we lose every year.

Funding Sources

Sponsorship

Sponsorship is currently the main source of income for the Region. We will seek sustained programmatic growth and

effective work to maximize our leverage in order to get additional resources. Nevertheless, we are aware of the fact that

sponsorship funds growth is at risk because of the world challenging economic conditions, and diversification of funds is

becoming a top priority.

Corporations

We will continue to offer corporations the possibility to run their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs through individual child sponsorship, community development or through the development of funds with the purpose of promoting the creation of sustainable micro-enterprises, GIK / GIS - Gift in Kind and Gift in Service, working together in Advocacy activities or helping to increase the knowledge and skills of members of marginalized communities to allow for their economic sustainability . Our approach to corporations could be under the logic of Corporate Social Investment (CSI), where we can demonstrate measurable returns through indicators such as the IRR, initially in terms of social impact. This process will demand important technical skills and additional capacity, offering CSI products to small or medium size companies. Additionally, we will explore social enterprises out of the reach and the geography of the traditional ADPs.

Grants from Multilateral Agencies and Governments

We will strengthen our access to multilateral sources to finance a portfolio of large-scale projects. To achieve this, we

will develop a regional Grants strategy, in coordination with NOs and SOs and with 3 year financial goals.

Additionally, we will identify 5 NOs with the greatest potential to assemble a strong Grants team, training their staff in

the preparation of proposals and the management of this type of funds.

Communications

In recent years the flow and access to information has increased dramatically worldwide due to technological innovations and the penetration of the internet and other new forms of communication through the web, social networks and viral marketing in particular. This situation, while bringing great opportunities, also poses a challenge for the entire organization and demands specific changes in the traditional communication processes to which the partnership has been used to. In the region, the area of Communications will take full advantage of the increasing internet and digital media penetration to pursue seven strategic key processes.

1) Capacity building: We will strive to improve the quality of our communication processes and this will require building and strengthening the technical capacity of our teams in the NOs, integrating their work at regional level, fostering the development of a network of resources working in close collaboration to generate unique congruent messages inside and out of the organization.

2) Community communications: Lifting up children’s and community voices through grassroots to global communications networks. Facilitate community participation and raise the voice of the ADP in external communications with donors and the general public.

3) Internal Communications: Ensure that internal information is consistently administered and communicated appropriately, so that the work of WV is fully understood, trusted and influential.

4) Communications with donors and donor public engagement: Inform and engage donors (local and international) and the general public with WV branded communication materials and messages that educate the donor and increase public understanding, trust and support.

5) Emergency Communications: Communicate in humanitarian crises, to the national and international media and Support Offices, seeking opportunities to raise funds, recruit donors, conduct public partnerships, advocate, and raise the profile and credibility of WV.

6) Communications with the Media: Contribute to the formation of a public opinion to mitigate potential reputational risks, proactively generating a good positioning of the organization among the local and national media.

7) Advocacy Communications: Promote issues related to the promotion of protection, justice and security, seeking to influence public policy or improve its implementation, through channels of internal and external communications, including media and social networks.

With the implementation of the strategy we expect to strengthen our brand and World Vision’s positioning, while being prepared to respond to the current or potential risks on our reputation. Additionally, we aim at developing capacity to properly address communication needs related to natural or human emergencies and disasters and decidedly support advocacy work in the field of promotion of justice and security, always with a Christian focus.

Our columns support our Ministry (What we do) These three columns, People & Culture, Organizational Effectiveness and Sustainability, support our Ministry work: “what we do”. We will continue working arduously in our traditional fields of action. Three out of the four CWB targets are related to health, nutrition and education, fields in which new goals will be established, which should challenge us all, regardless of how advanced we might be in these subjects in some of our sub-regional contexts. Our CWB targets possess the tremendous advantage of being defined by measurable results throughout the life of our CAYs and they provide us with a path to achieve the wellbeing of our children. Health and Education constitute our basic promise to donors, and they are a conducting thread on our path toward a protected child with wellbeing. The gratifying achievements in our region allow us to move forward from mostly attending the physical wellbeing of our children and communities in search of what we really understand by a more "holistic wellbeing". The holistic wellbeing also looks forward to children that will evidence God’s love through positive relationships with their families, communities and environment. A fundamental element in our strategy will be the spiritual strengthening of children, the consolidation of their Christian commitment where it applies and their active participation as designers of their own destiny. We look for the unification of the holistic wellbeing concept as the combination of protection, participation and spiritual nourishment, which means going beyond an approach focused on health and education, towards a model of comprehensive wellbeing of our CAYs, to evolve from a thematic approximation, to an approach focused on CAYs as promoters of change. The holistic wellbeing involves the active participation of children in the design of their own future. Our work with our partners has been certainly impacting positively our children’s wellbeing, but now, jointly with our CAYas agents of change, we together will create conditions and mobilize resources and wills, to regionally promote the integral development of the child. By this means, we will not only protect CAY, but they also will be relevant players, real promoters of a more just and secure society.

Integrated ministry

The Integrated Ministry, into which Transformational Development, HEA, Advocacy and Donor Transformation converge,

will work within the following Ministerial Platforms, in order to achieve the CWB Targets

- Programming Platform: implementing integrated programming at NOs, aimed at: (1) focusing on Children, (2)

achieving higher impact and sustainability with partners; (3) integrating all programmatic processes (Design,

Operational Models and Administration of Sponsors).

- Information Platform: PMIS (“Horizons”) starts its consolidation process as an information platform.

- Performance Measuring Platforms: timely reports, evaluate sponsorship management, aligning to LEAP and

monitoring progress in the protection of CAYs.

- Impact Platforms: improve the coverage of RCs and propel participation and partnership through better

systemization and capacity building.

Our ministerial options:

- Increase alliances beyond the ADPs, with key stakeholders (with an emphasis on Churches)

- Maximize focus and accomplish a visible impact on CWBA

- Propel participation through the regional coordination of hundreds of national networks of CAY

- Increase incidence and the capacity to influence and change national policies

- Generate spaces / structures / environments safer for the children

- Generate more life opportunities for the adolescent and young

- Increase the shared learning capacity applied at the level of the programs (through Learning Centers)

- Generate shared actions between ministerial sectors and sustainability, to support the generation of resources.

General Objectives of the Ministry:

- Implement 10,000 community bases by 2016. These can be formal or informal organizations, not necessarily

linked directly to WV, but which will include the holistic development / child participation in their agendas.

- Make the integrated and contextualized ministry viable, in all four ministry lines (TD, Advocacy, HEA and Donor

Transformation), with a Christian Commitment as a cross-cutting theme.

The agenda of each ministry line:

Transformational development

Strengthen the contribution of Vision Fund to local processes of social and economic development.

Promote the incorporation of the integrated development paradigm of the CAY to the community bases.

Provide multicultural opportunities for the spiritual development of CAYs, their families and their communities.

Develop leadership skills for adolescents and young.

Train CAYs in relevant skills for each stage of their lives.

Generate capacities of the CAYs, their families and their communities to improve their access to social and economic opportunities.

Strengthen the capacity of the community to generate sustainable forms of survival and development.

Vision Fund – MFI

The crisis of the global economies will continue to impact economic activity overall, severely threatening the possibilities

to reach the wellbeing of the people for whom we work. The demand for micro-credits is still greatly unattended.

Nevertheless, there are opportunities of getting funds from institutional donors and socially responsible investors (SRI).

These latter have shown an increasing interest on supporting entrepreneurial activities, sustainable small projects with a

potential of showing a high social ROI at first and with high probabilities of becoming economically profitable businesses

on the mid-term. These SRIs wish to play an increasingly more relevant role in supporting the poor, to grant them

access to funding sources for small projects with interesting potential.

The synergy between the strategies of VF and WV will depend on ensuring that the provision of microfinance services

substantially supports our Child Wellbeing Outcomes (CWBO), as well as it will also depend on an appropriate

organizational integration by means of implementing synergic structures, relations and joint procedures at all levels:

ADPs, national and regional.

The Microfinance Institutions can be a powerful vehicle to promote savings and entrepreneurship in our ADPs. At the

same time, they could provide the communities with a variety of services, which would strengthen WV impact in its

areas of ministry influence. Additionally, this could be a success factor for economic development programs in two lines

of action that interest us: the creation of urban ADPs and furthering our reach and influence beyond the ADPs.

However, in order to propel the reach of the MFI in our projects, VF shall look into diversifying its financing sources.

Advocacy

RWG Recommendation: The RWG recommends that since LAC seeks to have a national level impact which goes beyond ADPs, the region adjust

and adapt RO and NO operating models, including competencies, to promote greater impact of advocacy in all we do.

It is imperative to assure WV is a significant contributor to influencing government policy and practice, generating

enactment of new policy and improving implementation of existing child wellbeing related policy on priority issues.

Create, develop and associate with local, national and regional networks of CAY.

Engage and participate in the promotion of a fair and equal society in the region.

Engage donors in advocacy processes.

Influence the access and the participation of CAYs in health, education, economic, political and recreational quality systems

Develop the capacity of CAYs and community bases in the framework of freedom and rights of the children.

Create monitoring and incidence mechanisms and methodologies in the area of children’s rights.

Connect ecclesiastical and faith communities with the social movement of CAYs.

Consolidate a Christian commitment focused on the prophetic mission of bringing the voice of children and justice through local, national and regional levels.

Make a significant contribution to influencing government policy and practice, resulting in enactment of new policy and/or improved implementation of existing policy on priority Child Wellbeing issues

Actively participate in the Child Health Now campaign and WV's global Child Protection Systems advocacy initiative

Encourage and help Communities to hold government and other duty bearers to account for provision of services for children and protection of their rights.

Provide solid evidence from WV’s work in communities, which will be of great importance to leverage the advocacy influence at the national , regional, and global levels

Include Advocacy in all ADP/grant (re)designs

Humanitarian Emergency Affairs

At the global level, the Partnership has identified for HEA a set of important trends which pose important humanitarian

challenges, including urbanization, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees, migration, food security, climate

change, fragile contexts, civil-military engagement, and disaster risk reduction initiatives.

The goal of the Global Strategy is to save and protect lives and enhance the quality of life through holistic, child-focused

disaster management that actively engages with WV’s organizational context and the wider external environment.

At the regional level, LACRO HEA has mapped the risk of countries within the Latin American and Caribbean Region.

Risk is viewed as a relationship between hazard, vulnerability and capacity according to OCHA and WVI guidelines.

The LACRO HEA strategy is about building resilience that allows World Vision and its partner communities to

effectively respond and adapt to increasingly complex threats, hence reducing the impact of disasters on the well-being

of children. The integration of quality, accountability and learning will be the underlying principles that guide how the

strategy is implemented in all focus areas. As a line of ministry, HEA together with TD and Advocacy will proactively

create opportunities for integration. This strategy guides the strategies of National Offices, as well as the regional sector

and the support services strategies.

The Strategic Intent is directly linked to the Operational Dimensions of Disaster Management—i.e.: Early warning,

Preparation, Disaster mitigation, Response, Rehabilitation, and Transition.

Key Strategic Priorities:

Effective emergency response at all levels

Resilient Development Practice

Capacity in Disaster Management (all 6 DM dimensions)

Commitment to quality, accountability and learning

Building strategic partnerships for preparedness and response (REDLAC, churches, youth networks etc...)

Building N-EPRF at all NOs in the Region.

Develop capacities of CAYs, families and communities to properly deal with the physical, psychosocial and

environmental risks.

Strengthen our capacity and the capacities of the families and the communities to respond to natural disasters, and political and social crises.

Develop human, family and community resilience.

Strengthen psychosocial and spiritual enrichment of community bases during and after natural or human emergencies.

Propitiate healthy, safe and friendly child environments.

Donor transformation9

Sensitize donors for the Latin American Children’s Cause, as well as to promote opportunities for corporate social investment.

Generate opportunities for collaboration between CAY, donors and their children, with the ministry of World Vision and its partners.

Our strategic goal, what we want

Life in all its fullness for each and every child is our highest aspiration, and is located at the top of our building. We in

LACR conceptualize this vision as protected children living in a safe environment. With the help of God, we want to drive

a cause that promotes a more secure society for this to become a reality. Through this Cause, CAYs are not only the

reason for our work, but also our partners. This is why we have set a Master Goal that proposes the mobilization of

millions of CAY using a structure of networks as a platform, to promote our Cause all over the Region. Our Cause

“protected children promoting a more just and secure society” expresses the meaning, the way we in LACR

conceptualize our search for a “life in all its fullness” for our children.

We mobilize for a safer society: the cause and the master goal

The Threat of Violence Latin America is the most unequal region of the planet, showing amazing levels of violence, propitiated in part by the structural inequality. It’s a fact that the organized crime, drug trafficking, public insecurity and unemployment are the

9 Here there is a special emphasis on offices that are locally fundraising, even when all the offices seek for transformed relationships

with donors.

main problems of governments throughout the region.Our violence indicators are among the highest in the world and our CAYs are particular victims of this phenomenon.

Protection as the main topic The protection is a natural response in the face of violence, but according to our Master Goal we should not victimize the child. Instead, we should look for long term solutions for their protection, along with the participation of CAYs as real key agents of change, and with our partners in governments and multilateral agencies, the civil sector and private companies. At a global level, the Partnership of WV defines Children’s Protection as "all measures taken to prevent and respond to exploitation, neglect, abuse, and all other forms of violence affecting children." Our first CWBT aims at Children reporting an increased level of well-being. Regardless of other changes in their positive environment, children are not likely to report high well-being levels, when they are being abused, neglected or exploited. Child Protection is fundamental to the other CWB Targets, as abuse, exploitation or neglect can reduce or counteract other positive input opportunities in a child's life. Child Protection is critical for all child well-being outcomes. Violence or exploitation can undermine any other child well-being outcome, just as a safe environment provides opportunities to children, with development across all the outcomes. Also, adverse childhood experiences (Such as abuse, exploitation and Neglect) are proven to have long-term well-being and behavioural consequences. These may include poor health and difficulties in gaining employment and socially interacting. The children ask for protection, but they also want to be the owners of their own destiny, they want to participate in the decisions affecting their lives. Only by having healthy children, educated, with spiritual values, feeling safe and protected, only through children who exhibit the dimensions considered in our CWBA and become actors and future managers of their own lives, we will be able to talk about a holistic wellbeing of our children.

Our cause and our advocacy work to create a movement for a just and safer society Our third mandate (Grow our resources and influence to increase our impact) invites us to increase our Influence, and to this end, the Master Goal precisely looks for relevance, for a regional incidence, leveraging our actions at local and especially at National levels. To make the Master Goal viable and effective, we must act on four fronts:

1) First, fully internalize the idea that the ADP is a means, not an end in itself. 2) Second, we need to act in partnership and sync with external strategic allies: building strategic alliances,

especially with Churches and other key partners to mobilize the youth, donors, the media, civil society and the public and private sectors.

3) This front complements a third one, which is the domestic front, where we will be seeking: a. To develop sustainable programmatic models specific for urban contexts, given the accelerated

urbanization of our region. Then, promote the decided opening of urban ADPs in line with our strategy of urban mobilization.

b. To develop and implement a mobilization well beyond the ADPs. We look for a National impact, not merely an ADP impact. Our impact must go well beyond our ADP´s, as our Vision calls for “every” child life in all its fullness. We are searching for a National impact, we are aiming to benefit all children.

4) A fourth front will be to continue the accelerated development of initiatives in Advocacy and incidence, and if we intend to mobilize our youth looking for real participation and incidence, to become real agents of change, our movement will give preeminence to our adolescents and youth, from 12 to 24 years of age, when they already have developed criteria to understand their context and needs.

To make the Master Goal a reality, we propose three integrated strategies:

1) The first one is the creation of coordinated networks of CAYs through relationships of solidarity, in a political movement organized following a common Cause. The networks will become key players in a process of social change to reduce violence and inequality. They will seek to create awareness and empower children about their rights and exercise their responsibilities as citizens. They will also put pressure on the governments and the communities so that they meet their obligations.

To this end, WV does not seek to establish parallel or repeated networks at any level (local, national or regional), but to join hands, work together and leverage our purposes, recurring as much as possible to existing networks. While it is true that WV will not pretend to impose our agenda on the existing networks in the communities, we will try to encourage the participation of the CAYs and complement the agendas in each network with the Cause WV is promoting.

2) The second strategy is the development of the leadership skills of our CAYs, to generate a real social impact in

an organized way. Leadership will be a cross-cutting dimension. Central to our internal organization and central

to our regional mobilization.

3) The third strategy is related to the community bases as a launching platform for the Master Goal. These

communities will be the organized units in charge of fostering the implementation of the paradigm of integral

development of children.

The mobilization Thus, a massive organized mobilization of actors is the chosen strategy for this search of relevance. We will integrate

our Ministry with this social movement of our CAY and the strategic alliances at all levels, within an organizational

positioning based on relationships of trust with the media, the civil society, the public and private sector, donors and

social investors.

Our ministry will leverage this networks allowing them to actively participate and contribute, with all legitimacy, to the

child well being at all society levels. This integrated network will constitute a powerful tool for influencing policy and

make governments more accountable in the implementation of existing regulations related to child well being. It will

also contribute to the formation of social capital, which is one of the most important assets of a society to increase its

human resilient development and achieve a sustained holistic child well being.

The Value of our Cause to strengthen unity and the regional mobilization The idea of defining a Regional Cause emerged in December 2010, with our regional leaders’ recognition of World Vision as being in a decisive moment to stand out as an authoritative voice on issues of childhood in the region. This Cause will allow us to better define and reinforce the positioning of WV in the region and it will unify the efforts of the National Offices towards a common goal, creating a mechanism for developing partnerships, building coalitions and fundraising.World Vision’s Regional Cause is being initially oriented towards our internal audiences. Its initial purpose is to unify the LACR around one idea and a common goal. Its communication process throughout the FY12 will be to internalize this strategic mission, within the teams of collaborators of World Vision in Latin America and the Caribbean as one body. This will lead us to understand, adopt, embrace and integrate the Cause in our organizational work, by internally articulating its strategic approach at all levels, especially into our ministry in the communities where we serve. In the short term, we will be developing tools to incorporate the cause to our internal institutional communication and reinforce this mission in our employees. In this way we will create the conditions to initiate a movement both within and outside our ADPs, which will help us to fulfil the Master Goal. We have dedicated a short document (attached) explaining how our Cause was developed. At the same time, and in coordination with the Global offices of Marketing and Communications, we will develop the process and tools to migrate from the Cause as an internal way to unify purposes, to a powerful tool of positioning, fundraising and advocacy. The Cause will guide and propel our external activities and relations, our marketing, our advocacy and the mobilization behind our master goal.

Our Cause will seek to mobilize our society and will be measured according to the Master Goal. It seeks to channel our

passion and convene wills to positively impact millions of CAY through our programmatic activities and our work of

incidence. Our ultimate goal is the transformation of society for children to live life in all its fullness. We will continue to

fight for the holistic wellbeing of our children, by having children enjoying good health, educated for life, loved, cared for

by their family and their community, with values and spiritually nurtured. However, we will give special emphasis to

their empowerment, to radically change their role of aid recipients and turn them into active participants in the design

of their destiny. We will help them to organize and mobilize their actions behind a cause that joins us with them. We

will strive for: "protected children promoting a more just and secure society".

The Master Goal in our 2009-2013 regional strategy

Our Master Goal for 2020:

“Contribute to the development and empowerment of 5.8 million CAYs, organized in local, national, and regional networks with whom we seek to contribute to the transformation of Latin America and The Caribbean. By the year 2020, the Regional Network of children, adolescent and youth, will be fully established and the transformation process will have positively impacted the lives of 5.8 million children, adolescents and young”.

The global goal of 150 million children

Additionally, the Partnership has established as a goal: “Strive to achieve the well-being of 150 million of the world’s most vulnerable children by 2016”. As a region, we will seek to contribute in different ways and through different initiatives towards achieving this global goal. The partnership expects our decided contribution, although there is no global figure suggested for our region. We propose as our share in this objective, to positively impact the lives of 14.5 million children by 2015, the horizon of our current refinement. The Appendix I explains how we arrived to this figure. This objective involves a different definition in terms of the impact we are looking for. The 2009-2013 master goal basically refers to the impact generated by our RC’s on their families and local communities, and is strongly oriented to build a structure of networks to mobilize our CAY looking for relevance in our society. The Global goal refers to positively impacting children well beyond our RCs and the CAYs considered in the regional Master Goal. Its general definition understands positively impacted children as all CAYs who either, participate, are direct or indirect beneficiaries of our programmatic activities or somehow are benefited by processes of development, advocacy or incidence related to the well-being of children and carried out by WV and/or WV partners. Therefore, Advocacy is a line of ministry which in our plan will have great relevance. This 14.5 million CAY objective will be reached through advocacy initiatives. The regional master goal is entirely based on the activism of our regional networks, whereas this global objective extends coverage to all those children that will be positively influenced in their wellbeing through our advocacy actions.

RWG recommendation: The RWG recommends that LAC develop a movement which galvanizes multiple partners, especially with churches and the youth movements, in order to achieve national impact for the most vulnerable, especially in child protection, justice and equality.

Our Master Goal for 2016

Our Master Goal now has two components: The mobilization of CAYs through a structure of connected networks behind our Cause and in search of relevance, and an intense Advocacy activity striving to contribute to the well-being of 14.5 million children.

By refining the strategy, we want to contribute to better monitor the achievements of this Master Goal in light of the lessons from the past few years. The Master Goal, focused on the Cause, is in the heart of our strategy. Nevertheless, the structuring of networks as the platform to promote the mobilization of millions of CAYs, led by thousands of holistically developed spokesmen and youth leaders, while a beautiful ideal, also represents a great challenge. We need to make the Master Goal feasible, this requires for our Region as a whole and our National Offices in particular, not only to clearly understand the concepts involved in the Goal and in the Cause, and their transcendentalism, but also to have absolute confidence in the possibility of achieving them. To the issue of managing the Master Goal, we are dedicating a space in Annex I. Only with this certainty we will be able to embrace our regional goal for year 2015: World Vision seeks a more just society and will contribute to the protection and sustained well-being of 14.5 million of the most vulnerable children in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through the empowerment, participation, and mobilization of 3.7 million children, adolescents, and youth, World Vision will achieve national level impact using an integrated program approach. To meet the established Goal, by the end of 2016 we will have:

- 10,000 community bases as our basic unit of mobilization - At least 370 organized WV networks, which means at least one WV network for each one of our projected number

of ADPs. - 1,500 CAYs, protagonist leaders of the National and Regional Networks in the countries where World Vision

operates. - 50,000 children, adolescent and young as local leaders of the networks in the countries where World Vision

operates. - 10,000 formal and informal community bases, not necessarily linked to World Vision, but with an agenda that

includes child protection and promotes CAY participation. - 3,700,000 children, adolescent and young that will be positively impacted by our organized networks. - 14,500,000 CAY positively impacted by our network and Advocacy initiatives

Explanation of Numbers10

- Our master goal is really ambitious and we can only reach 3.7 millions of CAY through a mobilization well beyond

our ADPs with the regional cause as a will unifier. These CAY are not an exclusive product of World Vision’s work in the region, they are part of a movement that will have to bring together other existing organizations seeking for a transformation of the continent. These CAY are influenced by 370 networks promoted by World Vision (at least one network for each ADP), in places where the community bases are the platform to open and strengthen spaces for children participation. The 3,700,000 children, adolescents and young will be directly or indirectly impacted in a positive way by 2016, thanks to the actions of CAYs in our networks.

- The 1,500 leaders are CAYs formed by WVLACR (an approximate of 5 per ADP) under the servant leadership model. These leaders will serve as national spokespersons for the different WV networks, and will in turn represent nationally the base organizations of children and adolescents.

- The 50,000 are CAYs that will serve as the driving forces of the networks. From them, there will emerge the 1,500 leaders mentioned above. They are part of the local networks related to WVLACR projects and partner organizations. These leaders will represent the voices of the community and will provide us with the support to promote a just and safer society.

- When we talk about 10,000 community bases by year 2016 (around 25 for each ADP), we are referring to formal and informal base organizations, not necessarily linked to World Vision, but which in fact include in their agendas both, the participation of CAYs to contribute to the transformational development and the issues of child protection.

10 We are providing more detailed information on our Master Goal, Annex I-Management.

STRATEGY MAP

ANNEX A

Our Three Operational Models

Country Grouping (Conglomerates)

A conglomerate is a group of National Offices organized and integrated at the functional level, whose extent of services

covers the group of countries composing the conglomerate in the first instance, with opportunities to serve other

National Offices. Within each group of countries, we will provide services using different models such as Shared Services,

Service Providers and Outsourcing, among other options.

The functions to be provided, whether they are service operations (back office), or ministerial operations, intend to

enhance the impact of our ministry by improving the quality of results through standardized, high quality and cost-

effective services that will add value. The “back office” services will always be considered a basic first level of service in a

Conglomerate, and the support operations to the ministry or the ministerial functions will only be those willing to adopt

standardized operating mechanisms.

The operating procedures of the conglomerate must be sustainable and systematic (viable in time, cost effective and with measurable results). Additionally, the synergies of processes within the conglomerate must be repeatable, capable of being monitored, affordable and measurable.

Centres of Excellence / Learning Centres

The Partnership defines a Centre of Excellence as an organism based locally in any agency of the Partnership (NO or SO), demonstrating excellence in a specific sector or ministry. Such organism is selected as a centre of knowledge, research and development for the entire Partnership in that specific sector or ministry. LACRO will begin its Centres of Excellence with Learning Centres, which are groups of people at regional level, conformed and established in the operations of the National Office, with a recognized expertise in a specific area, who will define the best practices and will spread the knowledge, first within the region and then throughout the rest of the Partnership. Through these Learning Centres we intend to achieve the systematization of knowledge and methodologies that will help us to implement project models, the adaptation of global standards to the different contexts, as well as the production and dissemination of relevant findings. At LACRO level, we aim at implementing one Learning Centre per National Office. Haiti will start soon and our current plan considers for now 13 of the 14 National Offices, focusing on the following programmatic sectors: 4 Learning Centres in Advocacy, 4 in Christian Commitment, 2 in Health, 2 in Transformational Development and 1 in Education.

Shared Service Centres

A Shared Service Centre (SSC) is a body that manages common support processes of one or more units of an organization. Its strength results from the specialization and the economies of scale. This is a process management model and includes services such as Finance, Accounting, Human Resources, IT and Audit, as well as more specialized services such as Sponsorship Services. In the implementation of a SSC, there are repetitive operations that can be translated into standardized services offered and shared throughout the organization. The most important principle of a SSC is the high quality of service to internal customers, while cost reduction can be a possible secondary benefit. All operations under the SSC model must be referenced against the best practices/state of the art in the field. The Regional Office will promote, facilitate and envision the implementation and operation of shared services in the region, supporting them to become a reference point across the Partnership. The shared "back office" and operational services within the region, will free resources and allow greater investment on high-profile technical staff in the RO and the NOs, to develop more specialized processes that add more value to the ministry in the field.

ANNEX B

Guidelines for the CWBA

Child Well-Being Aspiration #1: Children enjoy good health

Global Guidelines

Mothers and children protected, preventing infections, diseases and injuries.

Mothers and children well nourished.

Children and their caregivers (including mothers) have access to essential health services.

Regional Guidelines to the NO for the period FY12-FY16

Promote partnering with churches and faith based organizations.

Strengthen alliances with internal and external partners, leveraging the campaign Child Health Now.

Develop capacities at regional, national and local level on issues related to health, HIV and nutrition.

Support the development of Learning Centers, with evidence-based interventions related to the health sector.

Child Well-Being Aspiration #2: Children educated for life

Global guidelines

Focus on the classroom and the school, promoting an effective participation of the family and the community

and fostering an environment which favours achievement and participation.

Contribute to the creation of educational options for a significant number of CAYs not attending school,

particularly in preschool and secondary levels.

Vocational training and development of skills to access employment opportunities.

Reinforce a clear orientation to promote development and participation.

See that the teaching and learning actions are oriented to the development of essential skills for life.11

Promote that the development of skills for life has as its axis the holistic development of children.

Articulate efforts with local, national and regional partners to influence on public policies about education,

giving special priority to the most excluded segments of the population.

Regional Strategic Guidelines for the period FY12-FY16

Strengthen relations with national and local governments on policy issues and public project design and

implementation

Prioritize quality education with equity at all the times and spaces of learning and participation.

Favour children’s active learning processes, as well as the education in skills for life, consistent with the

Educational Transition Plan, promoted by the GC and the Regional Master Goal.

Recognize the value of education, in all its expressions, to enhance the holistic development of CAY, which also

integrates critical aspects of physical, biological, cultural and spiritual nature.

Strengthen the institutional capacity in the area of education at regional level.

Develop Learning Centers and strengthen the Community of Practice (CoP) of "Education and Skills for Life",

promoting intra-regional exchange and with other regions of the Partnership.

11 When we talk about essential life-skills we refer to critical thinking, managing emotions, communication, social relations and social responsibility. These skills should be based on those that are foundational, which are developed during the prenatal period and early childhood. Finally, as one goes through adolescence, strengthens the applied skills to develop a healthy life, entrepreneurship, peace building, self-protection, environmental care and resilience.

Activate the “Education and Skills for Life Working Group” of LACR, integrated by those in charge of education in

the 14 NO, to strengthen leadership, promote communication and optimize available resources.

Strengthen the capacities of the staff on issues of education, under an integral-holistic development approach at

a local (ADP) and national (NO) level, with particular attention to FDT y volunteers.

Encourage the linkage with external partners from the Education sector to influence in public policies.

Develop spaces and mechanisms for inter-sectorial articulation of the ministry in LAC.

Child Well-Being Aspiration #3: Children experience the love of God and their neighbours

Global Guidelines

Ensure that the processes to accomplish the sectoral objectives of CWB strengthen one another to address the

ministry in an integrated way.

Develop capacities to frame our work around the different life stages of children, in order to improve their

opportunities for cognitive, social, physical and spiritual development, in a differentiated way according to their

age group.

Strengthen, integrate and communicate in all programs and offices our foundations and our Christian

commitment as a diverse global partnership that follows Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed.

Manage our influence and our impact to give a testimony of our commitment to justice and child well-being.

Regional Strategic Guidelines for the Period FY12-FY16

Ensure the integration of the Christian testimony in all of our programs and projects, according to the Holistic

Development Model based in Luke 2:52.

Ensure the presence of the spiritual component of the Holistic Development Model for Children, with the

purpose of teaching CAY’s to love God and others.

Strengthen Christian formation and the spiritual enrichment of our staff.

Acknowledge churches as key partners, with whom World Vision shares its values and mission towards

disadvantaged populations.

Strengthen collaboration relationships and develop strategic alliances with Churches, Christian institutions and

other faith based organizations, as a national strategic priority.

See that the programs and projects focused on children have a comprehensive approach (including all the

different dimensions of the human being, on their specific life stages).

Reaffirm the transformative value of prayer through its intentional promotion in different organizational spaces.

Promote our core values as guidance for our internal and external practices.

Coordinate regional initiatives, with special emphasis on initiatives outside of the ADPs, working in collaboration

with external partners.

Spiritual Nurture Strategy

In order to build ethical values, to love and respect others, promote the education in the principles of the Christian faith

and develop inclusive, equitable, fair and mutually binding relationships, we believe that all National Offices should:

Develop qualified staff to foster the spiritual nurture of children: transcendence, relations, meaning and ethics.

Sensitize the Church on its responsibility for the protection and development of children through initiatives such

as the movement “Juntos por la Niñez”.

Search for the intentional integration of the development of children’s spirituality in processes of holistic

development.

Move from the development of tools and manuals to the education based on principles of child spirituality that

can be applied even when there are no tools available.

Encourage spiritual nurture through quality interactions between the children and their peers, significant adults

and mentors.

Look for strategic alliances with academic and educational institutions to train the teachers in issues of

children’s spirituality.

LACR will count with a Learning Center for Children’s Spiritual Nutrition, in order to generate educational and

methodological evidence on how children living in poverty find God and develop their spirituality.

Child Well-Being Aspiration #4: Children are cared for, protected and participating

Global Guidelines

To be an authoritative voice at all levels, driving structural changes on behalf of the children and marginalized

populations (Mandate No. 4).

Empower CAYs, families, communities, churches, donors and activists as promoters of justice, to create

movements that have a stronger voice and impact for the most vulnerable children, and to develop strategic

relationships with institutions and decision makers in order to gain greater influence.

Regional Strategic guidelines for the period FY12-FY16

Find ways for CAYs to become a priority in political, social, economic and religious processes.

See that vulnerable and marginalized populations are included in all political and developmental processes

seeking for a more equitable LAC.

Make sure that the national and local governments give priority to the investment in policies for low-income

people and children.

Focus the efforts of the region in child protection.

Search for ways to integrate Advocacy in other areas and ministries.

Manage as cross-cutting issues, gender equity and the impact of climate change on CAY.

Articulate networks, coalitions and partnerships with external agencies, including local governments, base

communities, NGOs and private companies, to become strategic partners on core issues related to children's

rights.

Prioritize at NO level their relationship with UN agencies, mainly UNICEF, the members of MMI and faith-based

organizations.

Give priority to relationships at national and regional level with members of the Children Rights Committee

(CRC) and Violence against Children (RSSG).

“Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and people”

Luke 2:52