Academic education
The main tool for personal and professional growth, delivered as real scholarships at every level, from primary school through to university. This is the pillar the whole thing exists to reach.
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Sea of dreamsMar de Sueños: Sport as the Way into School on the Salvadoran Coast
The social project Waveswell exists to fund. Fifteen to twenty children a year, from around age ten through to graduation.
What it is
What is Mar de Sueños?
Mar de Sueños is a social start up that uses sport to pass on values, virtues and high goals to children along the Salvadoran coastline, and to open up their personal and professional development. Josselyn Alabi founded it to join her sports career to what she actually wanted her life to do.
It came first. Waveswell came afterwards, and Waveswell exists so that Mar de Sueños can eventually pay for itself instead of depending on whoever happens to be feeling generous that year. Part of what every retreat guest pays goes straight into it.
How it works
Three pillars, and they are in this order on purpose
Values education
Delivered through coaching sessions, and through films and books chosen for teenagers and worked through together. Soft skills are what actually separate young professionals later, so they are taught deliberately rather than hoped for.
Sport
The channel, not the goal. Values land through play far better than through a lecture, so sport is how everything else gets in, in a way that is fun and subtle enough that nobody feels lectured.
Who it is for
A commitment, not a donation drive
Every year the programme selects a maximum of 15 to 20 beneficiaries, boys and girls. That number is deliberately small, because the commitment behind it is long: quality work from around age ten all the way to graduation, and after that the aim of placing them in decent jobs.
It runs with volunteers from ESEN, the Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios in El Salvador, and it is working to open up to more Salvadoran universities.
Current number of children in the programme, and the exact share of each retreat that goes to it, pending.
Where it is going
Mission, vision, values
To educate and create opportunities for young people from coastal areas, through sport and personalised coaching in values, virtues and high ideals, for their personal and professional growth.
To become the leading social enterprise, a hotel school, in the Americas for tourist areas and above all coastal ones, so that broad horizons of opportunity open up for the beneficiaries through academic education, sport and values.
Teamwork. Proactivity. Perseverance. Generosity. Optimism. Integrity.
The long version of the vision is a chain of hotel schools. The hotel is where guests stay. The school next door is where the young people from the programme study, and they do their practical training inside the hotel. Guests meet them, they meet guests, and the money loops back around. A chain of hotels dedicated to human development through sport.
Helping
How to be part of it
Come on a retreat
The simplest one, and the one that was designed for this. Part of what you pay for a Waveswell retreat goes into the programme. You get a week you were going to spend somewhere anyway, and a child gets a school year.
Sponsor a child directly
There is an option to become a sponsor from El Salvador or from anywhere in the world through a monthly contribution, made as a donation via Waveswell. Write and Joss will explain exactly where it goes.
Get in touch about Mar de Sueños
For sponsorship, volunteering, or a company that wants a social responsibility programme with something real behind it.