Posted November 28 2018
New Voices offers Cincinnati area high school students a unique opportunity to learn and serve in Costa Rica beginning in the 2019/2020 academic year.
Llanos de Cortez Catarata, Costa Rica
Beginning in January, 2020, New Voices voices launches a new series of adventures far beyond the Greater Cincinnati community. Through its collaboration with Asociation CREAR, a non-profit tutoring and support program for youth in Playa Samara, Guanacaste, Costa Rica, New Voices students will travel to Costa Rica to learn, serve and collaborate with students enrolled in Asociation CREAR programs. Working side by side with their partners in the same way that New Voices students have consistently reached across cultural, socio-economic and other barriers in Cincinnati through artistic collaborations, New Voices students will share personal stories and develop their unique points of view of the community through the lens of the camera.
Asociation CREAR student
Playa Samara is a small town of about 3,000 on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica which has benefited from the country’s strong tourism based economy. As a smaller and more remote community, however, Playa Samara has fewer educational and recreational opportunities for youth than other communities. Organizations like Asociation CREAR have been stepping in to fill this gap with supplemental programming. It’s after school programs in art, language instruction and technology are designed to put students in Playa Samara on an equal footing with others in participating in Costa Rica’s growing service industry.
Playa Samara
New Voices seeks to support Asociation CREAR’s mission by bringing additional opportunities for its students to interact with others outside of their own families, friends and classmates and to develop and share their personal view of the Playa Samara community through photography. New Voices hopes this experience will bring confidence to CREAR students as they form connections with the many visitors to Costa Rica they will encounter throughout their lives.
New Voices seeks to give Cincinnati high school students a new perspective on others outside of their own communities based on new personal experiences. These experiences and relationships, formed across boundaries of language, geography and culture have the potential to add a dimension of thoughtfulness and deliberation to future interactions with the incredible array of diverse communities throughout our own country.