Scholarships

What our scholars are saying:

“Since I was a child, I have been acquiring philosophic values that help me to became the agent of change that I am today, and everything is thanks to The DREAM Project and UWC Costa Rica. I remember, before I started this journey, one of my main targets was to show my culture, where I come from [and] what I want to become in the future and acquire a quality education…[I have been accomplishing] my goals, because I have the opportunity to be myself [and] make my voice…heard in a small community… I realized that I knew nothing about academics until my teachers began to find in me that taste for learning that I learned from The DREAM Project…[that] has been helping me to think and analyze internationally but with different perspectives. 

Therefore, the fact, that I came to UWC Costa Rica, my life has been constantly changing, because I have learned and unlearned things that can help me to make this world a better place, such as, I became…more active to find feasible solutions to solve and debate about local, national and international issues and meet people from parts of the world that I never imagined or that [I] could not meet back home that not only became my friends, but they also have given [me] the honor of calling them my family. I also learned a different language [and] acquired and developed values such as leadership, responsibility, respect, brotherhood, integrity and, above all, ethics, which are, for me, the core values of this amazing movement. I am completely sure that UWC is the best experience that a teenager could ask for. In conclusion, I would like to say thank you to The DREAM Project and UWC Costa Rica for this beautiful opportunity.”

- Gracchus Fenelon, United World College, Costa Rica, 2019-2021

Catherine Sánchez enrolled in DREAM's vocational training program, A Ganar, when she was 17 years old. Through this program, she reinforced her values, gave them more importance and learned to be punctual, to respect the rules and to resolve conflicts with very different colleagues. At DREAM, she also received training in sexual education and healthy decision-making through the Deportes para la Vida program. She became a leader of the youth ministry and got involved in social work. She organized raffles to raise funds and redistribute them to people in difficulty.

After graduating from the A Ganar program, Catherine obtained a scholarship from the Beyond The Beach Foundation to study accounting and graduated with her accounting degree in 2015 from UTESA University in Puerto Plata. Since 2012, she worked as an accounting assistant at Caribe Wind, as an administrator in COOPADEPE and as a coordinator at Colegio Cardenal Beras School. Thanks to these experiences and the training she received, she now has a level of professionalism and training that will serve her forever: “I learned to be more punctual [and] responsible, …to work under pressure and write reports and express myself confidently. I now have a good knowledge of accounting, as well as the Dominican laws, regulations and legal vocabulary...” Catherine hopes to study for her Master’s in the near future. “Without the Beyond the Beach scholarship and my work at Caribe Wind, which I got thanks to A Ganar, I would never have been able to finance my studies. I am from a poor family and had no work experience. I feel very happy.”

- Catherine Sánchez, Beyond the Beach Scholarship, 2012-2016