The CREAR Association, Costa Rica
The CREAR Association, founded in 2005, is a non-profit organization for the rural communities in and around Playa Sámara, Guanacaste, Cosa Rica. CREAR offers a wide variety of services to the local members of the community, primarily children, all completely free of charge, with our main focus being to provide supplementary education opportunities in the fields of technology, music, art, English, dance, theater, environmental education, horticulture, sports, values and academic support.
In addition, the CREAR Association runs summer camps, women's empowerment/independence workshops, and young adult apprentice programs. CREAR currently has a presence in the local schools four days a week in the form of an after school program, offered to 150 students from Sámara and the neighbouring areas. CREAR also runs the first and only public library in Sámara, with a wide range of books for children in both Spanish and English as well as books for adults in English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and Italian. The library is a free resource to the community.
CREAR's Mission
La Asociacion CREAR seeks to provide a venue where children and young people can develop their artistic talents, social consciousness and a range of skills through creative art-education initiatives, environmental education and classes in a variety of supplemental areas. At the same time, they learn life-long skills that will offer them a wider and more fulfilling range of employment opportunities in the future. We aim to enforce environmental consciousness in our students so that they may take that awareness back to their homes and continue to educate future generations. Each lesson or activity has an academic foundation as well as a creative component. We aim to promote higher-level thinking and questioning through our studies of current social and environmental issues.
CREAR is run by a multi-cultural staff, made up primarily of the international volunteers who come to our community. We incorporate social, environmental and cross-cultural themes, as well as foreign languages, in our curriculum, hoping thereby to contribute to the formation of a spirit of multicultural curiosity, global awareness and tolerance in the program's youth.
La Asociacion CREAR is a growing presence in the community, whose primary objective is to expand our resources in both materials, funds and personnel so that we may implement future projects and expand our existing programs in size, scope and effectiveness.
