The Secretos para contar Foundation is present in all the municipalities that make up the Department of Antioquia: 125 all together, composed of approximately 6.000 villages. We have visited all schools located in rural areas of Antioquia, and in so doing, we have reached 100% of the rural families with children attending school. 

A group of deeply-committed workshop staff or facilitators – known locally as “the book people” – have to travel up into the mountains, down into the valleys and along the rivers to get to these remote areas; all this in order to personally deliver our books to the local schoolchildren and their families as part of the installation workshop and the reading program.

Although the Foundation is mainly focused on the Department of Antioquia, it has participated in other programs in other departments of the country in conjunction with Acción Social - Red de Seguridad Alimentaria (Social Action- Food Safety Network) and Instituto de Bienestar Familiar (the Colombian Family Welfare Institute) as well as other private entities such as Indupalma in el Cesar and Philip Morris in Santander.

The book delivery or installation process involves the Foundation’s workshop staff visiting the same town three times for each trilogy or book set. The first visit consists of getting the town’s teachers together, presenting them with the collection and then planning the second visit or installation workshop.

On the second visit, our workshop staff goes to each of the village schools to meet with the families who have been personally invited to this event with the help of the teachers. There we stage the installation workshop where we hand over a 3-volume set of books to each family. We invite everybody to touch them, open them, and become totally familiar with them. Then we tell them how they can be used by the entire family thereby awakening their curiosity to continue reading at home.

On the third visit, the workshop staff meets again with the town’s teachers in the form of a workshop where they provide teacher guides containing activities and exercises that can be carried out with the books in the classroom. Watch video

During all these years that the Foundation has been directly staging these reading programs in the rural areas of Colombia, it has been a privilege for us to see how much these families love learning and how grateful they are to be considered active people capable of thinking, feeling and willing. 

The relationship that we have built up with our rural families is one of dignified respect for the role they play. We encourage their development and deliver on our promise, always focusing on the positive side of things so as to bring about the right solutions. This is why teachers and families in remote rural parts of Colombia cannot wait for us to arrive, since our workshops have become quite joyful events.