Project Launch:

Cabeceras de Tilarán is a small rural town of about 700 people located in the cool, rainy mountainous region surrounding Monteverde in the northwest Costa Rican province of Guanacaste. Most people in the town work for dairy or coffee farms, in the local cheese factory, or in the tourism industry. The school has a traditional dance group that recently won a regional competition and nearly every single member of the town is a soccer fanatic. While the world-renowned beauty and biodiversity of the cloud forests is a source of great pride for the people of Cabeceras, in practice, the town falls short in the area of basic environmental responsibility on a day-to-day basis due to a lack of basic infrastructure and education. Through six weekly workshops, a group of youth and kids in the community of Cabeceras addressed a self-identified community development priority: trash. Each workshop took aim at a different aspect of this pressing environmental and social problem affecting the community. Activities included trash pickup, painting public trash cans, designing and painting anti-littering signs to distribute throughout the community, building four sets of recycling receptacles, and learning the philosophy of reduce, reuse and recycle through several crafts that reuse recyclable materials. With a $500 grant from World Connect’s Kids to Kids Program, kids were able to make the anti-littering signs that were part of the project.