Launched in January 2023, the Varkey Foundation’s Comunidad Araucaria is a pioneering initiative in the Latin American region that seeks to train, inspire, and connect ministers and secretaries of education throughout the region. Together with its strategic allies, including TWCF, this network has already succeeded in providing learning and knowledge exchange opportunities to more than 50 regional leaders from over 10 countries in the region.

Led by Agustín Porres, this project aims to leverage previous TWCF-funded research to foster virtuous educational leadership in Latin America; to enhance virtues literacy among government teams; and to support the design of educational policies focused on Character Education to promote systemic human flourishing.

The key activities of this project will include training a team of master trainers who will deliver the character based curriculum and learning materials through a combination of in person and online formats. The Varkey Foundation team will present three different character development training programs for the competing teams to choose from. These include the Inner Development Goals curriculum, the BICEPs curriculum, and the Jubilee Centre approach. The project will be rigorously evaluated through a partnership with academic experts to determine its impact on the policymakers and their teams, and capture relevant lessons learned.

The primary audience for this project includes political, administrative, and technical teams from five ministries whose ministers or education secretaries are part of Comunidad Araucaria. In total, 25 people from each ministry will participate in the program, meaning the project will have an outreach of 125 government officials from 5 different countries in Latin America.

The intended outcomes of the project are that 1) knowledge and skills about character education amongst Latin American education ministers and their teams increase, 2) that the government teams themselves develop an understanding of the principles of character virtue, 3) that there is an increase in knowledge on how to design policies related to character development amongst the ministers and their teams, and 4) that character education policies will be developed, adopted and implemented in Latin America.