Costa Rica rural community support fund

Helping others and saving ourselves!

As an active member of the Drake Bay community, the Corcovado Foundation cannot close our eyes to the needs surrounding us. When the pandemic hit and Costa Rica closed its borders, we realized that the people from our community would hurt so much.

We couldn’t help everybody, but we set our goal to identify those that needed the most help. This wasn’t hard; many of these people were our neighbors or the grandparents of the children we provide with environmental education, or we knew their children, and we knew that as tourism died, their jobs had disappeared. Also, people gave us leads: an old lady living alone in a shanty house, under a couple of tin sheets, a dirt floor, and a $100 pension; a senior mother taking care alone of her son with special needs, or a couple of sick elders living miles from town on an isolated farm.
We found so much need and so much isolation. This effort to identify disadvantaged people was a true revelation and a change of direction for our organization. Human poverty is a social issue and a problem that the Corcovado Foundation ought to tackle as part of the ecosystem.

This act of love happened thanks to you and people like you. We have raised over $30,000 on aid for those most in need. Our donors, volunteers, and members were the driving force behind these efforts. I feel that everybody was excited to help. In this time of despair, being able to make a difference in somebody’s life was a fantastic way to light up those dark months of seclusion and isolation. The opportunity to support others with time or money was a great way to save ourselves from the gloom of the pandemic.

During the pandemic, we delivered food packages to 50 people, over 1020 packages over a year. When the borders opened, we identified those, who even before the pandemic, had been forgotten by the system or their families, and we continue to support them. We have also helped families in their time of desolation. Two weeks ago, a family lost their house to a fire and lost all their possessions. The community joined efforts to help, and the foundation united them to make a difference. To this date, we have delivered over 1200 packages of food, which equals around 17,000 US invested in relief. We will continue to bring these packages full of relief and love for as long as we can.

Protecting the Osa is always about protecting its most vulnerable lifeforms.

Sometimes that includes people.

Humans have been part of the Osa Peninsula’s ecosystem for over six millennia, so it has evolved into one inter-dependent ecosystem. And when any life form suffers, humans included, the entire ecosystem experiences increased pressure and depredation. As advocates for environmental protection, restoration, and sustainability across Costa Rica, the Corcovado Foundation looks to reduce the suffering and its consequences. 

Like much of the country, people across the Osa depend on tourism. When Costa Rica closed its borders in 2020, Drake Bay, the gateway to Corcovado National Park, and home to the Corcovado Foundation, became one of the hardest-hit communities in the country. Almost 95% of the families in and around Drake Bay found themselves unemployed, many without any income at all. 

There were many gloomy stories coming to us, families in extreme financial distress, grandparents that have been forgotten under the crisis; dogs, and cats left abandoned because families could no longer feed them. We could not sit with our arms crossed to wait for things to get better. So, we came up with ideas, and one was food distribution.

We’d been distributing food since the beginning of the Pandemic, delivering some love and dignity in the shape of a bag of food to help with some of the basic needs of people living on the edge. That is how we met the Mendoza family. But we realized after meeting them that contrary to what we thought, this mother and her child had been struggling to make ends meet years before the pandemic.

The Mendozas are members of the Gnobe indigenous community. Mrs. Mendoza, a single mother, faced serious challenges, including caring for her boy on her own, a boy with a mental disability. Having lost her income from local tourism, she found herself unable to survive on the less than 90 dollars per month in government support.

Also, the boy’s disability forced them to live in a predominantly non-indigenous community to be close to medical services. Their isolation, lack of a support network, barely able to speak Spanish, and the demands of taking care of her son, make it even harder for her to get a job.

You and other wonderful people heard us, opened your hearts, and came to the rescue too. Your support made it possible for us to locate so many older adults forgotten by the world and bring them a package of food and cleaning supplies so that they could live with some dignity. We also brought food for their pets. 

 Since the beginning of the Pandemic, Corcovado staff and volunteers have delivered food 21 times for a total of 1,020 packages. The gratitude and relief the families express every time our team shows up is a massive reward for us. We want to share that gratitude with you for supporting these efforts with so much commitment.   I hope that wherever you are reading this report, you can feel the reward of helping those in need.