The place where you are born is no more than a coincidence. One person grows up in a safe and wealthy place, the other in unsafe and poor surroundings. Stichting Mano firmly believes that all people should have the same opportunities to develop optimally and to make a positive contribution to the city they live in, no matter who you are or where you came from.
History of Stichting Mano
Stichting Mano (= the Mano Foundation) helps vulnerable citizens of Rotterdam join society by giving them the lead role to self-reliability and decisiveness. Many residents in Rotterdam like Rotterdammers, former refugees or children and adolescents forced to grow up out of their homes, are vulnerable and in need of support. For more than 15 years now, Stichting Mano has helped them find their path to participating fully, healthy and promising in society.
It all started in Cuzco, Peru, where they gave Peruvian children, who lived and worked on the streets, a chance for self-development with the project Pasa la Voz. Here children could stand up for themselves with their magazine and work for a better life. The program’s success inspired people in the Netherlands. In 2007, they started their first multimedia workshops for children in deprived areas of Rotterdam.
Since then, Stichting Mano has hosted hundreds of media workshops, created films, magazines and radio programs, that children, young adults and elderly people, newcomers and people with disabilities, were proud of and thrived from. They now do much more than media workshops such as programs to reach children and young adults life skills.
Stichting Mano
The organization wants to ensure that citizens of Rotterdam have equal opportunity to be a member of society. In this way, isolated individuals and families living in poverty, who suffer from a lack of competences and social network can participate as active citizens.
Stichting Mano creates the conditions for people to discover their qualities and talents, to deploy them and to take life into their own hands, because that is what everybody wants to. All we have to do is give them a helping hand.
This is how we work towards an inclusive society, from the head and with the heart, with all our projects and programs. With a personal approach and by providing the right tools, this NGO empowers people to take control of their own lives and connects various Rotterdammers in a sustainable way, with the efforts of volunteers.
On a yearly basisStichting Mano reaches about 1,500 participants with the support of 550 volunteers.
Think Human Foundation & Stichting Mano
At the end of March 2021,Webhelp Rotterdam reached out to see how the company could make a social contribution to the city.
Webhelp employees became supporters of 15 participants in our SamenOndernemen project, aimed at empowering newcomers through entrepreneurship. In addition to guiding the participants, Webhelp provided a
workshop about marketing and social media and they attended the meeting in Ahoy in June where the newcomers pitched their business plans.
In November 2021, Think Human Foundation, Webhelp’s endowment fund, decided to go further by supporting a new project of Stichting Mano. They will provide reading sessions in Dutch to the newcomers’ children, to help and facilitate the inclusion of these isolated families.
Our initatives
Think Human Foundation projects and contacts
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