Mónica Koppmann Morán

Mónica Koppmann builds a platform for at-risk children to succeed in school and in life, using her position in both the marginalized and elite sectors of Chilean society to collaborate and benefit through her program.

Mónica has found a way to give vulnerable children in marginalized communities the foundation of emotional care they need to develop and pursue their education. Through Manos y Naturaleza (Hands and Nature), she creates safe, emotionally dependable places in their neighborhoods to assign nurturing “tutors” to supplement and build upon the care their families are able to give. By enrolling children at a young age and working with them through graduation, Mónica shapes their future, enabling them to become professionals capable of caring for not only their own children but for other needy children as well.
To support her work, Mónica taps into the underutilized resources of the burgeoning Chilean private sector. By offering clear and simple ways for businesses and individuals to engage in her program, Mónica is paving the way for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social-business partnerships in Chilean society. She is also creating links to business by cleverly positioning her model for replication by government programs throughout Chile.

Children growing up in marginalized communities, such as the slums of Santiago and rural areas of Chile, are at high-risk to drop out of school, live on the streets, engage in dangerous behavior, and under-achieve as adults. This is often because their parents—having grown up in similar settings—cannot give their children the care and affection they need. Monica believes that without this love, children cannot complete the development needed during childhood and may become troubled and incomplete adults.
Formal education cannot benefit poor children where emotional trauma or vulnerability remains un-mended. The gap between the potential benefits of education and children whose experience limits their ability to absorb it is exacerbated in Chile, as elsewhere, where there is a gap between the education rates of the top and bottom socioeconomic groups. Ninety-five percent of children in the wealthiest fifth of Chilean society complete basic education levels, as opposed to only 40 percent of children in the poorest fifth of society. The Chilean government has recognized the need to take education in Chile beyond the mere transmission of knowledge to address children’s development holistically, especially in impoverished communities. It has failed in doing so with municipal programs in marginalized communities to improve the quality of education.
Since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990, Chile’s business sector has grown rapidly. CSR policies are developing apace as an opportunity for citizen organizations (COs) to expand the impact of their work, but COs need examples of how to tap into this resource.

Mónica founded Manos y Naturaleza in Chile in 1985, along with a corresponding organization in Germany to raise money for her work. Mónica, as Executive Director and President of the Board, manages over a dozen staff members, including tutors who do direct service work with the children, as well as finance, administration, and marketing staff. Her annual budget is about US$140,000. She raises this revenue mostly through business partnerships, but also through events, individual donations, and continued support from the German wing of her organization.
Mónica’s strategy relies on intensively trained “Tio” or “Tia” (Uncle or Aunt) Tutors, adults from the marginalized communities where she establishes her program. Tio (a) Tutors each have a caseload of twenty children, the maximum capacity for children to get the personal attention they need. Tio (a) Tutors fill in where a child’s parents leave off, providing the care, discipline, and consistency needed in a child’s life. Tio (a) Tutors work with their assigned children from the six years of age until they graduate from high school. Tio (a) Tutors work together as a group to support one other when there is trouble dealing with children or families.
A key role of Tio (a) Tutors is to strengthen links and provide support for three points in their children’s lives: Clubhouse, school, and family. “Clubhouses” are safe places where children come to play sports, and learn from activities and workshops; proving essential to Mónica’s model. Children attend their clubhouses daily after school. Additionally, both the child and parents must commit to the child attending school before he or she can enroll in Manos y Naturaleza. At schools, Tio (a) Tutors form relationships with the child’s teachers, allowing them to monitor the child’s progress and connect parents and teachers. Tio (a) Tutors also come to play important roles in the families, changing patterns through their persistent but gentle prodding of problems. Over time, Mónica has developed programs for parents, holding “living room sessions” as therapy and creating workshops for parents.
Mónica has impressive results with the children who complete her program. Most go on to higher education, and 60 to 70 have professional careers in law, engineering, acting, and other such fields. Mónica’s methodology comes to completion when graduates return to their communities after university to become Tio (a) Tutors themselves.
Mónica has a variety of innovative strategies for engaging businessmen and businesses. Though she could probably earn more from larger companies, Mónica chooses to focus on small and medium sized businesses because they can learn the most from her program and the context of poverty in which it operates. Businessmen who are friends of Mónica have become spokespeople for her in the business world after leading clubhouse workshops. Thirty businesses currently support Manos y Naturaleza as their corporate social responsibility partner. Mónica often solicits donations from their employees, who can “adopt” children for support. In partnership with Starbucks, Mónica has created a popular Christmas campaign where customers in shops can take paper flowers which detail a few characteristics of Manos y Naturaleza children, and send those children personalized gifts. They receive personalized thank you notes in return. 
A new strategy is to try elite practices, such as bridge championships. In November this year there will be a championship to benefit Manos y Naturaleza. The great advantage of this is to show people who normally don’t have much contact with these realities “in situ” and to sensitize them and establish bridges. 
A model alliance with an enterprise has also been created to build a Manos y Naturaleza project together. The project includes planning, as well as handwork and enterprise volunteer work. The enterprise places all its expertise at their disposal: Legal counselor, designer, marketing team, employees, all of them building the project. The children are also included in the making of the project. Thus, another bridge is created among those working for a CO. This intends to break the myths existing between the company and the CO. For Manos y Naturaleza it is vital to create bridges by cooperating, working together, having a great time building jointly, and breaking barriers created by the ignorance of different realities.
A municipality has agreed to support a pilot replication of Mónica’s program and expand it if successful. Through this agreement, Monica has attracted the attention of Servicio Nacional de Menores (SENAME), a national government program for children at risk. She has partnered with Educare, an organization working on drug prevention and treatment for teenagers, to create a program targeted at vulnerable children and teens. Now, with SENAME watching this pilot, Mónica is well positioned to convince SENAME to adopt and expand her model as a means of more strategically using government resources that up until now have been spent ineffectively. Mónica has proven her model’s effectiveness by replicating in three locations including one of the most violent slums in Santiago, as well as an impoverished rural town outside Santiago. Mónica has modified her model according to the particularities of the different contexts.
Manos y Naturaleza is promoting a return to Nature among its people, companies, children, and families with a great project called “Mundo Vivo” (Live World), which consists of the recovery of about 300 hectares of hill land inside the city perimeter, with the intention that the land will be kept as a green point. An alliance is being established with the owners to create a center of urban ecology: Sports, workshops of handicrafts, and healing the animal world. It will be a point where the different worlds come together.
Though Mónica has replicated her model several times and trained other organizations to implement it independently, she has been hesitant to expand her model on large scale before perfecting it. She feels strongly that she cannot experiment when children’s lives are at stake. She has added components to her model when replicating in new communities, such as introducing revenue-generating activities for parents and revitalizing unused community clubhouses. After careful planning, Mónica has arrived at the point where she feels ready to take her model to scale and has positioned herself to do it.

Mónica’s contagious energy and love of life comes in part from her mother and father, who were dynamic people and engaged parents. One of their key lessons for Mónica was respect for others and they encouraged her to meet and play with children outside of her middle-class background. Mónica’s parents died when she was in her early twenties, and she was devastated. Instead of developing a career, she floundered, pursuing a life of diversion and pleasure.
When Mónica turned thirty, she realized something had to change. Having attended a German school as a child, she moved to Germany in search of a completely different life. She enrolled in courses and worked as a nanny, housekeeper, and painter. It was the first time she had been forced to work with her hands—she was a domestic worker who once had domestic help in Chile. The hardships she endured, including discrimination by Germans, affected Mónica deeply. She looks back on that time as an experience which taught her empathy and gave her the ability to bear the difficult things she has to hear, see, and do during her work in the Chilean slums.
During her time in Germany, Mónica was deeply impressed by the number of extracurricular activities open to children. These opportunities, which helped shape them and bring out their potential, were not available to children in Chile, particularly poor children. Mónica began planning a program to bring similar opportunities to children in Chile, and with the financial support of friends in Germany she returned to Chile to implement it. Mónica began Manos y Naturaleza by identifying a slum community and then traveling there to get to know the street children and their families. At first, she was rejected by the community, which was suspicious of outsiders. Over time, by befriending and working directly with the children, Mónica’s project took shape. Though she eventually entered into the communities she worked with, Mónica maintained her ties with the elite social circles of her former life. This has enabled her to uniquely bridge her two worlds and forge partnerships between them.