So much has been happening at Worldfund these last few months, which is why we are a little late in updating you on our progress.  As you can read below, we just completed a very successful pilot project in partnership with the Dartmouth College Rassias Foundation.  Nine Dartmouth instructors, led by Professor Rassias, spent two weeks in Mexico City in an intensive course to train teachers at our Mexican partner schools on how to improve their oral English skills and to demonstrate proven techniques for the teachers to use in their classrooms.  We will continue this program in June with a new group of Mexican education professors in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Three weeks ago, Worldfund raised $32K for our partner school outside San Salvador at a cocktail reception hosted by the Consulate of El Salvador. As the response was so positive, we hope this will be an annual event!

Other achievements of the past quarter include:

• We completed the overhaul of our website, which went live in early February.
• Worldfund moved to new offices located at 915 Broadway; we hope that you will visit!
• We now use Worldfund as our preferred name, but our focus remains the same - working to improve education in Latin America for underprivileged youth.
• Our US partner, Better World Books, has just launched its new online bookstore BetterWorld which carries over 2 million books and offers free shipping in the US and $2.97 shipping worldwide.  Any purchases that you make by entering the site through www.worldfund.org will benefit our programs.
• Our partner Mano Amiga school in Monterrey, Mexico placed in the top 10% of the 27,000 schools in Mexico that participated in the national ENLACE exam.  In addition, the recently released results of the national SINEA exam in El Salvador revealed that sixth grade students at Worldfund's partner school CIDECO Centro Educativo scored fifth in the country.
• One of our board members, Mauricio Trabuco, and I spent a week in Brazil visiting our existing and new partner projects, with the goal of expanding our education efforts in Brazil.
• In March, Erin Sawaya joined our teams as Vice President of Communications and Development.  She is a graduate of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and Barnard College and already an indispensible member of our team.

Thank you all for supporting our work to help Latin America's youth obtain the quality education that every person deserves.

All of us at Worldfund wish you all many blessings during this Easter and Passover week.

Warmest regards,