Friends of Families United . . .

Helping Poor Families Improve Their Lives. . .

The Families United of Nicaragua is a group of 21 women with 50 dependent kids. In most families the older children and grandmas also live under the same roof. Most of the member families are headed by single mothers who have been divorced, deserted, or widowed. The other women have husbands with serious medical problems that prevent them from holding regular jobs. Altogether there are approximately 100 family members. The members with steady jobs earn between $2 and $4 per day, for an average of $460 per year.

These twenty-one families have been organized into a support group called the Families United in Nicaragua Association (FUNA) Their Coordinating Council is dedicated to using the resources they receive from their northern Friends to improve the lives of all the families.

The Committee of Care, comprised of three local leaders, helps implement the programs the Friends have set up to assist the Families. They are our hearts and hands and feet on the ground, working directly with the Families.  The Friends Executive Board  works very closely with this Committee in Esteli.

Our assistance programs supplement basic needs in education, health, nutrition, housing, and micro-financing. Most of our effort goes into improving the opportunities of the dependent children, so that they can grow up healthy and educated. Through them, we believe, the cycle of extreme poverty can be broken.

The ultimate goal of the loyal Friends who support this program is to raise these families to a level of self-sufficiency--to a point where they are enabled to provide for their own basic needs and can live in dignity.

The Friends welcome you to join us in this mission. When you become a Friend, you will gain the satisfaction of helping families who are among the "extremely poor" of this world, living on the edge of survival in the second poorest country in our hemisphere.

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