Many students get involved in community service in high school, but 16-year-old Ricardo Meneses, a Belen Jesuit Preparatory High School junior, has taken it to another level. A budding entrepreneur, Ricardo coupled his passions for business and service and founded two fast-growing, successful, not-for-profit initiatives to combat poverty in Nicaragua and Venezuela, the homelands of his parents. His father is Venezuelan and his mother is Nicaraguan.
“Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere,” says Ricardo Meneses. “Not far off, Venezuela could suffer 2,300 percent inflation in 2018. I saw a dire need to improve conditions for the many suffering people in these countries.”
In 2016, as a sophomore, Meneses took action and created two charities, Project eduNICA and VENayudar, which have already made a significant impact in their respective countries.
Project eduNICA’s mission was to raise funds to construct new schools in impoverished communities in Nicaragua. While researching possible partner organizations, he decided on buildOn, an international not-for-profit organization that builds schools in developing countries. Ricardo reached out to buildOn to choose Nicaragua as its next location. Once this partnership was established, Meneses then gathered a group of dedicated students from Belen Jesuit who were committed to the arduous process of fundraising $30,000, the dollar amount necessary to fully construct a school in rural Nicaragua in accordance with buildOn’s requirements. He then decided to collaborate with a group of students from Santa Barbara, California, who were working toward a similar goal. After a lengthy fundraising process, the $30,000 was raised and the Project eduNICA team joined with the team from Santa Barbara to travel to Nicaragua in August 2017. It was there that the two teams got to work to build not only the physical foundation of the school, but more important, hope and opportunity for the inhabitants of the northern Nicaraguan village of Las Penitas.
Escuela Las Penitas was finished recently and more than 100 students are attending the school on a daily basis. Meneses has already brought together a total of just over 30 students from all over South Florida who have begun fundraising toward their goal of building three additional Nicaraguan schools in August 2018.
In the midst of Project eduNICA, Meneses noted that the economic situation in Venezuela was worsening, so along with five other Miami students of Venezuelan origin, Meneses created VENayudar, a non-profit organization that focuses on supplying humanitarian supplies to those in dire need in Venezuela. Meneses and his peers started VENayudar from scratch and had to go through a long legal process to establish VENayudar as a not-for-profit entity. After setting up a bank account, the team had to come up with a plan for getting the donated supplies to the needy in Venezuela.
Since the current government under Nicolas Maduro has made it difficult to send supplies to citizens, Meneses and his team began working with the Doral-based company Vencorp. Meneses and his team have raised money and bought supplies at the cheapest price available and then have had Vencorp ship the supplies to an orphanage in Venezuela. To date, VENayudar has raised enough money to have successfully sent three container shipments to the Venezuelan orphanage of much-needed food, medicine, clothing and other basic need items.
Meneses says, “I have always been an active volunteer with charities in Miami, but this is the first time I have felt that I have been instrumental in keeping children from dying from starvation.”
Meneses is looking forward to more supply shipments throughout the rest of this school year and will continue to look for other ways to make a difference in his parents’ two homelands next year and beyond.
He is a straight A Honor and AP student at Belen.
