TECHO
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| Founded | 1997 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Felipe Berríos |
| Location |
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Area served
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Latin America |
| Method | construction of transitional houses; social inclusion programs |
|
Volunteers
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500,000+ |
| Slogan | Together for a poverty-free world |
| Website | www |
TECHO, also known as Un Techo para mi País (UTPMP) (Spanish for A Roof For My Country), is a nonprofit organization that mobilizes youth volunteers to fight extreme poverty in Latin America, by constructing transitional housing and implementing social inclusion programs. It was founded by a Jesuit priest, and working with more than 720,000 volunteers, it has constructed houses for over 102,400 families in 19 countries in Latin American and the Caribbean and 2 offices located in Miami, FL, USA and London, England that work as funds hubs.
Un Techo para Chile was formerly a separate organization. As of 2012, Un Techo para mi Pais and Un Techo para Chile became one single institution called TECHO.
Un Techo para Chile was founded in 1997 by Jesuit priest Felipe Berríos, along with a group of university students. In 2001 it began expanding to other countries under the name Un Techo para mi País. In 2012 the name was changed to TECHO.
The organization has a long history of responding to disaster situations, such as earthquakes in Peru (2007), Haiti (2010) and Chile (2010). TECHO was one of the first organizations to start building houses after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and it was awarded a grant from the Inter-American Development Bank to build 10,000 houses there. Building began in Canaan, Haiti in 2010.
Notably, TECHO coined the term Precaria (country) as a framework for visualizing Latin American poverty as a country. This has been adopted by numerous leading figures including the former President of Chile Michelle Bachelet, writer Isabel Allende, and Argentine corporate social responsibility expert Bernardo Kliksberg.
TECHO is most known for its large-scale construction projects, building transitional homes called mediaguas for people living in slums (campamentos) in Latin America. The homes are made of wood and built by volunteers who work alongside the beneficiary families. Transitional homes allow Latin America’s poorest populations to have a private, safe and decent shelter; these basic results have long-term impacts which are being evaluated in the impact study “Building a Brighter Future: A Randomized Experiment of Slum-Housing Upgrading,” led by academics from the World Bank and the University of California, Berkeley.
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