Fundacion Paraguaya's Financially Self-Sufficient Organic Farm School

In the early 1950s, the San Francisco Missionary Brothers, a small Franciscan congregation, founded La Escuela Agrícola San Francisco de Asis, a parochial boarding school for the area’s poor boys. By 1980, the school had 70 students, 62 hectares of partially-forested yet cultivatable land, and 7,000 square meters of facility and conference space. It had also run into the ground financially. The Congregation of the LaSalle Brothers, another local congregation, took over the school, but again became mired in money problems and prepared to shut it down in 2002.

Around this time, the leaders of Fundación Paraguaya met at their annual staff retreat. When they learned that the Farm School was on the verge of closing, they saw an opportunity. Why not reinvent the school as a model for teaching sustainable agriculture?

As a condition for buying the school, the foundation made a commitment to educate rural kids in a boarding school model; to develop new sustainable business programs for teaching purposes; and to rebuild the school’s finances, facilities, and training programs. And Fundación Paraguaya committed to weaning the Farm School back to financial health in five years or less.

Within the first year, Fundación Paraguaya rejected state subsidies, rewrote the curriculum and got it approved by the Ministries of Education and Agriculture and Livestock, transitioned to organic farming practices, and made the teachers more accountable to the financial health of the institution. In 2006 the school went co-ed. In 2007 it created a cluster of campus-based, revenue-generating enterprises so that the school could operate financially self-sufficiently. In 2008 the Ministry of Education granted the school permission to issue its graduates certificates in Hostelry and Tourism, in addition to the certificates in Agriculture and Training Technicians.

The school has recently begun attracting international attention. According to a 2008 report of the Inter-American Development Bank: “[The school] achieves its value proposition of making a systemic change in the educational system to offer high quality technical entrepreneurial education to underprivileged Paraguayan youth who graduate with usable skills they can immediately apply on their family farm, in a new business venture, as an employee in the agricultural industry, or in university while also having access to credit and follow-up services.” The school also placed second in the 2008 BBC World Challenge, which highlights the world’s best small businesses and enterprising projects.