The Force Awakens

The Force Awakens

voices in the wilderness

Oretgo (and Christine Averill 13) started La Fuerza to teach communication skills to youth.

JULIANA ORTEGO ’13

EVERY YEAR THOUSANDS OF COLLEGE STUDENTS embark on spring break service trips. As an undergraduate, Ortego admired their good intentions, but she wanted to implement a program that would bring long-lasting change. In 2009 the history and Spanish major cofounded La Fuerza para el Futuro (Force for the Future), an intensive leadership development camp for youths staffed by members of the Dartmouth community in a remote and impoverished area of northeast Honduras.

Ortego, who works fulltime in wealth management at Morgan Stanley, has continued to shape the program into more than a typical “voluntourism” trip. During the College’s spring break she leads a team of 10 alums and students at the camp, which many of the 60 Honduran students (ages 12 to 22) attend year after year, often traveling three hours or more across rough, mountainous terrain to reach the program. Ortego also helps campus-based organizers raise money and plan curricula and local service projects that build on previous years’ activities.

La Fuerza operates in partnership with ACTS Honduras (actshonduras.org), an Upper Valley-based nonprofit that has been conducting sustainable development work in this region of Honduras for 30 years. Recently, to support the work of a dental clinic ACTS built, La Fuerza’s Honduran students fanned out to surrounding villages, distributing toothbrushes, floss and toothpaste and presenting skits and demonstrations on oral hygiene to residents, most of whom had never before held a toothbrush.

To Ortego, La Fuerza is a way to nurture the next generation of change agents. “Leadership development is so crucial for what ACTS is doing down there,” she says. “If you want some long-term impact, then getting young people to carry it forward is really critical.”

Kaitlin Bell Barnett '05