Currin Macarena
Organization: Rodelillo Foundation
Year Founded: 1987
Country: Chile
Website: www.rodelillo.cl
The Rodelillo Foundation helps families overcome social vulnerabilities and take personal responsibility for their lives and destinies. Focus: Enterprising Families, Home Ownership Geographic Area of Impact: Chile Model: Social Business Number Direct Beneficiaries: 4,250 (2009) Annual Budget: US$ 1,326,000 (2009) Percentage Earned Revenue: 90.42% Recognition: Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Chile, 2006 Background In addressing poverty, Latin American societies have tended to rely on paternalistic approaches rather than encouraging personal development, independence and entrepreneurship. Chile is no exception. Rodelillo Foundation helps families to draw on untapped strengths, and to respect and believe in their own capacities. This reinforces their sense of self-worth and confidence in their ability to achieve their goals. Innovation and Activities The Rodelillo Foundation provides opportunities for workers’ families to grow as a unit through a personalized, psycho-social companionship programme. This includes workshops on: self-esteem; income-generation and social integration for mothers; balancing work with home, spouse and kids for fathers; communication, affection, sexuality and budget management for couples; earning and giving respect, academic success and community involvement for adolescents. With help from Rodelillo professionals, families learn together how to unite, mature and co-construct and work towards an integrated family action plan. The foundation has worked with some 6,000 poor Chilean families, or some 25,000 individuals, helping them set and accomplish their goals. Known as Rodelillo Inside Enterprises (RIE) or Rodelillo Inside Social Organizations (RIOS), the foundation’s model also provides companies with a focused corporate social responsibility strategy tool centred on a company’s most important constituents: its workers and their families. Implementing RIE/RIOS leads to significant reductions in human resources workloads, more harmonious relations among co-workers, and, with supervisors, greater transparency, less absenteeism, more productive workers and a friendlier workplace. The social platform allows Rodelillo to greatly expand its outreach to families living and working in diverse regions of Chile and Latin America. The Entrepreneur Macarena Currín was born in Temuco, in the south of Chile. She founded Rodelillo in Santiago in 1987 as a product of her overcoming poverty and extensive academic preparation. Later, while living with her husband, David Hansen, in Los Angeles, California, she established a local variant of Rodelillo in a Catholic parish which still thrives today. Macarena continues to inspire and influence leaders from business, civil society, government and academia with her integral-family social vision, her leadership, wisdom and faith.
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