NESES started as a family project in 1998.
Ricardo and Joy Pocasangre began taking orphan children on a study tour to give these children the chance to explore their rich cultural communities through a week long bus trip. The NESES trip is meant to be entertaining and culturally enriching. The Pocasangres know that the trip has served as a motivation for the kids. The trip is an incentive for the children to become productive citizens, and to engage actively with their communities, and to strengthen the ties to all Salvadorans.

We know the needs of orphaned children sometimes exceeds the traditional school curricula. The greatest need was for children in the care of Salvadoran administered orphanages. Dolores Sousa, Hogar del Niño, in the department of San Miguel was the first orphanage. After two years, we decided to give the opportunity to another orphanage, Aldea San Antonio, also, in San Miguel and then, San Vicente de Paul in San Salvador. In 2003 we began working with Ciudad de Los Niños in Santa Ana.

All these orphanages are government run under the umbrella organization of ISPM (Salvadoran Institute for the Protection of Minors), now called ISNA (Salvadoran Institute for Children and Adolescents).
Each time we go, the trip changes somewhat. [view a sample of the itinerary]. We give the kids t-shirts with the NESES logo on them so they have a keepsake and we supply each child with a one use camera and return their developed pictures to them. We also encourage them to write in their journals, take pictures, and get to know other people we visit on our trips.

Scholarships

In 2003 NESES saw the opportunity to further expand the knowledge of these children it serves.
We started by giving scholarships to those students who had graduated from the ninth grade.
We applied for and were granted non-profit status in order to grant these scholarships.
To learn more about SCHOLARSHIP, click here)