The program
Pathways
A development program for children growing up in residential care — social development, English, and workforce readiness, delivered as one continuous path from early childhood to independent adulthood.
The program
A development program for children growing up in residential care — social development, English, and workforce readiness, delivered as one continuous path from early childhood to independent adulthood.
From the home to a life they love
Ages 2–5
“I belong here.”
Ages 6–9
“I can do things.”
Ages 10–13
“What am I good at?”
Ages 14–15
“I can picture life after the home.”
Ages 16–18
“I know where I’m going.”
Ages 18–20
“I love my life!”
We don’t want these kids to just live life. We want them to love life!
These are God’s children. At every age, we support prayer, group prayer, reading the Bible and being close with God.
How it works
English is the highest-return skill we can teach. It opens jobs in hotels, restaurants and tourism in Mexico and on Colombia’s coast.
Kitchens, workshops, gardens and real workplaces, not only classrooms.
We ask local employers what they hire for before we teach a trade, so training leads to college, a vocation or a job.
At fifteen, young people start learning to live on their own. We fund the construction of independent dorms to support that transition.
A trained, paid mentor commits for three years and stays past age eighteen.
These are God’s children. We support prayer, group prayer, reading the Bible and being close with God.
Pathways installs inside an existing home in ninety days, and it costs the home nothing.
Belong → Communicate → Prepare → Launch
In Spanish the program is Los Caminos de la Vida — Pertenecer, Comunicarse, Prepararse, Despegar. The name comes from a vallenato — Scott's favorite music, learned on the Colombian coast — a song almost everyone there can sing, about the roads of life turning out not to be the ones you imagined. This program is the argument against that. The full story is on the Spanish page →
From care to capability
Pathways is designed to be installed inside an existing children's home or community organization. It is built for a residential setting of roughly a hundred children between the ages of two and eighteen, and it runs alongside the home's own education, caregiving, therapy and child-protection work rather than replacing any of it.
The objective
Every child should leave care with stronger relationships, stronger communication, greater confidence, practical life skills, and a realistic pathway toward education, employment and independence.
The model is age-based, trauma-informed, relationship-centered, bilingual where it should be, and measured. What a home already does well, Pathways leaves alone. What it has no budget or staff to do — consistent social development, real English, and a bridge into adulthood — is what we bring.
The premise
Everything below this section rests on one idea, and it did not start with children. Scott Kimball has spent twenty-five years asking a single question — how do you maximize the potential of a person? — and the answer has held in every setting he has tested it: a person becomes capable when three things are present at once.
Someone who will still be here next year.
Stability is relational, not logistical. It is felt rather than observed, and it is the answer a child gives to four questions they are always asking and almost never say out loud: Do I feel safe? Do I feel loved? Do I have potential? Am I succeeding at something? A child answering no to those cannot think about Friday, let alone five years from now.
A shape to the days that can be relied on.
A schedule, a routine, a written plan, a rule that holds. Structure is what turns an intention into a repetition, and repetition is the only thing that has ever become capability. Nobody gets good at anything on inspiration.
What do I want to bring to the world?
Not a job title. A contribution — which, unlike a title, a young person can start making today. Without direction, structure is containment: a well-run day that arrives nowhere. Direction is what makes the routine worth keeping.
The part most programs get wrong
You cannot install direction before stability.
Goal-setting workshops arrive at children’s homes constantly. They are delivered to young people who do not have one adult they are certain will still be there in a year, and they fail for that reason rather than for want of enthusiasm. A child plans as far ahead as their world is predictable. Extend the predictability and the planning extends by itself.
So the order is not decorative. Stability is built first because it is load-bearing. Structure is built on top of it. Direction is what the first two make possible — and it arrives last, which is also why Horizon is the fourth pillar and not the first.
The correction this setting requires
This is where the framework needs adjusting for residential care, and it is the thing an experienced director will test us on immediately.
A children’s home is already one of the most structured environments a person can live in. Uniforms. A time to wake. A time for breakfast. School, then chores on a rota, cleaning schedules, bathing schedules, set recreation hours, church on Sunday, a time for lights out. Very little of a child’s day is unaccounted for.
Arriving at a home like that with an offer of more structure would be both useless and insulting.
What is actually missing is the other two. Stability — because staff turn over, and structure without continuity of people is only a timetable. And direction — because the timetable runs to eighteen and then stops, with nothing on the other side of it.
There is a further distinction that decides whether structure develops a child or merely contains them: whether they had any hand in building it. Structure a young person helped shape, and can make choices inside, is developmental. Structure done to them is management. That difference is the reason agency runs through every part of this program, and the reason nothing we count is something a young person did not choose.
The question underneath
Almost every question an adult puts to a young person is the same question: what do you want to be? It asks for a noun. A job title. And a noun is a small container for a life — answer it at fifteen and you have either locked yourself into something or, more often, named the only job you have heard of.
The framing we use instead comes from the National Geographic photographer and storyteller DeWitt Jones, whose work Scott has returned to for years. His reframe is to stop asking what you want to be and start asking what you want to bring to the world.
Why this matters more here than anywhere else
A title is something you wait for. A contribution is something you can start today.
That distinction is not philosophical for a young person in residential care. Ask a fourteen-year-old what they want to be and the honest answer is that everything depends on decisions other people will make about them. Ask what they want to bring — patience, steadiness, the ability to fix things, someone who notices when a younger child is struggling — and the answer is available immediately, and they can act on it this week.
Which means direction stops being purely future-tense. A young person who is already contributing something is answering two of the stability questions at once — do I have potential, am I succeeding at something — and the three parts start reinforcing one another rather than queuing up.
The concrete questions still follow, and they are easier to answer once the large one has been:
A young person who can answer the large question can answer all of the small ones. A young person who has only ever been asked the small ones tends to answer with whatever job they have heard of.
The four pillars are how this premise gets delivered. Belonging is stability made into a person. Agency is what a young person exercises inside the structure. Mastery is structure turned into capability. Horizon is direction with documents attached.
How the pieces fit
These are two halves of one idea, and it is worth being explicit about which is which. The left column is the diagnosis — the four things institutional care most often fails to supply. The right column is the program that supplies them.
| What is missing | What we run | What that means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Belonging | Belong | Social and human development, and one trained adult who is still there next year. |
| Agency | Communicate | English, and the wider ability to be understood. A young person who cannot make themselves heard has no agency to exercise. |
| Mastery | Prepare | Life skills, digital and financial literacy, and competence in something concrete. |
| Horizon | Launch | Documents, housing, a plan, an employer or a place to study — and a mentor past eighteen. |
If you have read our home page, the left column is the language we use to describe the problem publicly. The right column is the language we use with a partner home, because it names work that has to appear on a timetable.
Developmental architecture
Programming changes as children develop. The standard of possibility does not.
Every cohort receives the same core curriculum. Where a home's population is weighted heavily toward one gender — as most are — that affects how sessions are staffed and grouped, never who is entitled to what. Small single-gender groups are added where the subject calls for it: safety, confidence, healthy relationships, and the risks a young person will meet at work.
The four pillars
Social and human development.
Before a young person can thrive at school or at work, they need to be able to understand themselves, relate to others, manage conflict, communicate, cooperate and trust.
The curriculum moves from emotional vocabulary and cooperative play in the youngest cohort, through teamwork, leadership, resilience and decision-making, to boundaries, public speaking and professional social intelligence by the time a young person is preparing to leave.
This is the pillar most often treated as soft and cut first. It is the one every other pillar rests on.
Core competencies
Young people who feel valued, connected and confident — and who are increasingly capable of navigating relationships and unfamiliar rooms.
Love La Vida English — language that creates opportunity.
This is not another grammar class. It builds functional English a young person can use in school, in an interview, at work, while traveling, and in ordinary life.
Songs, games, objects, colors, numbers, greetings and movement. English as something that happens, not something that is taught.
Vocabulary, simple sentences, questions, listening, and the confidence to speak badly in front of other people.
Functional conversation, reading, talking about their own interests, giving directions, and speaking with visitors.
Workplace vocabulary, digital communication, presentations, and handling a customer.
Interview English, professional communication, following workplace instructions, and solving a problem out loud.
For older students, proficiency is aligned to a recognized framework such as CEFR — paired with practical demonstrations that a certificate cannot fake: a self-introduction, a job interview, a phone call, a customer interaction, an email, and one workplace scenario.
Life skills and workforce readiness begin long before the first job.
Career development should begin with exposure, not pressure. Younger children discover what adults do. Adolescents learn what they are good at. Older youth build concrete skills and a route.
Meet professionals. See workplaces. Discover talents and interests.
Career awareness, strengths, entrepreneurship, and the link between education and opportunity.
Digital literacy, budgeting, banking, teamwork, résumé basics, interviewing and customer service.
Career assessment, an individual plan, training, a mentor, real experience, and a place in education or employment.
Every young person aged sixteen to eighteen has one, and it answers four questions: Where am I going? What capabilities do I need? What is my next step? Who is helping me get there?
The bridge from care into the economy.
Success is not finishing a class. Success is entering adulthood with a real pathway, real relationships and real capability.
In most systems, support ends on a birthday. A young person leaves with a bag, a certificate and nobody's phone number. Launch exists because that is the moment everything upstream either holds or doesn't — and because it is measurable in a way that feelings are not.
What every young person leaves with
Where are they six, twelve and twenty-four months later?
Operating rhythm
Consistent enough to matter. Light enough to leave childhood intact.
| Ages | Social | English | Work & life | Experience |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2–5 | 2 × 30 min | 3 × 15–20 min | Through play | Monthly |
| 6–9 | 1 hr | 2 × 45 min | 30 min | Monthly |
| 10–13 | 1 hr | 2 × 60 min | 1 hr | Monthly |
| 14–15 | 1 hr | 2 × 60 min | 1.5 hr | Monthly |
| 16–18 | 1 hr | 2 × 60 min | 2 hr | 2× monthly |
Love La Vida Saturday
Once a month the cohorts come together around an experience: career speakers, sport, art, service, English immersion, an entrepreneurship challenge, cooking, culture, an employer visit, a university, a museum, a day outdoors.
Joy is not an extra. It is part of healthy development.
These hours are deliberately moderate. A program that eats a child’s week stops being development and becomes another institution.
Relationships with guardrails
Mentoring can be the most powerful element of Pathways — but only when it is structured, screened, supervised and consistent. A formal Child Safeguarding Standard is established before any mentoring begins, not after.
A local professional who consistently shows up for the same young people creates more developmental value than a stream of one-time visitors.
Evidence of impact
Did this young person's opportunities increase because Love La Vida was here?
Activity is not impact. Four measurement domains, on a fixed rhythm, with the results published including the ones that go the wrong way.
Measurement rhythm
Baseline → 6 months → 12 months
Confidential, age-appropriate development profiles. We collect only what is legitimately needed for program quality and impact measurement, and nothing that would identify a child to anyone outside the home.
An honest limit. With a first cohort of this size these numbers are a management tool, not research. They tell a facilitator which young person is slipping, early enough to act. We will not claim more than that.
Choosing a partner
Pathways installs inside a home that already exists and already does the hard part. So the question is not which home is most impressive. It is which home has the largest distance between what it manages today and what it could manage with a curriculum, a trained facilitator and a budget line that isn't survival.
01
Underfunded
Running on less than it needs, month to month. Nothing in the budget beyond food, beds, uniforms and school — because there has never been anything left over to put there.
02
Short on resources
Thin staffing, aging facilities, little or no technology, no English teaching, and nobody whose actual job is what happens to a young person after eighteen.
03
A gap in the programming
The care is adequate and the development is missing. Children who are fed, clothed, schooled — and going through the motions. This is the gap the foundation was built around.
04
A director who wants it
Not one who tolerates it. Pathways takes space on a weekly timetable and asks staff to learn something new, and it fails quietly wherever leadership is merely polite about it.
We visit, and we stay long enough to be inconvenient. We walk the building, read the weekly schedule, meet the staff, and ask the director one question that tells us most of what we need: if you had twenty-five percent more resources tomorrow, what would you do first — and why? The answer separates the homes that have a plan and no means from the ones that have neither.
Where we would say no
The bias in that list is deliberate. We are looking for the place where the next dollar and the next trained hour do the most work — and that is almost never the home with the best website.
What you install with
Pathways is not a consultant who visits. It is a method, and the method is published — in Spanish, free, with no email box in front of it, so that a home can run it whether or not we are ever in the building.
Every document runs on the same six-rung capability ladder and the same twelve domains, which is the part that matters operationally: a director ends up holding one system, not six. And every rule has exactly one owner. The suicide script lives in What Do I Say? and nowhere else. The country reporting routes live in the Child Protection Manual and nowhere else. Anything that needs them points there rather than writing a second version that will eventually drift.
The four that carry the installation
Development Matrix, Ages 2 to 18 is the map — twelve domains, every age band. Individual Development Plan turns it into one plan per child, reviewed every ninety days. 100 Experiences That Build Capability answers what to actually do this afternoon. A Year to Grow is the calendar that puts the other twenty into motion — one capability a week, fifty-two weeks.
This is also the honest answer to a question a careful director should ask: what happens to our home if your funding stops? The relationships end. The mentors end. The method does not — it is already yours, downloaded, printed, with your home’s name on it if you want it there.
Installation
Assess. Pilot. Launch. Learn.
Days 1–30
Assess & design
Safeguarding review, staff interviews, age and education map, inventory of existing programs, English baseline, technology assessment, employer-market scan, and baseline measures.
Days 31–60
Train & pilot
Train local facilitators, establish the cohorts, pilot the social curriculum, begin English placement, create Launch Plans, recruit screened mentors, and secure first employer and education partners.
Days 61–90
Full launch
All cohorts operating, English underway, workforce curriculum active, career experiences scheduled, mentoring live where appropriate, and the first operating dashboard published.
Local trained staff deliver the program. Love La Vida supplies the curriculum, the training, the technology, the measurement, the partnerships, the resources and the quality control — and then gets out of the way.
Pilot → Measure → Improve → Codify → Replicate
From childhood support to independent adulthood.
The first hundred-child location becomes the pilot. Run it. Measure it. Improve it. Codify it. Then replicate what works — without losing the humanity that made it work.
The model
Everything we build sits on three ideas. They are not sequential stages. They have to be present at the same time, and in this causal order, or the whole thing comes apart.
Safety, routine, and adults who are still there next year. Without it, nothing else is learnable — a child spending their attention on whether they are safe has none left for anything we teach.
Predictable expectations, practice, and responsibility that grows. Institutions are usually good at this part. Good enough that it gets mistaken for the whole job.
A future the young person can describe out loud, and chose themselves. This is the part almost nobody funds, because it is hard to photograph and harder to evidence.
How capability actually transfers
Every one of our documents runs on this single ladder, in three vocabularies that map one to one — because three different people use it for three different jobs. A caregiver transferring a skill, a team recording evidence, and the young person rating themselves.
| Rung | The adult transfers | The team records | The young person says |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | I do it | Knows it | I know it |
| 2 | We do it together | Practices it | I practice it |
| 3 | You do it with support | Does it with support | I do it with help |
| 4 | You do it | Does it | I do it on my own |
| 5 | You solve it | Solves it | I solve it when something goes wrong |
| 6 | You teach it | Teaches it | I can teach it to someone |
Nothing is marked as learned before rung four. Nothing counts as readiness to leave before rung five — because rung five is the month the budget doesn’t reach, the shift that goes wrong, the bus that doesn’t come. That is the one that predicts.
And there is no rung zero. Not yet observed means we have not watched yet. It is an instruction to the adult, never a verdict on the child.
What gets developed
The same twelve from age two to age eighteen, at rising resolution. At fifteen they open into fifteen transition domains, because someone about to leave needs documents, transport, technology and housing named separately.
A young person can be green in twelve domains and red in documents, housing, income or network. Those four are conditions, not scores. The gap sets the exit date — not the average. We never average the colors.
Why this one
We built a program, not a grant budget
Pathways is a curriculum, a schedule, a training package and a measurement instrument that installs inside an existing home in ninety days. Most funders send money. We send a method, and then we train local staff to run it without us.
We fund the part nobody funds
Food, beds, uniforms and schooling are necessary and comparatively well covered. Belonging, agency, mastery and a horizon are not — because they are hard to photograph and harder to evidence. That gap is the entire reason we exist.
We pay for continuity, not for visits
The injury these young people carry is that adults arrive and then stop arriving. So the long relationships belong to trained mentors who stay three years with the same six to eight young people. Visitors are welcome, and warmly — they just come as a group and leave as a group.
We follow them past eighteen
Institutional care ends on a birthday and most support ends with it. Our program runs twelve to twenty-four months past that date, and the indicator we hold ourselves to is where a young person is six, twelve and twenty-four months after leaving.
We work in Spanish, without an interpreter
Both founders are bilingual and speak Spanish at home every day. We talk to directors, teachers, mentors and young people ourselves. In this work that is not a convenience — it is the difference between knowing what is happening and being told about it.
We will publish what fails
Once a year, with the same prominence as what worked. We would rather lose a donor early than build an organization that has to manage its own story.
Most organizations serving children in institutions fund survival. We fund the part that decides whether a young person wants their own future.
“Someone who is still here next year.”
A trained, paid mentor on a three-year commitment — because a volunteer who stops appearing repeats the injury we are trying to undo.
“Someone finally asked what I wanted.”
Institutional life removes decisions. Every part of our program is built so the young person chooses. If they didn't choose it, it doesn't count.
“I am someone who plays, builds, fixes, draws.”
Twelve months of coaching and equipment in a pursuit they picked themselves. Competence is where identity comes from.
“A tomorrow I can describe out loud.”
Documents, housing, tuition and the same mentor past eighteen — the age at which institutional care ends and most support disappears.
How it is supposed to work
Activities are easy to describe and easy to fake. This is the causal claim underneath them, and every measurement we take is aimed at one of these links.
Need
No one is staying
Basic care is met. Continuity, choice and a plausible future are not.
Intervention
One program, weekly
A paid mentor, English, life skills and something each young person chose.
Capability
They can do things
Speak, work with others, handle money, hold a conversation in a second language.
Opportunity
Doors that open
A certificate, an internship, an employer introduction, a place to study.
Outcome
A life they chose
Housed, working or studying, still in contact with an adult, two years on.
See the full Pathways model — cohorts, curriculum, weekly rhythm and measurement →
Impact
Nearly every new organization blurs these two columns. We are going to keep them apart on this page for as long as the foundation exists, and the right-hand column is the one we expect to be judged on.
Targets — year one
Achieved to date
No children have been served by a Love La Vida program yet. The entity is still being formed. The first report will follow twelve months after the first installation, and it will contain numbers rather than adjectives.
An honest limit. With a first cohort of this size, our numbers will be a management tool rather than research. They will tell a mentor which young person is slipping, early enough to act. We will not claim more than that.