Profile: Izamar Alvarez
As executive director of FUNDACEA, Simón Bolívar United World College of Agriculture, IB alumna Izamar Alvarez is helping to improve farming not only in Latin America, but in the developing world, as Kath Stathers discovered.
Izamar Alvarez is a city girl. She was born and bred in Caracas, Venezuela, where she still lives with her husband and two children. Yet it seems that the moments that have moulded Izamar’s life have all taken place in locations far from the city.
As well as being a member of the IB Council of Foundation and an alumna of the United World College (UWC) of the Atlantic, Wales, an IB World School since 1971, Izamar is a founder member and executive director of FUNDACEA, the Fundación Colegio Experimental de Agricultura, the fundraising body for the Simón Bolívar
United World College of Agriculture in Venezuela (www.sbuwc.uwc.org). The college, situated on the Western Llanos, is the only United World College to offer a vocational course.
“Sometimes I feel we are the black sheep of the UWC,” joked Izamar, sparing time from her busy schedule to talk to IB World while on a working trip to the UK, “but the ethos and aims of the Simón Bolívar UWC and the IB are the same.”
Students come to study at Simón Bolívar UWC from developing rural areas all over Latin America and the Caribbean, and even from Asia and Africa. They follow a three-year course in the methods and business of agriculture and rural development. Around 70% of the students’ time is spent on practical projects in the local community. “We want all our students to leave here with the tools to be the agents of change,” says Izamar. “They don’t just gain the ability to run a farm, but will also be able to relate to the realities of the local community.”
Making a difference is something that has been on Izamar’s mind since she was as young as ten. Her family spent two years in England when her father, a medical doctor, took up a scholarship in London. She spent one of those years at a boarding school in rural Sussex. “It was my first international experience,” says Izamar, “and
I learned that people can have very limited views about how people from different places are. I remember thinking it didn’t make much sense.”
There, in the British countryside, Izamar’s international spirit felt its first stirrings. Her family went back to Venezuela, but through a chance encounter at a friend’s farm, she heard about the United World College of the Atlantic. “I liked the sound of it,” says Izamar. “Seventy nationalities at a boarding school in a Welsh castle. Imagine!” She was awarded a scholarship, and was back to a British country setting.
As with so many IB students, she was at first amazed by the subjects on offer. She was studying the sciences with the intention of following her father into medicine, but then she spotted peace studies as an option. Her wish was to do something in life that looked after a greater number of people rather than individuals, and the ethos of the IB matched Izamar’s social awareness. “I became interested in humanistic work,” she says.
Izamar now applies that awareness in her work. “I think it’s a Chinese proverb that says ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ At Simón Bolívar, we concentrate on development,” she says.
Simón Bolívar isn’t Izamar’s only experience of social development projects. In addition to a degree in anthropology from Caracas University, she also spent a further three years on the Kellogg International Leadership Programme, studying community-based projects in Latin America, South Africa and the USA. “It was fantastic,” says Izamar. “It looked at projects on health, training, literacy. I learned a lot about how organizations work with people.”
She is also on the UWC Council of Foundation, whose meetings take her around the globe. Through her involvement she has met Prince Charles (during his UWC Presidency), Queen Noor and Nelson Mandela. “Meeting Mandela was one of the most amazing experiences of my life,” Izamar says. “He has such a presence. There’s only him and Gandhi who have done so much for international understanding.”
Izamar’s husband proposed to her just before she took up her place on the programme. “Are you sure you want a wife who is always going away?” she asked.
Fortunately, he did, as since then, Izamar’s commitment to international education has only increased, as she also chairs the Latin American Regional Advisory Committee for IB Schools, a voluntary committee that brings the different international schools
in the region together. There are 200 colleges across 17 countries. So for Izamar, country settings still dominate, but internationally.
Send us your comments on this article.
Learning by doing on the UWC farm
Opened in 1986 by the Prince of Wales and eminent agriculturalist Dr Luis Marcano Coello, the Simón Bolívar UWC of Agriculture (www.sbuwc.uwc.org) is the only vocational UWC. Situated at the base of the Venezuelan Andes, the 750-hectare farm is home to 180 students, mainly from the Caribbean and Latin America, and offers a three-year practical tertiary education that leads to a higher diploma in farm administration.
The aim is to equip its students with the skills they will need to turn their farming communities in their home countries into profitable, self-reliant enterprises with an emphasis on conserving natural resources. A major tenet at the college is “learning by doing,” and the students spend two thirds of their time doing practical work on the college’s farm.
There is also an extensive rural development programme involving the local community, which extends the benefits of the college beyond the 180 students to thousands who live around the farm. This programme not only teaches agricultural techniques and farm administration, but also covers disease control, nutrition and health. There is involvement with local children through literacy groups, sports and an initiative that builds vegetable plots for schools. The college is funded by private donors and a government student loan scheme.
