In 2024, we shared an important commitment: after 15 years of advancing gender equity in Central America, Rise Up Together would transition its work to local leaders and organizations in Guatemala and Honduras, ensuring they had the resources, foundational skills, and support to continue driving change in their communities.
Today, we’re seeing that commitment take shape through Rise Up Leader Juany Garcia, who has established an independent nonprofit organization, LIDERAMOS, to carry forward years of work advancing girls’ rights in Guatemala.
Juany was a member of Rise Up Together’s very first cohort of leaders in 2009. Seventeen years later, her journey offers a powerful example of what long-term investment in local leadership can make possible.
Since 2009, Rise Up Together has supported a network of more than 200 leaders across Guatemala and Honduras, whose work has contributed to significant advances in girls’ education, health, safety, and rights.
Juany has been at the forefront of that work, supporting the girl-led network Las Niñas Lideran and helping secure important changes in Quetzaltenango, including municipal psychological support services, stronger protections against violence, and updated public policies supporting children and adolescents.
We recently celebrated her continued leadership in our 2025 Annual Report. But beyond these achievements, Juany was also building the skills, relationships, and experience to take her leadership even further.
“My leadership has evolved significantly thanks to Rise Up Together’s support, which gave me the flexibility to propose advocacy initiatives based on the real context of my country,” Juany shares. “Technical assistance, exchanges with fellows from different countries, and, of course, funding were key to this process.”
In 2025, Juany reached an extraordinary milestone: establishing LIDERAMOS as a legally recognized, independent nonprofit organization in Guatemala.
For Juany, this was more than an organizational achievement. After years of advancing girls’ rights through Rise Up Together-supported initiatives, she had established a nonprofit rooted in her own community, with the ability to lead and sustain this work independently.
“In earlier years, I might not even have dared to imagine an initiative like this,” she reflects.
Today, LIDERAMOS is dedicated to advancing the rights, leadership, and opportunities of girls, adolescents, and young women in Guatemala, building on the foundation Juany and fellow local leaders have spent years creating.
“Rise Up Together’s funding during this transition has been very important. It has allowed us to accelerate the process of building the local organization,” Juany explains.
That support is now helping advance LIDERAMOS’s newest initiative, Voces que transforman (Voices That Transform), which aims to secure municipal investment in health, education, protection, and participation programs for more than 71,000 children and adolescents in Quetzaltenango.
Through the project, girls and adolescents will participate directly in discussions with municipal decision-makers, helping shape the policies and investments intended to support them.
“Their voices are essential to building more just and inclusive societies,” Juany shares.
The initiative, expected to continue through late 2027, represents the next stage of a long-term effort to ensure that girls and young people have a meaningful voice in the decisions affecting their lives.
In our earlier Central America transition story, Juany shared her hope that members of Las Niñas Lideran would have opportunities to “dream big, develop, grow, and become successful professionals.”
Today, that vision is helping shape LIDERAMOS’s future.
Juany dreams of building an organization led by women who understand their communities deeply, who have developed their own leadership within LIDERAMOS, and who create opportunities for the next generation of girls and young women.
For her, leading an independent organization rooted in Guatemala represents “the building of a more dignified present and future, rooted in our own context and reality.”
Her journey reflects what Rise Up Together set out to achieve through our Central America transition: sustaining local leadership, strengthening independent organizations, and continuing to invest in the people who will carry this work forward.
Because shifting power isn’t about ending a partnership. It’s about ensuring that the leadership, resources, and opportunities to create change remain rooted in the communities where they belong.
*Quotes translated from Spanish and edited for length and clarity.
