About us
The Monarch Effect Foundation began as a partnership between family friends to provide mentorship and financial aid to a few young students whose families were challenged by the high costs of tuition and living expenses for school.
We could not sit idly by, and our guess is that you can't either.
This became a collective vision, a foundation for change; to make educational opportunities available to middle-class students in Los Cabos and connect with the greater community for support.
migration to México
As we searched for a suitable name for the foundation, we kept coming back to our own stories of Canadians, Americans and Mexicans finding forever homes, friendships and families in Los Cabos. It resonated with the story of the Monarch butterfly as it begins its life morphing from one form to another then performing a remarkable long-distance migration from Canada, through America and on to Mexico, oblivious of borders and covering thousands of miles in its journey. It is an iconic and recognizable symbol for perseverance, transformation and awakening.
The "butterfly effect"
We see our students flourish and at the same time, see other middle-class students and families with the same critical needs for support.
The Monarch Effect Foundation was born of the belief that every student should have opportunity to dream and that we, Mexican, American or Canadian who see Los Cabos as our "home", have a responsibility to give back and pay it forward, to help elevate the story of our youth through their educational pursuits.
Defined by the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz who realized that even the tiniest alterations in the starting values of a complex system could lead to vastly different results over time. He famously coined this phenomenon as the "butterfly effect" to emphasize how something as seemingly insignificant as the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could set off a chain reaction of events that might eventually lead to a tornado in Texas.
Our story lives on the wings of the butterfly, the transformative journey of every young student we help and how, just by giving them an altered start, could dramatically change their path and trajectory as well as our own. We believe if we seed enough Los Cabos students, to learn, absorb, and experience life and other cultures, they will eventually come home to make a profound and transformative change to life in Los Cabos and even, possibly the world.
giving back
seeding the unpredictability of change... we call it the "butterfly effect"
With our collective efforts, students in Los Cabos are gaining a head start in their education, so infinite possibilities can blossom in front of them.
a new generation of educated young adults
It is not surprising that real estate companies in Los Cabos targeting ex-pats buying in the area provide information about private schools on their websites and that a significant proportion of the attendees in private schools are ex-pats. Private schools are reaping the benefits of these "entitled" students and forcing the cost of education beyond what the local students can afford. We need to help level the field.
To facilitate the development of a professional and technical class of young adults living in Los Cabos and to help support the economic and social development of the region, it is important that Los Cabos students can complete school leading up to and including high school, have the credentials to attend university, and also have the opportunity to enroll in some of the best schools in the world. Parents of these students may not have the financial wherewithal to support this important stage in their child's educational development. And ultimately these are the future leaders, scientists and change bearers who will make the greatest impact in this region's economic development.
