This program, which is an essential element of the FEDES Vocational Training School, focuses on:

• Teaching small business management concepts and practices to entrepreneurs.
• Providing information networks and resources to those that prove to have an entrepreneurial spirit in spite of scarce resources.
• Providing job skills training, employability competencies, and personal development classes to those who seek to perform hired jobs.
• Subsidizing equipment or materials for adult entrepreneurs starting a business after receiving their vocational training.

To achieve these goals, FEDES employs a team of professionals skilled in imparting basic business management techniques such as budgeting, supply management, and others.  FEDES also considers that personal development is crucial and thus puts an emphasis on communication and team working skills. 

Education in a specific vocation or trade combined with mentoring by professionals in their respective areas of expertise provides invaluable tools for entrepreneurial development.

At FEDES we believe that men, women, and communities are not only to be supported, but also provided dignity through their work. Therefore we attempt to share the enthusiasm and satisfaction that honest labor brings us in performing our daily tasks with the students who attend our school.  

Our ambition is that those participating in our programs will embrace the work ethic embodied by an expression of Martin Luther’s: “Even if I knew that the world was to fall apart tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree and pay my debts.”

To generate employment opportunities, FEDES has adapted the methods of the “Labor Self-Sufficiency” manual created by Brigham Young University.  The principles have been used successfully in the USA  and also in Chile by the Social Affairs Department of the Southern Branch of the LDS.  In accordance with those methods, the FEDES Vocational Training School has set up a network of “collaborative businesses” that assists in employment insertion, internships or other aids for student’s introduction into the formal economic system.

If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed.
If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree.
If you are thinking one hundred years ahead, educate the people.

-- Chinese Poet, 500 BC