Founders
Dr. Rosa Elena Bello, co-founder of the FHS in 2002 and of the Technical Institute in 2006 and rector of both programs, received her medical degree in general medicine and natural medicine in 1998, her Masters in Public Health in 2005; and a diploma in holistic attention to HIV-AIDS in 2009. At Community Medical Services, she organized and trained health-outreach workers, midwives, and mothers of malnourished children from 1990 until 2016, when she folded it into the newly founded Patricia Claeys Foundation. She received an Honorary Doctorate in Public Health from Simmons College in 2011. From 2013-2016 she was the mayor of San Juan del Sur, in which position she brought 100 units of housing to low-income people, helped advance the building of a new hospital, opened a Maternity House for rural women awaiting delivery, and a Daycare Center for up to 50 children of low-income working women.
Resident Scholar, Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/ending-ageism-or-how-not-to-shoot-old-people
Winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars and the APA’s Florence L. Denmark Award for Contributions to Women and Aging Declining to Decline chosen as best feminist book on American popular culture.
The co-founder of the Free High School and the North American partner since 1997, Margaret has raised money for the two literacy programs and the Free High School and Technical Institute. Margaret’s essays on the adult literacy program for women, “Florcita la Suerte” (cited as notable in Best American Essays) and “The Contagion of Euphoria,” (which won a Daniel Singer Millennium Prize), and on the teaching practices which have proven so successful, “In My Nicaraguan High School: Giving Excluded Women and Men a Second Chance,” appear on the page, Our History.
Margaret is the author of five books, the most recent of which is Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. The others include Aged by Culture, and the prize-winning Declining to Decline and Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.
Major Donors
Random Acts
Child’s Play
Piero Coen
Advisory Committee, USA
