Vania Masías

Vania Masías is making successful community leaders out of urban street children in Peru with the integral and financially self-sustainable Angels D1 project. Using urban hip-hop dance as an engaging hook, Vania supplies children with the coaching to generate their own income, enabling them to overcome their situations of vulnerability and neglect.

Reaching one of the most difficult segments in urban communities, Vania is transforming street children and at-risk youth in the most impoverished slums of Lima into productive leaders of society through Angels D1 (Ángeles D1). She attracts young people between the ages of 8 and 18 to join her program and take part in a support network of tutoring, counseling, and nutrition education. Vania’s curriculum is built on training in modern dance and urban hip-hop, and students are given the chance to perform in her dance troupes and earn money for their routines. Yet the graduates of her program are far more than expert dancers—besides requiring the students to return to school if they have dropped out, Vania and her team teach them essential life and pre-professional skills to become self-sufficient members of their community. Through the personal attention and counseling that each member receives, Angels D1 offers a positive and attractive alternative to joining street gangs, thus providing a sense of belonging to a damaged and often forgotten sector of the population.

Vania has developed a unique institutional model that generates income for the long-term project. The dance studios for the street children are supported by the fees collected at separate private schools that serve wealthier students and whose teachers are often at-risk youth themselves. Besides serving as a financial tactic to generate income, this model forms bonds that are key to building empathy and mutual understanding across socioeconomic classes. The star Angels at both types of schools are also able to participate in Vania’s professional touring company. The entire Angels D1 program is now financially sustainable, a feature that Vania underscores in her work with the students to teach them about the values of self-sufficiency and business administration.

Because of its financial model, Angels D1 offers a powerfully replicable new idea. The five-year curriculum seeks to empower youth leaders, many of whom go on to open their own Angels D1 schools that employ Vania’s methodology. Now reintroduced into society, the alumni are instrumental in multiplying the scope of the project into other neighborhoods, cities, and even countries outside Peru. Opening a school in these areas requires low initial seed capital; rather, the alumni coaches are passionate standard-bearers for the program who capitalize on the positive and “cool” attitudes, combined with the growing publicity, associated with the Angels to engage other communities of street children.

The children and youth who form part of Vania’s program are often the forgotten casualties of the worst conditions in poor and marginalized urban life. About 60 percent of children throughout Peru endure situations of poverty, and those living in urban areas especially are subject to malnutrition, violence, and neglect. They also tend to suffer from harsh family circumstances at home: Internal surveys administered by Angels D1 reveal that 98 percent of the students are victims of physical, sexual, and emotional household abuse. Such appalling violence contributes to poor self-esteem, depression, and drug addiction. Searching for any sense of emotional attachment and belonging, these children regularly join urban gangs and become involved in crime ranging from petty theft to the dangerous drug trade. Without any positive means to leave this environment, the children grow up marginalized in society and become adults who perpetuate a cycle of violence and neglect.

Out of personal necessity or demands made on them by their families, even young children are often forced to drop out of school and work in the street, earning meager revenue to supplement family incomes. Almost half of the population of street children in Lima is between the ages of 14 and 17, and of this age group, half have had to leave their education. Prematurely ending their primary or secondary schooling almost always guarantees that they will be unable to escape poverty and difficult living conditions as they grow up. These youth often must sell small products, perform services or entertainment at traffic lights, or simply beg during excruciatingly long hours to earn paltry daily incomes. Many are vulnerable to exploitation, insecurity, and assorted health challenges as a result.

Despite the efforts of many social programs to address this population in Peru, most fail to render any significant impact on the children’s lives. They tend to complete short-term, superficial interventions that cannot really improve the conditions that force the youth into working on the street. Largely reliant on local donations and charity models, these rescue organizations are intended to help the children on a day-to-day basis while not offering meaningful changes. Very locally focused, they also lack opportunities for replication and expansion to help street children in other neighborhoods around Lima and different urban areas; again, a consequence of their unsustainable financial situations. Most importantly, children who participate in such projects are soon pulled out by their parents if they fail to bring home any money from begging or street selling to contribute to the family.

Over the past seven years, Vania has implemented a transformative and long-lasting intervention in the lives of street children and at-risk youth through Angels D1. She has crafted a three-pronged Cultural Association D1 to support her three major components to engage children. Vania funds the Angels social program through proceeds from the D1 Dance School which serves a wealthier target population and from the professional Dance Company D1, for graduates to generate additional publicity and expand the reach of the Angels message. Currently, Angels D1 maintains two permanent spaces in distinct locales and operates two workshop areas, one of the latter will soon become a third physical space, around the Lima metro area. D1 Dance School offers two different studios that employ Angels students and alumni as coaches. Vania now oversees a budget of some US$555,000 and a skilled and well-paid staff consisting of school administrators, coordinators, and artistic directors.

The core of Vania’s initiative is the Angels D1 schools, which consist of a five-year program, seek deep and life-changing impact. The key is the integration of life mentorship, economic self-sufficiency, and continued education, all supported and financed through dance. Vania first entices new street children into the project through the attraction of free urban and hip-hop dance lessons, which offer a “cool” and fun activity for the working youth. Once she has engaged the young people, she requires them to re-enroll in school in order to remain members of the Angels program. Each is assigned an individual tutor or mentor, the students undergo several years of personal educational tutoring, psychological counseling and coaching, and technical training in dance, something many will continue after the Angels program formally ends. Nearly 2,000 youth have passed through Vania’s program with high achievement rates and inspiring stories of success as community leaders and even as professional dancers.

As soon as the Angels have had sufficient training, Vania provides opportunities for them to perform with their dance ensemble before paying audiences. This allows the students to earn money while still participating in the troupes. The counselors even teach them basic personal financial administration so that the youth can properly manage the income they generate through their dance performances. Vania additionally incorporates family members in her program, such as offering microcredit to mothers to help properly feed and nourish the children.

In order to fund and sustain the Angels D1 program, Vania opened her for-profit D1 Dance School to provide lessons to students in other wealthier neighborhoods. By employing Angels as the teachers, Vania has managed to keep her target population, the former street children and at-risk youth, closely involved in her program while also offering them a regular source of income. Furthermore, she considers D1 Dance School students indirect beneficiaries of the social mission of her initiative. By exposing them to successful coaches who hail from much poorer and blighted communities in Lima, she is forging contact between socioeconomic and often racial classes that otherwise would remain starkly separate, thus beginning to erode predominant stereotypes and prejudices. The positive and lasting relationships that she has managed to generate are unheard of by similar initiatives in Peru. On a financial level, the D1 Dance School also pays for 80 percent of the Angels’ social programs. By blending this for-profit/non-profit structure into Cultural Association D1 and shunning donations, Vania has crafted a self-sustaining economic model that can inspire street children to adopt values of self-sufficiency, while avoiding the problems faced by similar programs.

Vania has also formed partnerships with the private sector. Repsol YPF, a Spanish oil and gas company, is a strategic partner who receives publicity through presentations and performances by the dance troupes and the professional company, and pays Angels D1 to dance in schools and neighborhoods near their factory. They have now started to offer full-time work opportunities to some of the D1 graduates, enabling them to gain employment at large businesses where the youth would normally have no opportunities. Angels D1 further gives training workshops on leadership and creativity to these financial partners. Vania’s relationship with private businesses serves as a mutually beneficial opportunity to expand the reach and opportunities for the Cultural Association.

As her students have grown more capable and skilled in hip-hop dance, Vania has featured them in shows and performances throughout the country and world, showcasing an at-risk youth ensemble as stars and ambassadors from impoverished Peruvian societies. Many graduates have participated and even placed in large dance and choreography competitions. Vania’s star alumni are able to perform in her professional company, of whose twenty members, twelve are Angels D1 graduates. The company has toured around the world, including at the Manhattan Movement & Arts Center, and Vania is hoping to sponsor an off-Broadway dance performance in the future. While not only enabling her students to demonstrate their talents on large and well-respected stages, such company performances earn greater publicity and raises the profile of the Angels D1 program, a key tactic for Vania in the expansion of her operational and financial strategy.

Over the coming years, Vania hopes to replicate the extraordinary success of Angels D1. Of the 2,000 students who have directly benefitted, her indirect impact reaches about 13,000 students through additional workshops, participation in the commercial schools, and in artistic presentations. Her key strategy for replication relies on the outstanding interest and passion of her graduates to create and sustain a new “social franchise” model. Vania plans on opening five D1 franchises around the Lima area, and already, new student leaders have already opened three branches around Lima using the Angels’ methodology. One of her investors is willing to provide US$100,000 in seed capital to finance the startup of more D1 social franchises in Peru.

Although Vania wants to consolidate her impact around Peru first, she has received interest from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and India to include more schools in the program. The additional publicity she is generating through national and international performance opportunities will only further increase her opportunities for expansion. Since launching a franchise requires little more than a small initial investment and a passionate leader, the Angels D1 graduates are ideal ambassadors and directors to opening new posts and multiplying the transformative impact from which they have benefited.

Vania studied business administration, but is widely recognized as the preeminent ballet dancer in Peru. Her father is a businessman and serial entrepreneur who taught her the importance of diligence and having the confidence to pursue her dream. He signed her up for ballet classes at the early age of three, and at ten, he sent her to study alongside famed ballerina, Alicia Alonso, in Havana, Cuba, where she also learned about the economic hardships; while living in a small house with five families under the Castro regime. This experience marked her both in her training in ballet and as an adherent to private enterprise.

Vania vigorously pursued her ballet career by moving abroad to perform in ensembles from the United States to the U.K. and Ireland, including receiving an invitation to join Cirque de Soleil. During Europe’s summer holidays, she returned to Lima to perform as the first ballerina in the Peruvian National Ballet. In her spare time, Vania completed a degree in Business Administration from the University of the Pacific, a top private university in Lima, and also completed graduate studies in finance in Europe.

Vania’s life changed forever one day while driving around Lima in a taxi. At a stoplight, she watched a group of street children perform acrobatic tricks on the sidewalk to earn money from passersby. Recognizing from her own experience the high level of skill required to perform the techniques, she immediately offered the children the chance to study dance for a month for free. Vania contacted one of the lead hip-hop choreographers in New York, a friend and colleague, whom she invited to give classes to the street children. Enamored by the experience, she started to put together the elements that would later become Angels D1. Since she was young, Vania had envisioned herself someday developing and financing a social project that would “recycle” revenue earned from wealthier clients to supporting services to those who could not afford them. This dream soon became a reality in the unique funding scheme that is the hallmark of the Cultural Association D1. Now, Vania is completely committed to her project, holding no regrets for leaving professional ballet performance to dedicate herself to empowering some of the most damaged and victimized young people in her community, and transforming them into productive leaders of society.