Centro de Idiomas/The Language Center is a nonprofit language and cultural exchange program. Founded as a partnership between the town of Ocotal, Nicaragua and The CRESP Center for Transformative Action at Cornell University, The Language Center’s mission is to be a sustainable, participatory conduit of learning and cooperation across cultures.

The Center's elementary/secondary school serves 250 Nicaraguan children during the first half of the school day. The program offers general instruction by Nicaraguan teachers in Spanish supplemented with English classes taught by visiting North American students. The school focuses on educating physically handicapped, emotionally challenged, and other special needs kids, especially those from rural communities for whom public education is not available. With the generous support of our donors, scholarships, based on need and merit, are awarded annually.

The organization’s visiting North American students take Spanish language and other extra-curricular cultural classes, taught by Nicaraguan instructors, during the second half of the day.. In January 2003 the Center opened this international exchange program, and since then, over 50 participants have traveled to Ocotal to study and work. For an all-inclusive program fee of $3,200 per trimester, visiting students can spend three months or longer living with a host family. Program participants have often told us that the most valuable parts of the program are what they learn about themselves and how to communicate across boundaries, from working in the local community and living with a Nicaraguan family.



In April of 2006 The Center opened a new office, located on the grounds of our school, Centro Educativo Maestros Jubilados Maria Almendarez Lovo. Using the new office as a catalyst for expanding our sustainable partnerships, we kicked-off a reforestation project with the school’s high school students in July, and more recently, a recycled paper-making project with the elementary aged students.. In partnership with Engineers for a Sustainable World at Stanford University, we are moving ahead with plans to create a “green” design for the school. All work is collaborative to ensure the building's design, construction, and operations serve as a model of environmental stewardship and sustainability for the entire community. Working in conjunction with the Public Service Center at Cornell, we will implement the first phase of the design: the construction a bilingual ¨green¨ library. Student teams from Cornell and Ithaca College, will break ground on the new Library in December of 2006.