Adelphos Foundation: Efforts to Build Trust and Bonds Among Different Neighborhoods in the City of Quito

One of the most notable characteristics of the city of Quito, Ecuador, is how people's location reflects their social class.Neighborhoods of lower socioeconomic status are usually situated on the slopes of the Pichincha volcano and, in almost all cases, are part of the city's periphery.The people living in these neighborhoods are often marginalized from the productive sectors of society, facing high rates of unemployment or participation in the informal economy.Their social exclusion has deepened in recent years due to rising violence and the emergence of gangs and criminal organizations fueled by drug trafficking; distrust has become the bitter fruit of this worsening crisis.In 2015, the Adelphos Foundation was established -first in practice and then in legal form -to promote visits to the homes of individuals living in these peripheral neighborhoods, with the goal of establishing direct dialogue in a relaxed environment.The Foundation's aim is to achieve mutual understanding and learning, creating bonds of trust and breaking prejudices among the various social groups of the Ecuadorian capital.By 2022, 610 homes had been visited, fostering relationships that opened up job opportunities.Since late 2022, in response to the country's economic crisis, the visits have focused on accompanying and supporting families, ensuring -among other things -that daughters and granddaughters of domestic workers, if they so wish, can access some form of higher education.The connections have fostered Adelphos Foundation Studies in Social Justice, Volume 19, Issue 2, 384-392, 2025 385 social change in the mindset of the volunteers and the lives of the families they serve.Ecuador, like many countries in Latin American, is characterized by the presence of clear social contrasts.These differences are often delineated by geographic zones: urban vs. rural, central urban vs. marginal urban, north vs. south, plains vs. ravines, etc.In the city of Quito, a significant number of peripheral neighborhoods are located on the slopes of the Pichincha volcano (Unda, 1998).Many of these neighborhoods have grown informally through settlements that are outside the legal framework (Chacón et al., 2023, p. 56).People with limited resources took possession, in practice rather than legally, of territories belonging to private estates or the state, settling down and awaiting the reactions of the authorities: first the houses, then whatever may follow.In other, more fortunate cases, landowners ceded their properties to the employees of old estates once urban growth had engulfed them.These geographic and socioeconomic divisions also reflect a deeper historical legacy of colonialism and racial inequality, particularly affecting indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities.In Quito, family incomes vary drastically depending on the neighborhood.The minimum wage in Ecuador is $460 US per month (Ministerio de Trabajo, 2023), contrasting with incomes that can be up to fifty times higher in other economic contexts that are often physically adjacent to the poorest areas.Yet even this contrast is inadequate to reflect class differences between people because of unemployment and underemployment, the rates of which are alarming and on the rise, as indicated by studies on multidimensional poverty in Ecuador (Añazco & Pérez, 2016, p. 11).People in situations of economic vulnerability typically reside in the marginal urban neighborhoods, where deprivations related to the labor market are evident (Burgos & Cando, 2016, p. 42).Although basic services (drinking water, sewage and electricity) are generally available for most citizens, access to quality education remains limited for individuals in the peripheral neighborhoods of Quito.While the Constitución de la República del Ecuador (2008), in Article 26, establishes that education is a fundamental right and that all citizens have the right to free education up to the high school level, the reality is that not everyone has access to educational institutions that guarantee the necessary levels of training for successfully pursuing higher education.This truncates the aspiration of an undetermined number of adolescents with high potential.There is no lack of talent, but rather, of opportunities.The quality of education is often directly linked to the financial capacity of families, with private schools offering much better education than most public institutions.The same is true of the healthcare system (Bustamante & Armas, 2018), whose immediacy and quality in care are almost always indisputable when it comes to the private healthcare system; however, access to this system is directly proportional to the economic resources of the citizen.

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