Education: An Unshakeable Commitment
A Message from Alejandro Baillères
President of the Alberto Baillères Foundation
Mr. Alberto Baillères, my father, created the Foundation that bears his name, convinced that "education is a powerful instrument that offers children and young people the possibility to increase their opportunities for subjective well-being and collective development," as he put it in his own words. Today, it falls to me to continue his valuable legacy and strongly embrace this project so dear to my father, this initiative that builds collaborative bridges between different social actors to offer our children and youth better educational options.
While the Foundation was born out of this spirit, reality has presented us with great challenges. In 2017, for example, confronting the earthquakes that caused serious damage to public schools in southern and central Mexico, the Foundation felt the urgency of offering an appropriate response to the emergency facing the country. In this context, the Social Model was conceived as an initiative to accompany education communities so that, through the collective creation of educational habitats, the school space could be constituted as a safe and inclusive place conducive to learning, coexistence, and community exchange.
Although schools were left empty in 2020 and 2021 due to the covid-19 pandemic, the Foundation found a way to advance in its project: the creation of partnerships between the private and public sector was a key step toward achieving its objective. In this way, the end of 2021 saw the inauguration of the first two schools born out of the Social Model, both located in the State of Mexico. No matter the challenges faced, the Foundation has worked with an unshakeable commitment on behalf of public education in Mexico. Without question, when governments, society, private enterprises, and educational and research centers join forces, it becomes possible to achieve shared objectives and tangible results.
Our hope is that our Social Model will be not a port of arrival but a point of departure for new projects in new environments, always on behalf of quality education for the children and young people of Mexico and to the benefit of education communities, in the broadest sense of the term.