The Stone Soup Story
Our mission here at the Stone Soup Foundation is to assist single mothers and their children through temporary housing while saving to buy their own home. Through a rent to own leasing program single mothers can have a chance to save, work on credit or even further their education for more successful job opportunities. To lessen the financial daycare costs, we also provide scholarships as needed. In doing so this allows children to grow up with proper nutrition, education, and one on one parental care. Our goal is to improve the lives of people throughout the community and furthermore allowing the successful homeowner mother to extend her positive experience to a new deserving family.
When our son was born in 2002, we learned he had developmental issues. Doctors advised he would be very limited in his physical and mental capabilities. They recommended physical therapy, only.
However, through our own research we found Dr. Hernan Jaramillo Botero. He had developed a formula for soup, very well known in Colombia as “Sopa Jaramillo” that contained all the necessary nutrients for developmental growth. We thought to give it a try as what harm could assuring proper nutrition for our small child hurt our chances at him living a full and healthy life?
Through this soup formula our son was able to recover from his ailment. To our wonder we saw him grow and develop into an exceptional young man.
In 2004 we moved from Colombia to the U.S. and continued working with Dr. Jaramillo to share his formula with other children in need. Later on when Diego Mauricio was in elementary school, he came home one day asking for an “onion” as he was supposed to contribute for the “Stone Soup preparation” during class the next day, we learned then, that the stone soup had almost the same ingredients as the Jaramillo soup, and we fell in love with the philosophy of sharing and cooperating with a community to pull together and move forward as a whole, and we continued to share this story with the dual purpose of nutritional value and changing people’s mindset to move from a scarcity to an abundance mentality.
We are so grateful to have met this doctor whose nutrition advice was clearly the front runner in his recovery. Our son is now 21 years old attending a Florida university on a full education scholarship. This young man is bright, energetic, kind and intelligent. The nourishing soup, education and physical therapy he has gone above and beyond what the doctors expected of him.
During this health scare and journey to physical therapy offices we witnessed a great deal of single mothers struggling. Rushing to drop off their children for physical therapy, rush back to work, return after PT was complete and often these children would not get the one-on-one parental help, they desperately needed for their recovery. The life of a single mother is difficult not only financially but also in affording the necessary time to properly raise children. Especially those with physical and mental disabilities.
Too often mothers who cannot afford losing hours at work have to face the harsh reality that it’s either getting a paycheck and keeping a job or putting their child’s healthcare at the forefront. High costs for childcare, rent, everyday food and toiletry expenses take precedence leaving hard working mothers unable to save in order to buy their own home. The joy of homeownership is too often not within their reach.
Alas how we found the need for a program to assist these hardworking mothers and focus primarily on helping through temporary housing while they save to become a homeowner. Lower living costs and daycare frees up enough income allowing them to save towards down payments on buying their very own home.