Luke Newlove and Dom Wood are hiking the Inca Trail near Cusco, Peru, in aid of Juntas, supported and match-funded by the Mace Foundation. The costs of the trek are self-funded, and 100% of donations received will be given directly to Juntas.

The Inca Trail is a famous 4-day, 3-night, 26-mile hike through the Andean Mountains, reaching it's highest point of 4,215masl at Dead Woman's Pass. We will be starting just outside Ollantaytambo on Sunday 6th August 2023 and concluding in Machu Picchu via the Sun Gate on Wednesday 9th August.

Juntas is a Peruvian social organisation focused on the prevention of gender-based violence through education and healthcare. In 2022, Mace and Juntas partnered to design a scalable intervention that would promote safer environments in the schools that form part of the Bicentennial Schools programme in Peru. We called the initiative “Nurturing Talent”, secured initial funding from the Mace Foundation in October 2022 and in December 2022 successfully completed the pilot implementation with 4 school communities.

Nurturing Talent was designed to respond to Peru’s dramatic statistics of school violence. According to Peru’s Ministry of Education, between January and April 2022, there were over 800 reported cases of bullying in schools and over 17,000 cases of violence against children and adolescents. Over 44% of aggressors were teachers or school staff. As a response, the project’s main objective is to encourage healthy relationships in school, generating a greater feeling of wellbeing in students. Nurturing Talent is aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including numbers 3 – Health and Wellbeing, 4 – Quality Education, 5 – Gender Equality and 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities.