Youth Venture

AYUDA empowers youth to serve as agents of change in diabetes communites around the world.

In 1996, two teenagers, Nicolas Cuttriss and Jesse Fuchs-Simon, established AYUDA after witnessing first hand the socioeconomic and emotional hardships associated with diabetes in Latin America. From the moment Jesse and Nick realized the desperate situation facing people with diabetes specifically, in Ecuador and generally throughout Latin America, they committed themselves to making a difference. They envisioned an organization led by youth that encouraged other youth to serve as agents for change. Now, more than ten years later, AYUDA embodies that dream!
Initially, AYUDA strove to provide basic education in the form of support groups and educational workshops to foster improved diabetes management among children living with diabetes. Amazingly enough, however, what began as rudimentary diabetes support groups in the corridors of a public hospital in Ecuador, quickly burgeoned into a much larger idea. Today, AYUDA's objectives are three fold: to strengthen local diabetes communities by promoting leadership, to motivate youth with diabetes to live happier and healthier lives, and to empower passionate youth to become leaders of social change.
AYUDA has sent more than two hundred youth from twenty different countries to help develop and implement sustainable diabetes programs in eight different countries and has published “Manejando la Diabetes” (“Managing Diabetes”), a diabetes management guide for children written by AYUDA’s founders, and disseminated it to diabetes communities throughout Latin America.