Cinthya Perez Cornejo & FormaTec Women

Cinthya Perez Cornejo is a Peruvian student and incoming Civil Engineering major at Vanderbilt University, focused on structural resilience and social impact. After helping build more than 70 homes in vulnerable communities and seeing firsthand how unsafe construction puts lives at risk, she founded FormaTec — a youth-led STEM platform that has already run four pilot workshops with 70.5% female participation — and is now launching FormaTec Women, a training program that equips young women ages 15 to 19 with practical skills in safe construction and resilient design, turning them into agents of change for housing safety in their own communities.

With our $500 Giving Joy microgrant, Cinthya is funding the inaugural pilot of FormaTec Women: a three-day, in-person workshop for 30 young Peruvian women covering structural models, housing risk analysis, and Design Thinking, where participants build prototypes and propose safer solutions for their own homes. The program pairs participants with women engineers, architects, and construction professionals as mentors, and culminates in a Community Showcase where teams present their prototypes to families, teachers, and community partners.

The Expected Impact

This grant is expected to directly benefit 30 young women through hands-on training in safe construction and resilient design. An estimated 60 family members are expected to attend the Community Showcase, alongside 15 to 20 teachers, mentors, and community partners supporting the program, with the knowledge participants take home reaching an additional 80 to 120 community members as they share what they've learned with their families and neighbors.

Looking Ahead

Cinthya will spend the first few months building partnerships with schools and community organizations, recruiting participants, confirming mentors, and finalizing the curriculum and materials. The program's centerpiece is a three-day workshop, ending with the Community Showcase where participants present their housing-safety prototypes. From there, the focus shifts to evaluating what participants learned, gathering feedback from mentors and families, and documenting outcomes to help FormaTec Women grow into a model that can reach more communities across Peru.