One Local Hero, One Vision: How a Decade-Long Partnership Turned Trash Into Music
In Cateura, Paraguay, a landfill outside Asunción is home to over 2,500 families who make their living as recyclers. It's also home to Favio Chávez, a former music teacher turned ecological technician who looked at the children growing up there and refused to accept that a garbage dump was the end of their story.
With a few of his own instruments and no budget to speak of, Favio started teaching. When he ran out of instruments, he and a local carpenter built new ones — violins from oven trays, cellos from oil drums, drums from x-ray plates. Out of the landfill's trash, the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura was born, later drawing worldwide attention through the documentary Landfill Harmonic and a feature on 60 Minutes.
Why GO Campaign Invested in Favio, Not Just a Program
GO Campaign named Favio Chávez a Local Hero for a simple reason: he had already built the solution. Our job wasn't to hand him a plan — it was to back his.
That belief has shaped a partnership that's now spanned more than a decade:
2013: Funded music teachers and instruments, reaching 125 youth.
2015: Program growth allowed the orchestra to serve 300 youth.
2016: GO Campaign both expanded music education for 250 youth and funded infrastructure upgrades that made the Cateura music school safer for 200 students.
2023: After a mudslide badly damaged the school, a grant from The Dalio Foundation, channeled through GO Campaign, funded the rebuild — keeping 300 youth in their music studies without interruption.
A Partnership, Not a Transaction
Each grant mattered on its own. But the real story is what a decade of consistent partnership made possible: a program that could survive a natural disaster, keep growing its teaching staff, and put an instrument in the hands of a new class of students every year — because GO Campaign kept showing up for the leader who started it all.
That's the model behind every Local Hero partnership: find someone who already has the vision and the trust of their community, then invest in them for the long haul. In Cateura, that investment now echoes in classrooms, on world stages, and in the hands of students who once had nothing to play but trash.
Help Extend the Partnership
The Recycled Orchestra's work isn't finished, and neither is ours. Your support keeps instruments in students' hands, teachers in the classroom, and the rebuilt music school standing strong.
