Global Respect Awards 2026 — 1st Edition | Guatemala

Catherine Carr

In 2025, Spiritual Playdate inaugurated the Global Respect Award, an annual award for those who take the organization’s Make Respect Cool Again Challenge. Giving out cash prizes throughout the year, the Make Respect Cool Again Challenge encourages people and organizations of all types to spread empathy and respect on social media. 

To select the winner of the Global Respect Award, Spiritual Playdate’s team of advisors takes into account the work the winners do to spread empathy and respect far beyond social media. In 2025, the winner was clear: the Little Angels of Mary, who serve food, education, and love in rural Guatemala.

Little Angels of Mary’s mission began in 1988, when Edwin Mendoza Escoto moved back to Guatemala after living in the US for 40 years. His mission? To help the underprivileged children of rural Guatemala, who suffer the 6th highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world.

Edwin knew that chronic malnutrition is especially devastating to children. It leaves their bodies unable to build the necessary components of bones, organs, and the brain and nervous system. Early childhood malnutrition can lead to lifelong learning disabilities, and death. In Guatemala, 47% of children under the age of five suffer from some degree of malnutrition. 

In the years from 1988-2007, Escoto worked to build and equip a health clinic in San Pedro Ayampuc, and opened a home for disabled children. While the home ultimately closed due to lack of funding, Edwin’s son and daughter-in-law took up the torch of Little Angels of Mary after Edwin’s passing.

In 2020, Edwin Mendoza Hipp and Darlene Jasso started a new project to serve Guatemalan children under the Little Angels of Mary banner. Jasso and Mendoza Hipp spent a year teaching in a Guatemala City school, and were struck by what they learned there. 

Jasso’s students came from all over the country, and it became clear to her that many indigenous students lacked access to education in their home villages. They would live in Guatemala City during the school year, then return home to their families in the summers.

“The families were so grateful,” Jasso told me in our interview. “At the end of my first year, one woman cried as she thanked me over and over for what I was doing for her child. I was so touched and grateful, but I thought to myself, “I’m just doing my job.”

Conversations like these showed Jasso and Mendoza Hipp how precious education was in rural Guatemala. Food and electricity are often in short supply in the villages, and government-funded elementary schools are often staffed by just one or two teachers to serve 40 or more children.

“We did research,” Jasso recalls. “We learned which region had the most severe malnutrition in the country. Then we just got in the car, and started driving from village to village. Everywhere we went, we would ask to speak to the village leaders. Eventually, we found a village where the leaders were so open and welcoming. They were thrilled to hear about what we wanted to do.”

From there, the work began. In a small schoolhouse, Jasso, Mendoza Hipp, and three teachers provide nutritious meals, vitamins, and early childhood education to local children. The Little Angels team works with a nutritionist to monitor the health of local children, plant vegetable gardens, and improve the nutrition of local mothers.

“We call ourselves ‘Little Angels of Mary’ because these children are God’s angels,” Jasso told me. “We believe in following the gospels through our actions. We are not here to evangelize. We are here to serve God’s angels.”

Jasso shares Spiritual Playdate’s conviction that the core values of love and compassion are found across religions. “Four of our core values come from the local Mayan culture and language of Kaqchikel,” she told me. These are:

• Loq’olaj ruwach’ulew: We take care of the land and nature, because nature gives us life.
  
  

• Tiqato’qi’: We help each other, and work together with our neighbors and our community.
  
  

• K’awomanik: We are grateful, even for the smallest things.
  
  

• Ri qäs qitzij pan ruq’ajarik qatzij: We always speak the truth.

  
  

The Little Angels of Mary were delighted to learn that Spiritual Playdate’s Make Respect Cool Again challenge also drew its roots from Mayan culture. The poem contenders recite as part of the challenge is a translation of an ancient Mayan greeting, translated into English by the American Chicano poet Luis Valdez.

For Edwina Cowell, Motherfounder of Spiritual Playdate, the greeting immediately resonated.  An interfaith mom who has dedicated her life to learning to teach values and spirituality outside of the strictures of any one religion, Cowell considers it her mission in life to build peace and empathy across religious, cultural, national, and linguistic borders.

“The Mayan idea that, ‘You are my other me,’ is my favorite formulation of the Golden Rule of empathy that is found in all religions,” Cowell told me. “It shows that this standard of respect and empathy is universal across cultures and religions, and sometimes the oldest formulations are the most profound.”

In 2025, a classroom full of Little Angels gathered to recite the Respect Code for the family. In Spanish, a chorus of small, joyful voices spoke:

Tú eres mi otro yo.

Si te hago daño a ti,

Me hago daño a mí mismo.

Si te amo y respeto,

Me amo y respeto yo.

The Little Angels of Mary posted their video to social media, hoping to spread respect and empathy around the world, and raise awareness of their vital work. A few months later, the call came: they had been selected as the 2026 winner of the Global Respect Award, and would receive the year’s top prize of $1,000 to fund their program.

Every dollar the Little Angels of Mary receives matters. With no government funding and no corporate backer, they depend on the donations of ordinary people to combat childhood malnutrition and provide education to the rural children of Guatemala. Jasso and Mendoza Hipp dream of expanding their operation to serve more children and families.

You can donate directly to support Little Angels of Mary’s work fighting childhood malnutrition and providing early childhood education here.

You can take the Make Respect Cool Again challenge yourself, and become a contender for the Global Respect Award 2027, here.