Tag Archives: Programs for Women

Project Update: Sharing the Dream

 Sharing the Dream in Guatemala is a non-profit organization that promotes fair trade with cooperatives and small businesses in Guatemala.  Sharing the Dream is working very hard so that through their work, families can afford to educate their children, provide health care, and promote healthy living in their own families.   In late June 2010, Sharing the Dream hosted a [...]

Profile: Curamericas Global, Inc.

Curamericas Global partners with underserved communities to make measurable and sustainable improvements in their health and wellbeing.  Since 1983, they have been working to reduce infant, child, and maternal mortality rates in regions that lack basic health services.  They also organize short-term volunteer trips to their project sites in Guatemala, Bolivia, Haiti and Liberia, where [...]

Profile: Primeros Pasos

Primeros Pasos is a clinic in rural Guatemala that has a comprehensive outlook on health care.   With the collaboration of health professionals, health educators, volunteers, and community leaders, Primeros Pasos offers quality and affordable health care and health education to the rural, underserved communities of the Palajunoj Valley of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.   Primeros Pasos works in [...]

Profile: Build a Nest

Nest is a nonprofit organization that empowers female artists and artisans around the world. Using a unique combination of interest-free microfinance loans, mentoring from established designers, as well as a market in which to sell their crafts, Nest helps its loan recipients create successful small businesses. Nest instills pride of ownership, preserves ancient artistic traditions [...]

Profile: A Thread of Hope

A Thread of Hope is a fair trade web store featuring items from Guatemala.   Eliza Strode, the owner, is a clinical social worker who went to Guatemala in 1997 to learn Spanish. Previously a food co-op manager in Cambridge, MA, she visited a number of artisans’ cooperatives in Guatemala.   Eliza started selling Fairly-Traded products from Guatemala in 2001. She has [...]

Profile: Maya Traditions

In 1988, Maya Traditions founder Jane Mintz, an experienced social worker (MSW) and weaver, began working with indigenous women artisans living in poverty in Guatemala. She observed that their skill of backstrap weaving was a chance for them to earn a stable income for their families while working from home doing what they were already [...]

Profile: Dr. Roselyn Costantino

Roselyn Costantino, Associate Professor of Spanish and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University Altoona, has received a Fulbright Scholar Award for Spring Semester 2011 to do research in Guatemala and to lecture at the Universidad Del Valle Guatemala, Department of Anthropology. During the six-month award, Costantino will conduct qualitative research on the internal organizational dynamics [...]

Announcement: Shalom Foundation Upcoming Trips

  The following trips are being sponsored by and/or are associated with The Shalom Foundation.  To find out more information, visit their website. All groups will work in Guatemala City.   Clean Water Trip – Living Waters for the World Franklin Breakfast Rotary & Kingsport First Presbyterian Church April 28 – May 3, 2010 Team [...]

Profile: Project Concern International/Casa Materna

Project Concern International (PCI) is a non-profit health and humanitarian aid organization dedicated to preventing disease, improving community health, and promoting sustainable development.  PCI began working in Guatemala in 1974, bringing basic health care to Mayan communities around Lake Atitlan. Throughout the 1980s, during the civil war that ravaged Guatemala, PCI trained an extensive network [...]

Profile: CasaSito

CasaSito increases educational opportunities in rural areas of Guatemala so that indigenous people living in poverty can attend school, receive quality instruction, and obtain the skills they need to improve their lives. CasaSito has two approaches for addressing educational needs, depending on location. In the Department of Sacatepéquez, they offer scholarships and work closely with [...]

Profile: Ak’Tenamit

Ak’ Tenamit means “New Village” in the Q’eqchi Mayan language, because their organization is transforming life in the Q’eqchi villages of eastern Guatemala.  Those villages are located around the Río Dulce, far from the nearest road – most are reached by a boat trips and hikes through the rain forest – and they lack electricity, [...]

Profile: Partnership in Women’s Ministries

Partnership in Women’s Ministries (PWM) is a partnership of ministries serving abused and abandoned women in Guatemala.  This partnership comes to fill a huge void in Guatemala, where women lack total control of their lives, and are powerlessly subjected to lives of misery.   These women, who are lacking resources and education, are desperately trying to survive and provide for their families.  [...]

Profile: Safe Homes for Children

Safe Homes for Children is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation set up to support Casa de Sion, an orphanage in Los Robles near Panajachel. On 17 acres of farmland, they have a 2500 sq. ft. building that is used for their orphanage. They take street children as well as children whose parents cannot afford to feed or [...]

Profile: Comunidad Nueva Alianza

Comunidad Nueva Alianza is an organic coffee and macadamia plantation owned and operated by a cooperative of forty Guatemalan families, located in a sub-tropical area 1000 meters above sea level 45 minutes north of the coastal town of Retalhuleu. The community is nestled amongst a 300 acre plantation of organic coffee and macadamia trees where [...]

Profile: Thirteen Threads (Oxlajuj B’atz)

Thirteen Threads (Oxlajuj B’atz’) provides training and educational opportunities to Maya women’s groups throughout rural areas of Guatemala. More than 400 women in 22 groups currently participate in the project.  They organize workshops, classes, and community follow-ups, as well as host two interns per year through their Young Mayan Women Internship Program What does the [...]

Profile: Seeds of Help

Seeds of Help Foundation is a private not-for-profit organization that provides grassroots-level assistance to improve the lives of people in developing nations through educational programs and construction projects. Currently, Seeds of Help Foundation serves 30 remote communities in a department (region) known as Huehuetenango, located in the western highlands of Guatemala where families survive by subsistence [...]

Profile: Faith In Action Ministries

Faith In Action (FIA) is a 501(c)(3) Christian organization designed to target isolated, remote people who have become lost and stagnant within their developing country. They primarily focus on mountainous highlands and the swampy waterways of Rio Dulce in Guatemala, Central America.  Faith in Action takes the Good News into communities that have no church [...]

Profile: MADRE

MADRE is an international women’s human rights organization that works in partnership with community-based women’s organizations worldwide to address issues of health and reproductive rights, economic development, education and other human rights. They provide resources and training to enable their sister organizations to meet these goals by addressing immediate needs in their communities and developing [...]

Profile: The Aid and Education Project

The mission of The Aid & Education Project is to promote education in indigenous communities in Guatemala. Their primary program for promoting education in Guatemala is to offer scholarships to deserving students.   They also have programs to promote computer literacy, to teach English, and to preserve the local culture.  Additionally, there are special programs for [...]

Profile: Pueblo a Pueblo

On the shores of Lake Atitlan in the southern highlands of Guatemala, surrounded by volcanoes is nestled Santiago Atitlan, a small indigenous T’zutujil Mayan community. This village of 43,000 residents represents one of the largest Mayan indigenous communities in the Americas.  In past five years, devastating natural disasters compounded the bleak pre-existing educational and economic [...]

Profile: Sharing the Dream

Sharing the Dream in Guatemala is a non-profit organization that promotes fair trade with cooperatives and small businesses in Guatemala. They are committed to providing fair wages and employment opportunities to low-income artisans, which will result in creating sustainable markets for their products. Their craft products are handmade by Mayan artisans using many traditional techniques. [...]

Profile: Chi Chi Amor

Chi Chi Amor is a for-profit, ecologically conscientious small business that creates beautiful children’s clothing integrating Mayan textiles with contemporary “western” fashion.    As cultural anthropologists, Danielle O’Connor and Shari Feldman are compelled by a profound desire to share the history, compromised present, and unknown future of the Mayan weaving tradition.   Although they take great care [...]

Profile: Salomon’s Porch

Porch de Salomon is a response to God calling a family into a life of love and service in Panajachel, Guatemala, by developing a multi-faceted ministry to reach not only the large population of expatriates, but to help mobilize the volunteer teams and individuals who come to minister to the indigenous population as well. Solomon’s [...]

Profile: MayaWorks

MayaWorks is a 501(c)3 non-profit that markets the work of Maya artisans who otherwise have no outlet for their handiwork. As a proud member of the Fair Trade Federation, MayaWorks pays artisans at prices they set, provides technical assistance and educational opportunities and meets other Fair Trade criteria. What makes MayaWorks Unique: MayaWorks is much [...]

Profile: WINGS

  Strengthening Guatemalan families through reproductive health. WINGS’ Mission is to create opportunities for Guatemalan families to improve their lives by providing them with family planning education and access to reproductive health services.  WINGS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.  All donations are tax-deductible in the United States.   WINGS’ Programs:  To address this need, WINGS [...]