Meet the Indigenous Women Leading WellKind Guatemala
By Kyle Weinstein
Tzununa is a small village of 3,000 people of the Kaqchikel Maya ethnicity, situated on the shores of Lake Atitlan in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. This town is beautiful but has many underlying socioeconomic and environmental challenges that it faces in a world that is rapidly changing. Many local people are struggling to make ends meet as prices are rising and wages are staying the same. The environment is also being severely affected because most people cook on wood-burning stoves and must cut down trees to have fuel to power them. Tzununa does not have a proper waste management system and is seeing contamination in their water sources and surrounding areas as a result of poor governmental organization.
WellKind Guatemala ONG has been working to solve the environmental and economic issues of the Tzununa valley on Lake Atitlan since 2019. We work with local community leaders and youth organizations to stimulate community-led decision making with all of our programs. WellKind at its core is a grassroots NGO that has several different programs fitting into three major focuses: Ecology, Economy, and Education. Our mission is to improve the lives of the Kaqchikel Maya people of Tzununa and to restore the ecology of the region in which they live. By helping to create small businesses and providing opportunities, we hope to stimulate the economy and empower locals to be entrepreneurs and lead the change in their community.
The women leaders of the Patuya Garden Program get together in the village’s community center after holding meetings with community members. Our partnership with these women has become the backbone of our work and ensures that we are empowering community-led decision making to improve the social and environmental aspects of the Tzununa Valley. We handpick women that show leadership skills and are engaged in our programming before offering them a leadership position. The tasks that each leader has include reporting on program success, identifying needs of the community, and distribution of raw materials like seeds and compost.
As we expand our reach and the neighborhoods that we work in, we continue to look for more leaders to help carry out our programming. This program is providing work to these women who who come from low-income backgrounds, and it is helping them with their professional development. We created this program because we saw the need to help women become financially independent and we wanted them to lead the change in their community and do things that they thought were important. WellKind is helping these 19 women leaders carry out their vision of environmental, social, and economic wellbeing for their land and community.
Meet two of our leaders:
Maria Benita Quiacain Mendoza is one of the eight women leaders who help WellKind with our programming in the Patuya sector of the village of Tzununa, Guatemala. Maria is one of the most important leaders in the community that WellKind has partnered with to tackle social and environmental issues. She has been a leader in the garden program for over two years now, helping grow the amount of gardens in her neighborhood and playing a pivotal role in their success.
This year, Maria proposed we hold a garden competition to incentivize people to work more on their land, and this has had a very positive impact on the family gardens in Tzununa. The criteria for winning the contest includes aesthetics, creativity, crop yield, and how maintained the garden space is in general. The different winners of this contest will be announced just before Christmas, and 5 families with the best gardens will be receiving chickens.
Maria is also part of the group of women that WellKind helped to build a greenhouse that sells seedlings to supply the family garden program. This greenhouse is administered by eight local women who run the business together. Maria put a lot of effort into starting the business and is constantly improving their production of seedlings. This year, the greenhouse produced and sold 13,900 seedlings to community members.
We are very grateful to have Maria as an ally and to help her carry out her vision of economically empowering women and helping to restore ecological balance in Tzununa. Maria told us:
“I have enjoyed being a leader of the garden program that WellKind has. It has allowed me to connect with my neighborhood in a deep and meaningful way. This opportunity has also allowed me to learn more about gardening. The money I earn from the leader program has helped me support my husband and family. I have seen that the impact of this program has allowed people to change their diet and nutritional health.”
Sebastiana Simaj is a leader in our small business creation program and artisan cooperative program. She has helped grow the number of artisans in the group by reaching out to her network in the community and going door to door to talk about the program. She is also one of the leaders and biggest advocates for the savings group that is affiliated with the artisan cooperative, which is helping women do financial planning with Educando Guatemala. Sebastiana is always smiling and is quick to lend a hand to her fellow artisans to improve their methodology and increase their productivity. She is a true example of a leader and is invested in helping out other women in the community through the different programs that WellKind offers. Sebastiana told us:
“I like all the programs that WellKind is working on in our village, mainly family gardens. This program has helped us to feed our family, and it has also allowed us to sell a small part of the harvest that we have obtained. When I think of WellKind, I imagine all the programs that they are working on in the community since the programs have made a big social impact in the village.”
Thank you, Maria and Sebastiana, for the amazing work you do on behalf of your community!
To support the work of Maria and Sebastiana’s artisan co-operative, consider donating to our GoFundMe campaign.