Manos que reconstruyen Oaxaca AC (Una mano para Oaxaca)
Organization Details
A Hand for Oaxaca (UMPO) aims to provide education to indigenous girls, young women and adults who dream of being able to study, learn and share their skills and knowledge. Due to cultural, economic and community conditions they are hampered from doing so. The programs use a participatory model to develop economic sovereignty that encourages women and girls to make decisions based on their personal well-being and to seek collective strategies that will enable them to improve their living conditions. This process strengthens their collective voice and power. Through the use, cultivation and transformation of local heritage foods and crafts, along with healing and self-esteem workshops. UMPO’s Community Center provides a space for women to organize collectively about training and sharin. The approach focuses on human rights of women and training in traditional trades for economic revival and emotional healing by allowing women to exercise their rights to work, education and culture.
Impact Story
We seek to guarantee women and children rights to education, their culture, and a life free of violence. We offer comprehensive and inclusive spaces for bringing value to our indigenous traditions in a way that allows community members to advance both economically and culturally. We dream on Creating a replicable Post-disaster Community Intervention Educational Model to be used by other communities in Mexico and Latin America, based on chains of learning in which women are the principal promoters of knowledge and they acted as catalysts of the creation of new collectives and organized groups. Through our activities we provide tools appropriate to the context and times of the women involved in them, seeking collective strategies that strengthen them to improve their living conditions through the use, cultivation and transformation of local food, healing and self-esteem programs with a focus on human rights of women through training in traditional trades. Since 2017 until now UMPO’s program has impacted 5335 with one social tourism route, 118 reactivation of traditional bakeries, the creation of 5 trade collectives, 20 new women leading an entrepreneurship, 6 cultural festivals and 154 implemented productive workshops. Una Mano Para Oaxaca’s impact is designed by working with the children and adolescents in their pride for being zapotec, promoting handcrafts, locally made goods and ancestral techniques among the working adults, offer more activities to develop the community and reduce migration and improve environmental health and responsible consumption of resources. We have been working hard for Improve the familial economic situation and self-care for Zapotec women and create financial sustainability through artisan and food producing cooperatives and Reducing hunger in our communities, through fruit harvesting and financial education and other projects around environmental awareness.