Our team visited all three regions where Heart-Links’ partners work: Cajamarca, in the northeastern Andes; the Zaña Valley, in the central coast lowlands; and the Chiclayo Metropolitan Area, also in the central coast lowlands, one hour south from Zaña.

In Cajamarca, we met with the volunteers who run the Rural Libraries Network, a 54-year-old association that supplies books to almost 300 remote libraries across Cajamarca and adjacent provinces. In addition to publishing books, the network promotes literacy and records and preserves traditional knowledge and culture. A principle tool is the Enciclopedia Campesina, a project financed by Heart-Links. We stayed at the Rural Libraries guesthouse in Cajamarca. The building is also the home of the main library, offices and meeting rooms.

Also in Cajamarca is ACIES, a community development organization that works in the impoverished city neighborhood of Quiritimayo. In the Quiritimayo Cultural Centre, ACIES offers an afterschool program that includes educational support, ecological workshops and cleanups, reading circles, writing groups, and art classes. ACIES also works with women, delivering workshops in mental health self-care and artisanal training. ACIES runs similar programs in the rural village of Pomabamba, as well an alternative school for impoverished children and youth, where they also learn about water conservation, gardening, and raising small animals.

In Zaña, we met the members of Latidos. In communities up and down the Zaña Valley, this association runs afterschool programs, breakfast and lunch programs, mental health workshops, entrepreneurial training for women and reforestation and forest protection. Latidos is strongly involved in the local business community, including agrobusiness, and works with them to practice corporate social responsibility, such as hiring locally. We stayed in the lovely Latidos guesthouse.

Our other partner in Zaña is Madre Oliva Association. They run an afterschool program in the rural hamlet of Nuevo Mocupe, where children receive educational support and recreation. The association also delivers food aid, clothing, medication and mental health training and counselling  to approximately 20 vulnerable families.

Finally, we went to the bustling metropolis of Chiclayo, and stayed in a charming modest downtown hotel. We first met with members of Centro Esperanza. This agency runs numerous programs from their Chiclayo office and premises, but the program Heart-Links supports is in Coloche, a rural community in Lambayeque. There, Centro Esperanza has started a women’s farming collective called MUFUM (Women for a Better Future). The women of MUFUM raise and market fast-growing guinea pigs. Centro Esperanza has provided production training, ecological workshops, leadership development and mental health programs. The project is thriving.

Our final visit was with Centro Santa Angela. Founded 41 years ago by the Ursuline Sisters of Chatham, the centre promotes ecological communities in the impoverished urban district of José Leonardo Ortiz, assisting local residents to rescue parkland, develop community spirit, and end harmful ecological practices. In its downtown office, Centro Santa Angela runs programs, also sponsored by Heart-Links, aimed at ending family violence and misogyny, developing community leaders and good citizens, and exercising vigilance against corruption.

It was wonderful to see the positive impact our partners are making in the lives of hundreds of children, youth, women and men in northern Peru. We can say with confidence that your donations to Heart-Links are helping create a more just world.

A lot has happened since this project started four months ago.

The 21 families began by forming an association and electing five women and one man to the board. A woman was elected chair.

Then they built pens for their guinea pigs and planted alfalfa to feed them. They also learned to make compost from the agricultural waste.

As part of their learning, they attended workshops on guinea pig health and hygiene, proper feeding, and reproduction. They also learned about bookkeeping.

Pastry making drew even more interest, with seven teenagers joining their moms to learn to make cakes and turnovers. Some of the women plant to take what they’ve learned to started home-based microbusinesses.

There is one more thing that is not so easy to measure. The families feel united as a community and committed to building a better future together.

The project Heart-Links’ donors funded provided laying hens and incubators, as well as training, to help community members feed themselves and their families. It also helped them organize and learn how to work together—women and men—to build a better, sustainable future.

María and other women saw changes in their relationships with their husbands and their positions in the community. “Some men are also learning the chores that we women do in the home,” María told us. “And well, for me and my family, my husband has also joined in raising animals. Because before, they thought that men only went out to work and we took care of the house and the animals. Not anymore.”

Today in San Isidro, ECODAE members raise chicken and sheep, and grow vegetables, passion fruit and papayas. They no longer need funding from Heart-Links to keep moving forward.

And María? She is now president of ECODAE.

Heart-Links has started helping another community in the region reach their dreams.

That was something María wanted, too. “We also want other women to learn what we’ve learned from the project—to improve their knowledge of raising small animals and to participate in decision-making at home and in the community,” she told us. “That they understand that women should be respected and valued. That household chores, raising animals and farmwork should be recognized and valued as work we women do that contributes to the household.”

Thank you for the support you gave María when she needed it. Investing in women like María is one way Heart-Links, with your help, is creating a more just world.

Centro Santa Angela has drawn up an action plan to get food and supplies to 200 families in the district. They are also educating their neighbours and the general public about the dangers of water-borne diseases and how to prevent contagion.

Through the Ecological Program supported by Heart-Links, they are helping people in the urban community of San Miguel to pump the water out of overrun drainage system and to access government relief.

Centro Esperanza, also based in José Leonardo Ortiz, is working with rural families affected by the flooding. They held workshops with 200 families from four communities in Illimo to show them how to use moringa seeds to purify the muddy river waters stirred up by the cyclone. These communities have been forced to resort to river water because well water in the region is contiminated with arsenic.

“The families of Coloche and San Isidro were the most affected [by the cyclone], because they were completely cut off, the waters were waist-high,” Centro Esperanza reports. “Now that the waters have receded, we can reach them. The district municipality is ready to work with us to improve the water and on this occasion provided the containers we used to show people how the water cleared up and bacteria was eliminated by the moringa.”

Centro Esperanza also helped community members fill out the very complicated forms they must submit to access emergency support from the government.

Because of strong local organizations like Centro Esperanza and Centro Santa Angela and the commitment and generosity of their leaders, these communities are not alone during this crisis.

Do you want to invest in strong community-based organization in northern Peru? Join our monthly donor family so you can help organizations like Centro Santa Angela and Centro Esperanza all year round.

There was, however, the fragile beginning of a community association. Community members had formed this organization after the floods of 2017 drove them from their homes. Even back then, they knew that the only way to recover from the catasptrophe and get ahead was by working together.

To see this same community today in the video below—the very same people we met back in 2019—is truly heart-warming. See (and hear) for yourself what life in San Isidro is like today. Learn what this generous and determined community has accomplished and how our partner Centro Esperanza helped them get there. As a Heart-Links supporter, you, too, helped make this happen. So thank you!

Video titles read as follows:

• Centro Esperanza, Chiclayo, with support from Heart-Links, Canada, has since 2019 carried out the project “Promoting the Development of Rural Families, Victims of El Niño, in San Isidro, Illimo.”
• During 3 years, they received training in organic farming and raising small animal and now they are moving ahead communally.
• 23 families were affected by the rains but through this project, they were able to recover, and today they are members of the association Community Enterprise for Sustainable Development (ECODAE).
• They learned to make organic fertilizers and bioinsecticides and to prevent disease in their animals. Now they are growing organic passion fruit and papaya as well as raising organic chickens and pelibüey sheep.
• As part of the project, they received workshops about social skills, the roles assigned to men and women, marketing strategies, and other topics.

The families of the rural community of San Isidro have come a long way since 2017, when they fled their homes because of floods that damaged or destroyed their houses, lands, crops, animals, irrigation system, and water supply. Today, with support from Heart-Links partner Centro Esperanza, they grow and sell organic vegetables, raise free-run chickens and produce organic eggs for themselves and the market, raise sheep and have planted an orchard that will produce passion fruit and papaya for market.

But it hasn’t been easy. In 2022, fertilizer, food and transportation prices skyrocketed, making it harder than ever to buy food or travel for work. Late in the year, countrywide protests interrupted supply chains, further undermining food security. Despite these challenges, the families of San Isidro made great strides:

• The community received a donation of sheep from another institution which was impressed by the success of the project sponsored by Heart-Links.
• A focus in 2022 was to get youth involved. Community youth learned about organic gardening, caring for sheep, communications and gender equality.
• The community successfully negotiated with municipal authorities for a place in town to sell their produce.
• They also arranged with the nearby Túcume Museum to sell their organic produce on a monthly basis at the site.
• A woman was elected president of San Isidro’s community association.
• One family both produces and sells organic fertilizer.
• The families used some of their earnings to donate educational games to the local school. They wanted to show solidarity as well as the importance of play in learning.
• More community members want to join the association.
• Inspired by San Isidro, a neighbouring community wants to start a similar project.

And there is so much more. But sometimes pictures tell the story better. These photos represent the first six months of this project in 2022:

On December 7, hours before what was to be his third impeachment hearing in the short 17 months he has occupied the office, President Pedro Castillo moved to dissolve Congress. He was arrested the same day, and shortly afterward Vice President Dina Bularte assumed his office. She is Peru’s sixth president in six years.

On learning of Castillo’s arrest, thousands of Peruvians took to the streets to protest his ouster. At least seven Castillo supporters have died so far in the violence.

Chronic instability has had and continues to have dire consequences for the Peruvian population. Any action by government is stalled, services are delayed. Much-needed development and reform is postponed indefinately. Civic unrest, which at least initially was concentrated mostly in the South, has disrupted supply lines and increased already high transporation fares. Food is not getting to market.

For our partners in Zaña, Chiclayo and Cajamarca, the current crisis has made already difficult conditions much more difficult. They know that vulnerable populations are always the most hurt. They also see that their programs to foster ethical and democratic leadership, to build resilient sustainable communities and to attend to basic needs, including food, among other initiatives, help people in their communities ride out crises like these and plant the seeds of a better future.

Heart-Links expresses our solidarity with the Peruvian people, who deserve so much better from their representatives in government. We are encouraged by the compassion, integrity and commitment of people like the leaders of Madre Oliva Association, Latidos, ACIES, Rural Libraries, Centro Santa Angela and Centro Esperanza—our partners. Their work offers hope for a better world for Peruvians and inspiration for people everywhere.

This season of the Ontario Council for International Cooperation‘s podcast and illustration series is focused on localization, an approach to development that prioritizes ideas and solutions that are community led. It is the approach Heart-Links and our partners take in their work.

You will hear Vitalina Flores and Ana Mio, of Centro Esperanza, and Savina Vargas and María Suclupe, members of the San Isidro Community Venture for the Development of Sustainable Agriculture (ECODAE) discuss how localization helped this rural community through severe flooding in 2017 and through food shortages caused by the pandemic and has made them an example other communities want to follow.

You can listen right here:

(Illustrations by Amanda Schutz. Read transcript here.)

Or you can tune in to Spotify (here) or Apple Podcasts (here) or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can listen to the episode in Spanish here.

Remember to follow or subscribe to listen to all the Season 2 episodes. You’ll hear stories from Cultural Seeds, Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund and Rayjon Share Care and their respective international and community partners.

Here are some ways you can help keep this important conversation about localization going:

• share this blog post on social media and with friends and family
• rate each podcast episode you listen to
• share your feedback, questions and comments (you can email them to info@heart-links.org)

Tapestry 2030 is a podcast and illustration series focused on the future of international cooperation and global solidarity, and the partnerships needed for gender transformative, sustainable development.

This season the focus is on “localization,” an approach to international cooperation that seeks to put greater control and direction in the hands of the people on the ground where development projects like the ones Heart-Links supports take place.

For Heart-Links’ episode, which will go to air in late May, we will sit down with Vitalina Flores and Ana Mio, of Centro Esperanza, and two representatives of San Isidro, to talk about how localization has been key to that community’s successes. With support from Centro Esperanza and Heart-Links, this community of rural farm workers has recovered from floods in 2017, navigated and survived the pandemic, incorporated sustainable farming methods and developed a community chicken hatchery.

Other organizations participating in Tapestry 2030 Season 2 are OCIC, the Primate’s World Development and Relief Fund, Rayjon Share Care of Sarnia and Cultural Seeds.

You can learn more about what to expect from this season by joining our virtual launch event this Thursday, March 24, at 9 a.m. (ET). Hear directly from participating organizations and our local partners as we talk about our episodes, localization and storytelling. We hope to see you there!

(Spanish-English interpretation will be provided.)

Our donors responded, and today María and her community are on their way to a thriving and sustainable business. Thanks to our donors, each family now has, on average, four laying hens and 21 chicks. They’ve even received an offer to buy 210 of their laying hens when they are ready to go to market.

There have been challenges: Power fluctuations (two communities share one power line) meant not all the eggs from the first round of incubation hatched. To improve outcomes, María took the lead in negotiating an independent power supply for their community with the municipality. She also invited the mayor to visit the new hatchery and he was so impressed, he waved the registration fee for installing a new power line.

Another challenge was the distance many community members had to walk in order to tend to their chicks, coralled at a central location, after they’d hatched. The solution was to house the chicks in smaller enclosures—one for every two houses—and keep them warm using biogas community members make themselves from manure.

To prevent disease Centro Esperanza, who runs the project, has enlisted a veterinary student to help community members vaccinate the chicks and teach them about appropriate nutrition at different stages of development and the importance of keeping the chicks’ pens clean.

San Idisro’s children are learning too.

Like María, many women in the community are eager to participate and learn more. They’ve asked Centro Esperanza to add public speaking to the workshops they will take so they can make their voices heard, in the community and beyond.

For these women and for María, your support has helped change their world.