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.

Asociación Civil Esperanza (ACIES) works in two locations in the province of Cajamarca: the rural village of Pomabamba and a marginal urban neighbourhood called Quiritimayo.

In Pomabamba, Heart-Links’ donors fund a project with 13 Indigenous women from the community who meet together weekly to share experiences, learn from each other and offer mutual support. They are also developing and applying their skills as knitters to produce crafts to supplement their incomes.

The women recently signed a contract to sell the nativity figures they knit in Germany.

ACIES works with children in both Pomabamba and Quiritimayo, providing afterschool activities that support learning which incorporates Indigenous and community knowledge and values. Using recycled materials, the children made books on different themes to learn about themselves and the world around them: myself, my family, my community, my animals, health and nutrition, and my school.

In this video, some of the children show their books:

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.

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.

The goal? To enlist men and boys in the struggle to end violence against women by promoting concepts of masculinity that embrace relationships of equality and respect.

“We start by recognizing that in the matter of gender-based violence, the ones who suffer most from it are women, and the people who perpetrate this violence are mostly men,” says project coordinator Anthony Peña Flores. In the interview, Anthony describes how one young man overcame homophobic misconceptions and learned that its’ okay, even good for you, to show emotion and tenderness to other men.

Topics addressed in the masculinities workshops include the social and cultural roots of machismo, what gender-base violence is and how to eradicate it from personal relationships, fatherhood, sexuality and managing emotions, and violence against women in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Marleny Constantino Lucumí, who coordinates programs to end gender-based violence at Centro Santa Angela, acknowledged that achieving gender equality is an uphill battle. The empowerment of women is also key. “It’s difficult, but not impossible,” she say. “It’s a matter of advancing little by little so that women come to understand their rights . . . and how to defend them.”

Heart-Links board director Sara Alva Lizarraga agrees that the kind of changes Heart-Links projects support do not happen overnight. Yet the projects Heart-Links finances with the donations we receive often lead to larger changes down the road. “It’s great for us to see how this seed we have supplied begins to grow and to generate programs that become self-sustaining,” she says.

You can watch the whole interview below. Follow the instructions to add English subtitles.

If you’d like to watch more news from Correo Canadiense, subscribe to their YouTube channel here.

Heart-Links is grateful to the Cambia Development Foundation for their financial support of the Men for Gender Equality project.

Early projects focused on developing women-led spaces such as the community kitchens in Zaña. In these spaces, women supported each other and took on leadership roles.

As conditions in northern Peru changed, the projects Heart-Links supported also changed. But our commitment to promoting gender equality and ending gender-based violence did not.

Empowerment, leadership training, income generation and skills development for women and girls are still a top priority. In recent years, Heart-Links has also started supporting projects that work with men to end gender-based violence and discrimination.

Run by Heart-Links’ partner Centro Santa Angela and financed by Cambia Development Foundation, this work with men is breaking new ground in Peru. A permanent network of men who support gender equality was created in Chiclayo and this network has connected with others in the region and across Latin America.

Men who participate learn about the social and cultural roots of machismo, what gender-base violence is and how to eradicate it from their own relationships, paternal responsibility, sexuality and managing emotions and, most recently, violence against women in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To reach other men as well, they are developing videos, radio spots, and a teaching guide for use in high school. As one of the young men in the video above says, “This is a place where you can remake yourself in ways that are more just, more equal, showing more empathy, able to show your emotions.”

You can follow the network on Facebook.

Last week, Heart-Links’ partner Centro Santa Angela held an online forum with educators, counselors and community workers to look at ways to address the problem in the communities in northern Peru where they work. The event forms part of the project Men for Gender Equality financed by Heart-Links’ donors.

Called Men at Home: Masculinity and Gender-Based Violence in Times of Coronavirus, the forum examined why men are becoming more violent during lockdown and how to help them manage their anger and other emotions during this time without turning to violence.

Participants also spoke about the opportunities for personal growth the lockdown offers men. Men who normally spend their days away from home are seeing up close the work involved in keeping house and caring for children. Men can assume their share of household chores and spend time with their children, caring for them and helping them with their schoolwork. “There’s an opportunity here for developing more equal and healthier relationships,” said forum leader Yair Vásquez.

Participants will take the tools learned during the forum back to the communities and groups of men they work with and apply them in their own lives as well.

Seven women in Peru have been killed by men since the state of emergency was declared on March 15. In the same period, the offices of the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations has responded to 1,585 reports of violence against women and 704 reports of violence against children.