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.

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.

Centro Santa Angela’s work to “green” urban neighbourhoods in José Leonardo Ortíz has moved to the neglected and underserved pueblo joven of San Miguel, whose public park had barely a single plant growing in it when the project started last year.

Centro Santa Angela runs programs in the neighbourhood for children, youth and adults, to teach them about the importance of protecting our environment as well as what they can do to help. Participants in these programs develop their own environmental initiatives, such as cleaning garbage from their streets, reducing and recycling, planting trees and community gardens or rescuing parks. They also promote good practices among their peers. Thirty families have organized into 9 block committees dedicated to caring for and improving their immediate environment.

As one participant says, “It’s given us the opportunity to learn, to make the authorities aware of us, to form new friendships, improve our relationships and make our community beautiful with parks and gardens so our families have a healthy environment.”

San Miguel’s sucesses have inspired community members next door in San Beatriz—El Palmo to get involved too. Centro Santa Angela will continue to work in San Miguel throughout 2023.

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:

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.