Awamaki Journal: A Blog About Textiles, Travel and the Sacred Valley – tagged "International Development"

Jun 27, 2018

Posed to Empower

Posed to EmpowerBy Elizabeth Salley, Marketing and Communications Intern “Okay, it´s time for affirmations! Find a partner!” Ginette Collin announces. The room becomes a flurry of movement as the artisans pair up and giggle. At first, some of the women are quiet, but within the next few minutes, the meeting is full of arms waving in the air and voices calling out phrases like, ¨I have energy!” or “I am incredible!” in Spanish and Quechua. This exercise is one of the many in a new workshop series for financial literacy and life skill training, developed in partnership with PurpleLily, a...

Jan 06, 2016

How Do You Say "Empowerment" in Quechua?

Jessa Pillipow is a former Awamaki volunteer who wrote this SCIC Blog post about her project with us. Volunteer Jessa spent six months with Awamaki in 2014. During her time with us, she led a project to develop and teach an empowerment workshop to the women’s cooperatives. Her goal was...

Jun 01, 2015

Keeping it Kind: The Awamaki Rotation System

by Gillian Fitzpatrick, Monitoring & Evaluation Intern Three years ago, Awamaki discovered distinct differences in income amongst women in the Patacancha cooperative. Quick to fix the issue, we introduced our rotation system. From the collected income data in 2013 and 2014 of the Patacancha cooperative members, it was shown that...

May 19, 2015

Knitter trainings in Rumira

by Gillian Fitzpatrick, M&E Intern Awamaki’s most advanced knitting cooperative, the Virgen del Carmen knitting cooperative in Rumira, has been attending business training workshops. The workshops are designed to give the women the skills they need to graduate from our impact model program into their own autonomous organization. They will...

May 19, 2015

Introducing the Impact Model

by Laura Brokaw, Volunteer and Tourist Coordinator A few years ago, Awamaki faced a tough question. Since our founding, we had focused on increasing the women’s income. To do this, we taught the women to make beautiful things, and sold those things to retail stores in the U.S. This made...

Dec 02, 2014

Mapping Patacancha

By Merel Haverhals, Monitoring & Evaluations Volunteer Last weekend I joined a team of two other volunteers and the Awamaki Tourism Coordinator, Giulia, to complete a GPS mapping project. We journeyed to Patacancha, the community of the oldest and largest of our five cooperatives of female artisans, to conduct surveys...

Nov 07, 2014

Managing Finances in Puente Inca

By Erin Faltermeier, Sustainable Tourism Volunteer Maritza and Judi have always been leaders in their cooperative and their community. Now, they are leading their fellow knitters to business independence, starting with learning to manage the Puente Inca cooperative’s finances. Over the past few months, Maritza and Judi have assumed responsibility...

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