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  1. Tejiendo Futuros NGO

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    Tejiendo Futuros ONG (Weaving Futures NGO) was founded in 2018 in the municipality of Panajachel, Guatemala.

    It began in response to the deep needs of the local community. These challenges emerged because of structural violence, and the state having abandoned its people. This results in a lack of access to healthcare, education, decent housing, work and social inclusion. Panajachel is also a tourist destination, and this causes precarious work conditions for much of the population.

    Tejiendo Futuros seeks to overcome these challenges and meet local needs by developing a comprehensive work model focused on four priority issues: holistic education, agroecology, psychosocial care, and health.

    It currently:

    • Works with over fifty families
    • Provides education to nearly 100 children
    • Provides comprehensive health care
    • Develops agro-ecological production centres.

    Its holistic school, ‘The Tree of Childhood’, provides free education and food to children and adolescents to promote optimal learning conditions.

    Mothers and fathers receive psychosocial care through the ‘Strengthened Families’ programme. They work to eliminate negative behaviour patterns through workshops on self-esteem, new masculinities, responsible maternity/paternity and self-care.

    The ‘Healthy Mind, Healthy Body’ program constantly monitors the physical and mental state of their members and provides quality care to ensure their good health.

    The agroecological program, ‘KaUlew’ (Our Land in Cakchikel) promotes healthy lifestyles, responsible consumption, environmental awareness, entrepreneurship, and the rescue of ancestral productive practices.

  2. Tuq’tuquilal Regenerative Centre

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    Tuq’tuquilal was born in 2019 as a dream created by the founder and a local family, located in Lanquín, a warm subtropical rainforest territory guarded by the Q’eqchi Mayan people of Guatemala.

    This dream was co-created to form a holistic project that works to regenerate the land through artisanal production of cacao and other products, organic agriculture, and ecotourism.

    For Tuq’tuquilal, to regenerate is to repair the social, economic, and natural fabric we are immersed in locally, while facilitating opportunities for conscious cultural interchange and co-education. It focuses on repairing and innovating around:

    • The economy and health of the cocoa producing families, by offering the possibility of selling their cocoa at an increasingly fair price, integrated with educational processes.
    • The concept of identity and value that families have of their cocoa and culture through educational, organizational and identity processes.
    • Ways of inhabiting a space, proposing ways of life that transform the ecological footprint of those who inhabit the space in Tuq’tuquilal.
    • Agricultural alternatives based on permaculture applied to cocoa production plots and other productive systems.
    • Forms of artisanal production with the objective of not polluting, creating efficient processes, celebrating cultural ingenuity, and generating employment for families.
    • Social and economic fabric, seeking markets that integrate the valorization of family and field work, and fair and conscious trade in their work philosophy
  3. Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (IMAP)

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    Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (IMAP) started in 2000 in San Lucas Tolimán, on the shores of Lake Atitlán in the Mayan highlands of Guatemala.

    It was created by a group of Maya Kakchiquel folk with the desire to use native seeds, permaculture, traditional Indigenous knowledge and education to create social healing after 36 years of internal armed conflict that wiped out hundreds of communities and displaced millions from their land and disrupted the transfer of their culture and ancestral knowledge.

    IMAP was established to comprehensively address the poverty and malnutrition suffered by indigenous communities in the lake basin as well as throughout the Mesoamerican region, who were disportionately violated during the war and left largely dispossessed following the signing of peace. IMAP’s work revolves around providing communities with access to land, seeds, and excellent permaculture education.

    IMAP has trained more than 10,000 smallholder farmers in basic principles of agroecology and seed conservation, increasing the capacity of communities to adapt to climate variability and combating malnutrition by promoting food sovereignty and strengthening the local market.