Don't Forget About your Hometown

by Corbyn

Tequios (tech-key-os), 'is a form of communal work which is unpaid and done by community members for the public benefit.' Tequios, I learned today, is a rural indigenous custom that is still practiced in the Mexican state of Oaxaca where Plant With Purpose has worked for over 11 years. It is because this piece of cultural history is still in existence that Plant With Purpose has adapted its programs in Oaxaca to conform with the local tradition.

Every Tuesday at our office here in San Diego we have staff training. Today our training was led by Milmer Martinez Vergara, our Mexico and Haiti program officer. I was captivated as I sat and listened to the strategic thought process that our 16 Oaxacan staff go through to develop longterm relationships with the rural indigenous Mixteco people in 52 communities throughout Oaxaca.

It is always interesting to think about how I can take the stories and testimonies we receive from the field and translate them (figuratively) into dialogue that will be relevant and engaging here in the US. One thing that has become increasingly popular in conversation here in the United States is sustainability. Are we driving cars that emit less emissions, using energy more efficiently, looking for cleaner ways to power our cities, reusing everyday items like plastic bags and water bottles etc.? Well, sustainability is something that has been around since the beginning of time, and when we look at the situation in Oaxaca where families are being forced to migrate because they can no longer provide for their basic needs, we have to enter into a relationship that allows each party (Plant With Purpose and the farmers) to learn from each other and adapt.

Oaxaca has one of the highest migration rates of any Mexican state. Families are leaving the land they have grown up on for generations to try to find some other sort of opportunity. Take a look at this picture of a sign on the way out of one of the communities where we have started to work. It is a sobering reality of the situation in Oaxaca. Translated, the sign says, 'Thank you for your visit- if you emigrate, don't forget about your town.' Plant With Purpose is committed to being a part of the long term development in Oaxaca, and it is so encouraging

to see families benefitting and growing stronger in their communities as they partner with our organization. Whether it be greenhouses, family gardens, chicken and rabbit coops, ecological latrines, cisterns, business training, savings groups, tree nurseries, goat and sheep pins, or any other of the many programs that help families to have the ability to live sustainably and provide for the needs of their loved ones, there is a lot of good work that is being done in Oaxaca.

The programs have been developed specifically with the long term in mind, and they have used the cultural history of community (Tequios) that already exists in Oaxaca as the foundation to build upon. We have to thank those of you who are supporting the work in Oaxaca; without your commitment, the exciting advancements would not be possible.

We would love to have you join the transformation that is taking place. Through our Sponsor a Village program, for as little as $30 a month you can commit to supporting the work of an individual village in Oaxaca. You will receive updates and testimonies from families like Godofredo's (pictured here with his Wife Luisa and their three children) about the progress being made and the barriers being

overcome.

When you sign up to sponsor a village your recurring donation will be matched for an entire year, doubling your donation! Please take a look at the villages that are available for your partnership here.

Meatless Mondays

by Stephanie Rudeen

Nutrition is a vital component of Plant With Purpose’s programs in developing countries around the world. In Oaxaca, Mexico, one of the regions where Plant With Purpose works, a vast 76.9% of the population suffers from malnutrition and doctors estimate that as many as 90% of children younger than age five suffer from malnutrition due to the poor Mixteco diet. The devastating effects of malnutrition in children include stunted physical growth, arrested brain development, and inability of the body’s immune system to effectively combat disease.

We at Plant With Purpose are proud to share our school partnerships program in Oaxaca that helps spread valuable nutritional education and practice to children in Oaxaca. Plant With Purpose’s successful family gardens program has been incorporated into the curriculum of many of the local schools in Oaxaca. The family gardens project empowers women to set up family gardens composed of vegetables, medicinal plants, fruit trees, nitrogen-fixing trees, and small animals such as chickens, sheep, and rabbits. These family gardens diversify the family diet and help to reduce malnutrition among children. This successful and empowering program has now been applied to local Oaxaca schools through the creation of demonstration family garden plots.

Plant With Purpose has also teamed up with elementary schools to equip teachers to teach environmental education classes that supplement sustainable projects such as the family garden demonstration plot that the students can then implement at home. Students are taught how to grow a diverse supply of vegetables including onions, radishes, lettuce, chile, cilantro, cabbage, broccoli, green beans, and squash.

Many Oaxacan children have now been able to improve their nutrition and become more prepared for the future. Plant With Purpose hopes that this program will help the children of Oaxaca pass down the legacy of Plant With Purpose to their own children, even after Plant With Purpose is gone.

While the children of Oaxaca are learning the skills to improve their nutrition and their lives, what can you do? Of course, this transformation was only made possible by the continuous help and support of donors who care about community development and environmental restoration. Yet, while we often preach about the importance of nutrition and a healthy diet for individuals and communities in impoverished countries, how often do we actually practice what we preach?

That’s why I’m excited to branch out on my own journey towards a healthier me—a journey that can be easily replicated by any of you! Meatless Monday is an international campaign that encourages people to cut out meat on Mondays to improve their health and the health of the planet. Deciding not to eat meat once a week lessens the risk of chronic preventable illness and has a strong positive impact on the environment. Check out MeatlessMonday.com for more information!

I’m not a huge carnivore so I’m sure I will easily be able to overcome this challenge; yet, I view it as one step closer to a healthier me. Just as Plant With Purpose helps to transform lives in the communities where we work, try to take a moment and transform your own!

Oaxaca Wednesday: 2009 Highlights and Accomplishments

by Aly Lewis

For Oaxaca Wednesday I’d like to take a minute to share some stories and statistics from our life-changing program in Oaxaca, Mexico over the last year. I've been sending a lot of reports on our Oaxaca program to foundations who've funded us, and, believe me, there is some exciting stuff going on that I just have to share with you.

In 2009 Plant With Purpose expanded its transformational work to four new communities and partnered with 140 new families, working with a total of 540 families in 48 villages in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca.

Plant With Purpose Oaxaca was able to not only continue to provide life-giving assistance to current Plant With Purpose farmers and their families, but also to join with additional families and scale up many of our critical projects, such as family gardens and cistern construction. We have been delighted to watch families experience improved quality of life as they are empowered to become agents of change in their own communities.

Here are some of our program highlights for the year:

• Greatly expanding our family garden program--we were able to help families establish 111 more gardens than we did last year!

• Placing a greater focus on cistern construction, a more expensive but incredibly valuable investment in the health and wellbeing of the farmers. 10 new cisterns were built throughout the year to capture and store rainwater for household and agricultural use.

• Facilitating 14 environmental education classes in primary schools. Through these workshops students learn valuable skills and creation care principles. Students also participated in environmental projects firsthand through demonstration projects that included the use of cisterns to capture rainwater, a vegetable garden plot, and an on-site tree nursery to produce tree seedlings for reforestation efforts.

• Establishing 3 new revolving loan fund groups. In addition to granting loans and providing a safe place for group members to store their savings, these groups also serve as a platform to teach women to improve their reading, writing, and math skills, building their capacity and self-confidence.

• Expanding the reach of our discipleship program by more than doubling the number of Festival of Values events we facilitated in local schools and expanding the “Church, Community, and Change” project to the village Rio Yutanume.

We're inspired by the transformation taking place in our Oaxaca program and look forward to sharing with you even more stories of our progress and accomplishments over the next year.

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Aly Lewis is Plant With Purpose’s Grant Writer. She researches funding opportunities, writes proposals, and submits progress reports on funding received. She also writes the content for Plant With Purpose's Sponsor A Village program.

San Diego's Victory Garden

Posted by Colin Richard- Plant With Purpose's Haiti Relief Intern

Last night I had the opportunity to celebrate the first birthday of an amazing local organization called ‘Victory Gardens San Diego’. Named after the ‘victory garden’ movement (promoted by the US government during the First and Second World Wars to free up needed domestic resources), their company overview on their Facebook page sums up the gist of what they do:

Victory Gardens San Diego (VGSD) is an official project of San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project, a nonprofit network of citizens, farmers, chefs, gardeners, teachers, and students working to encourage the growth and consumption of regional food. In collaboration with local gardening, food and community groups, VGSD supports people throughout San Diego County in growing food closer to where they eat through education, mentorship, and material resources.

Celebrating at ‘The Linkery’, a very cool local restaurant, it was great to see some familiar faces from last Sunday. A group of us had volunteered to help VGSD do what it does best: install, often in just half a day, a garden in a yard or other such space where there previously was none. It is a great way to get involved locally with an activity similar to one that Plant With Purpose does abroad: promoting local food production in the form of small-scale, often backyard agriculture, and thereby helping to promote food security, community health and economic development.

As the bare patch of earth was transformed into a garden, the dozen or so of us had a great time working together, getting to know each other, and enjoying a sense of accomplishment for what we had done. Cedar fencing lumber became raised-bed gardening containers, soil and compost were blended to fill them, and drip irrigation was installed. Seedling vegetable starts were planted, and everyone left by mid-day a winner: we volunteers with the feeling of satisfaction for having worked hard to serve our neighbor, and the family with their dream of a garden fulfilled. I look forward to working with them again in the future, and invite you to check them out as well at http://www.victorygardenssandiego.com/index.html.

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Colin Richard has volunteered many hours at Plant With Purpose over the last few years and has served as our Haiti Relief Intern since the earthquake on January 12. Recently Colin said, "Henry David Thoreau once wrote, 'There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one hacking at the root'. I’m proud to be part of organization that is “hacking at the roots” of poverty and not just the “branches”, holistically empowering the rural poor of the developing world to be agents of change in their communities."

Oaxaca Wednesday: Food for Families

by Aly Lewis

For Oaxaca Wednesday I’d like to tell you about my favorite Plant With Purpose project: family gardens. Family gardens grab me from the get-go. I like families. I like gardens. What’s not to like?

What is a family garden?, you ask. Well, a family garden in the Plant With Purpose context is a small vegetable plot that families (usually women) garden in order to provide food for their families and income from the vegetables they sell. These gardens consist of vegetables, medicinal plants, fruit trees, nitrogen-fixing trees, and small animals such as chickens, sheep and rabbits.

For this project, Plant With Purpose teaches women how to create gardens that will diversify the family diet, better use the limited space available for growing food, and improve the fertility and production capacity of their plots. Our agronomist, Raul, conducts the training on topics such as composting and fertilizing, grafting, crop rotation, animal care, soil preparation, nitrogen-fixing plants, harvesting, and food storage. Plant With Purpose also partners with local health clinics, which have unmatched credibility in rural areas, to conduct nutrition seminars. Those topics include the importance of having a balanced diet and the nutritional value of vegetables.

Since the first family vegetable gardens were implemented in Oaxaca in 2002, hundreds of Mixteco families have benefited from the increased nutrition of a more varied diet. Four hundred and fifty-four family gardens have been established to date, producing a wide variety of vegetables supplemented by proteins from meats.

This all sounds well and good—because it is—but I didn’t understand the radical impact of this project until I visited Oaxaca and saw for myself what a difference they’re making in the lives of the farmers and their families. Without family gardens, most farmers only grow corn and beans, meaning they’ll only have corn and beans to eat unless they produce enough to sell extra. If that doesn’t sound unvaried enough, last year a drought caused farmers’ corn and bean crops to fail—dead cornstalks haunted the steep hillsides—and the price of corn and beans skyrocketed. Farmers didn’t grow enough to eat or sell and they couldn’t even afford to buy their staple crops. Even before the drought, doctors estimated that as many as 90% of Mixteco children younger than 5 years old suffer from malnutrition. The devastating effects of malnutrition include stunted physical growth, arrested brain development, and inability of the body’s immune system to effectively combat disease.

But there is hope. Plant With Purpose’s family garden projects make a huge difference in the lives of these children who would otherwise only have corn and beans to eat. To combat drought, Plant With Purpose works with families to construct cisterns to collect and store rainwater during the rainy season so that there is water available to nourish the plots and ensure vegetables—and improved nutrition—year round!

So there you have it, my favorite Plant With Purpose project. Families. Gardens. Improved nutrition. Better lives. What’s not to like?

To donate toward family gardens and help a family improve their nutrition and quality of life, Click here.

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Aly Lewis is Plant With Purpose’s Grant Writer. She researches funding opportunities, writes proposals, and submits progress reports on funding received. She also writes the content for Plant With Purpose's Sponsor A Village program.

Be Choosy and Give to Specific Plant With Purpose Projects

by Aly Lewis

We all like options and for those of you with a penchant for both selectivity and specificity, the Plant With Purpose website has plenty of choices when it comes to helping out with PWP’s programs.  Not only can you give directly to a specific village (I sponsor Los Mogotes, DR), you can also give to specific aspects of our holistic development work.  If you cruise through our Sim City-esque Grow A Village pages, you can select our cute little icons (my favorite is the “farmer in action”) to learn more about specific projects such as Latrines, Business Skills and Loan Management Training, and Animal Husbandry. 

For example, for $30 per month you can help a community establish Family Gardens. Donating a family garden is a great way to make a huge difference in the quality of life of an entire family. The typical family garden usually provides enough for a family to feed themselves and have extra left over to sell. We teach families sustainable agriculture techniques to maximize productivity of their land, as well as what crops to plant to maximize nutrition. Family gardens improve health by decreasing food-born illness and by providing another source of income. Your donation to family gardens will improve the livelihood of an entire family and every recurring donation will be matched for the first year, doubling your impact!!

Another great project is our Women’s Empowerment fund. Numerous studies have shown that investing in women's education and development goes farther and accomplishes more than an equal investment in men. Evidence from micro-credit lending, for example, indicates that women have superior repayment rates, invest more productively, and are more risk-averse than men in similar situations. PWP helps empower women by establishing community banks and investing in women’s enterprise and artisan groups.  A recurring donation of $30 (or more!) per month toward Women’s Empowerment will impact an entire community by equipping women to pull themselves out of poverty and transform their lives and the lives of their families. 

Whether you’re interested in something tangible like Cisterns or something slightly more elusive such as contributing to Restored Relationships or Keeping A Family Together, there’s something for everyone on the PWP site.  So please be choosy, we don’t mind. 

To check out all of our life-changing projects, visit our Grow A Village pages and select away!