Newsletter 2021

Thank you for a successful year!

Here comes a small update from ECOespiral and our projects in Guatemala.

It has, as you probably understand, been a tough year for us at ECOespiral as the COVID situation has affected Guatemala tremendously. However, we have made the best out of the situation and would like to look back at 2021 as a successful year. Our projects have still been rolling as planned with some slight changes when it comes to the amount of participants in each workshop.

Our main projects this year have been to continue building our development center, which is now up and running with an amazing garden and a protection fence, as well as building our family food gardens. The latter will be further explained in this newsletter. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Fitness24Seven for their support with 25 additional family food gardens in addition to the 20 other ones that we constructed during 2020.

Additionally, we have involved more people in our organization, and we are happy to announce that Issa Daniela Secaira Mancía and the social media expert Beliza Ruiz Matamoros are now part of our team. Issa has a lot of experience working with permaculture and building family food gardens, which is very useful for our current and upcoming work.

Family food garden project

Two years ago, we initiated the family food garden project, where we support single mothers in setting up their own food gardens in order to feed their kids with nutritious food. The program that they participate in, which includes five workshops, teaches them how to manage a garden in terms of cultivation, harvest and general maintenance.  

Impact

So far we have set up 45 food gardens and it has been a highly appreciated project. The project contributes to strengthening food security and food sovereignty along with spreading knowledge about nutritious diets. Another positive aspect of the project, that has been highlighted by its participants, is the relationships and the community that has been created through the workshops.

Challenges

The last two years have been especially challenging due to the Covid pandemic. Mothers need to bring their children to the workshops, which raises the number of participants that due the risk of spreading the virus has needed to be kept down. This has led to postponement of workshops and countless creative solutions. Although, we have managed and are very happy with the outcome of the projects. Another challenge that we are still coping with is the access to water in order to sustain the gardens. We are currently exploring several water retention systems, and we have found one that we believe has a lot of potential to be implemented during 2022. Today, the families need to walk long distances to find water, and the garden requires a lot of water to be sustained. We are using permaculture techniques for the garden to require as little water as possible, but we still need to find a better solution for the water accessibility.

Plans for the coming year

We have big plans for 2022! We have seen that our family food garden project is extremely appreciated, and many of the women who are participating in the project with their children have shown an appreciation in a way that we have never experienced in previous projects. We feel that we have found a winning concept where we really make a difference for these families, and will therefore continue to do similar projects next year to improve the situation for additional families. 

As one of the challenges in our garden project is to find water to sustain the gardens, this will be a big focus for us during next year. We will also have a bigger focus on growing edible mushrooms as a sustainable source of protein, vitamins and minerals and will complement the rest of the garden well. It will also strengthen the resilience and better growth of the trees as it creates a network and exchange of nutrients in the earth.

We will additionally continue developing our Development Center during next year. The forest garden as well as the chicken house is finished, but we are also planning to build a workshop area for indoor classes when we hold our ordinary creative workshops for kids and women.

In order to finance these projects, we will continue working on fundraising through selling our bracelets, company and private donations and applying for grants.

We would like to thank you for your support so far, and hope that you want to continue following our work!

With love,
Sofie, Sabina and Marietta