“I grew up in between two nations,” Guadalupe shares as we sip coffee in the office of Asociación de Mujeres (AMA), the community development organization she played a role in founding. She is referencing more than the influence of two distinct cultures, though also relevant to her upbringing. She hails from an indigenous community physically split by the border drawn between Mexico and Guatemala, her grandparents’ generation told some were to henceforth be Mexican, some to be Guatemalan.

Years would pass before Guadalupe would start AMA with her partner and a handful of others, but the organization would be marked by the suspension between worlds that touched Guadalupe's story and shapes much of the cultural landscape of Guatemala today. The country, though dwarfed by its northern neighbors in land mass, retains a stronger indigenous influence than most of the Americas, with 23 individual indigenous languages still actively spoken. Still, Guatemalans today grew up attending school in Spanish and under the influence of Catholic mission work. It’s not uncommon to encounter individuals who practice both Maya spirituality and faithfully attend mass, an integration of practices rather than an abandonment of either. Guadalupe describes her own family as embracing “both and everything”—her grandmother was kicked out of the Catholic church for clinging to Maya rituals but still lit incense to pray to Saint James on her own time.

It’s within this context that AMA operates, holding both the indigenous and latin influences in the same hand as they seek to do the grassroots work of community organizing. Although AMA is almost entirely run by Guatemalan women, Guadalupe’s husband and co-founder, Ben, is American, and has been influential in building the network of support that financially sustains the work. This has been largely facilitated through Highland Support Project (HSP), the Richmond-based sister organization and funder that does similar work with indigenous communities throughout the United States. In partnership with HSP, AMA regularly hosts groups of visitors from the U.S., adding a complex dynamic of cross-cultural engagement to their work. On the surface, leveraging American church and school groups for funding, visits, and some degree of labor looks like a familiar model. But for AMA, the intent is to build meaningful, reciprocal relationships that can right power and resource disparities, not reinforce them. Groups serve as a source of financial support for the work in Guatemala and cultural education for the visitors. The trips are intricately designed to confront preconceived notions and challenge the way “mission trips” have often reinforced harmful power dynamics.

The staff and ethos of the organization are rooted in critique of traditional approaches to aid and development, and the power dynamics it creates. As their programs demonstrate, the model is entirely dictated by what beneficiaries expressly need and can play a role in manifesting. In this too, AMA exists in tension: How to do work in a region that bears the scars of colonialism, with assistance from the same powers that perpetuated harm? How to help, without getting in the way? Can it even be done? These are the questions the organization’s model seeks to answer, and they’re questions relevant to the international community as a whole, at a time when interconnected aid and support is being forced to scale back. What makes AMA’s work compelling is that they may have found a way to successfully exist in the balance of these many worlds.

Antonieta found herself in front of 20 women she’d managed to assemble in her home, crowded into an assortment of chairs and spots on the floor. Many women juggled multiple children, with babies crying for attention; others shot her looks of skepticism as they watched to see what would unfold. In the months preceding, Antonieta had worked to convince AMA to form a women’s circle in her town of Bella Vista, just outside of Quetzaltenango. She’d learned of the organization when a women’s circle was formed in a neighboring village and women began to have stoves installed in their homes.

As part of AMA’s organizing strategy, the initial incentive to join a circle is to receive, in due time, a stove for your home. The iron slab is affixed to a brick firebox, with an opening to stoke the fire, and a chimney that channels the smoke out of the home. This allows women to cook faster, returning valuable time back into their days, but it’s also an urgent matter of health. Cooking over an open fire can generate household air pollution and cause respiratory disease for the women spending hours bent over the open flame and smoke. If there’s a child crawling nearby or strapped to her mother’s back, they’re at risk of related illness as well. Around the world, household air pollution caused by open air cooking is associated with 6.7 million premature deaths a year—so a stove is a potentially life saving fixture of the home.

Initially drawn by the potential of a stove, wives and mothers experience the support system of a community of women, all facing similar challenges. Together, they discuss the skills they’d like to learn or projects they’d like to pursue, and AMA helps facilitate. All of AMA’s other work—skills training, ecological programming, building schools or wells—stems from what women explicitly discuss in their women’s circle. This approach to development work empowers beneficiaries with decision-making instead of asserting a program onto a population. Their empowerment work is grassroots, starting with a handful of mothers and wives packed into someone’s living room.

For Antonieta, she knew this was the sort of organizing she wanted to see in the place where she lived. An outsider to Bella Vista, Antonieta grew up in a town closer to the city. She spent her youth and early adulthood involved in efforts to empower women, socially and economically. She was an active participant of trainings or workshops oriented to her personal development, and held strong convictions around the role of women in a community. She married a man who appreciated her strength, and together they returned to his hometown, Bella Vista. Further removed from urban life, Antonieta found the adjustment difficult. Men wielded more control over their wives’ decisions, and the opportunities for women to step into leadership were limited. AMA emerged as a vehicle for her to step into her calling.

Antonieta came to appreciate that the real power of the women’s circle lies not in meeting material needs, but in the psycho-emotional healing that takes place. This is baked into the groups in both subtle and overt ways, with group therapy and sessions on self-worth central to the programming. It’s also found in the transformative power of relationships with other women, the chance to take responsibility and be in charge of projects, to see yourself as a leader and decision-maker.

“Even though sometimes I got a little stuck when I spoke,” Antonieta remembers back to her early meetings facilitating women’s circles, “I kept going. And it was working.” The values she was working to instill in other women, she grew in experiencing herself: “They taught me a lot about self-esteem, about self-respect as a woman,” She shares, “[as a woman] you also have a voice and a vote to defend yourself and speak up.” She’s remained involved in AMA for over a decade, and now holds the position of Vice President of the Board of Directors. Understanding her leadership now, she reflects, “I'm not afraid anymore like I used to be. I no longer feel like I don't belong.”

Lesly Bravo, a current AMA Social Promoter responsible for leading women’s circles, describes what it’s like when those moments of communal healing take place: “There are many women who start crying, who find themselves and are liberated. They forgive themselves and come to love themselves.” She sees this as the most critical function of the organization, identifying what women need most as, “to be heard, to be listened to, to receive lots of affection, lots of love.” 

The greatest barrier to getting women to attend, however, lies in the opinions of husbands. Antoineta initially experienced this even in her own marriage, her husband feeling jealous of her time and uncertain she should be stepping into such community leadership with other women. She faced his pushback boldly: "You knew that I was doing all these things before we got married,” she reminded him, “and I want to continue and bring all these things happening here in the community for the benefit of the women and the community itself." Like many of the husbands, he came to see how Antoineta’s work with AMA benefitted the family. She learned how to cook traditional meals and make handicrafts that brought in extra income, as well as gaining skills for managing children and the home. Most of the women who participate in the circles aren’t trying to live a life outside of their domestic, communal role, but they want to do so well, and with agency. Watching this first hand enables the men to understand the benefit of their wives’ participation.

“I saw that women often [needed] their husband’s permission to go out. So I said to them, ‘But why? You're not going to do anything wrong. You're going to learn from other people,’” Antoineta shares impassionedly. “AMA has taught us a lot of things and given us a lot of leadership training about women's rights and the rights of children. So I started telling them that they shouldn't let themselves be treated that way…” Even as she makes the argument in our conversation, her skills in persuasion and leadership are evident. “So, I tell them that it's true, we have to respect our husbands, but they also have to respect us, because if they have the freedom to go out then we do too, because we are going to learn something for ourselves and for our families.”

With the women’s circles as the starting point, the scope of material projects the organization takes on is vast. The community in Twi’Ninwitz had identified, even prior to any connection to AMA, a need for a school. It was an issue of safety: children had to travel a long distance and cross a busy street to get to the nearest available school. The project was spearheaded by community leaders Don Marcos and Doña Nicolasa. AMA’s model necessitates total collaboration with a community, and entails an extensive evaluative period before such a major project can move forward. But the community was intent on seeing it to fruition. AMA worked with a stateside partner to help fund the project: a Virginia-based church that has continued to regularly visit the community over the past 15 years of their involvement. The established plan was for the church to fund a classroom, and then for the community to fund a classroom, alternating fronting the financial burden until the school was complete. Community members additionally provided labor to help build the facility.

Don Marcos, now on the board overseeing the school, recalls families showing up for the construction as an act of faith, believing something good would come from their labor. Requiring this degree of support from community members ensures the project is something that genuinely has broad buy-in, and is a project they’re ready to own once it’s off the ground. Today, six of the eight classrooms plus a kitchen are complete, and the school yard is abuzz with children laughing and launching soccer balls across the pavement. The children enjoy nutritious meals safely prepared over an AMA-provided stove, and are taught by teachers from the city.

From the start, the school should’ve been the prerogative of the municipality, but political and bureaucratic obstacles forced the Don Marcos and Doña Nicolasa to look beyond institutional means of support. AMA practices the concept of accompaniment, helping individuals or communities navigate pre-existing but complicated or threatening systems, where the presence of solidarity makes all the difference. For the Twi’Ninwitz school, AMA Social Promoter, Lesly, traveled with the school’s committee members to Guatemala City to petition for official recognition, a process where persistence and refusal to give up won them their demands. With this recognition came the provision of teachers from the state.

This process of accompaniment has been critical in other projects, like helping the Pasacuach community attain sanitation. An ongoing project that’s become the joint jurisdiction of AMA and the state, with a bit of advocacy on AMA’s part, will install running water and a sewage system in the new location of the community. The entire population collectively relocated two years ago, emblematic of internal displacement that’s relatively common in Guatemala. The factors are multifaceted—the country is still healing from a drawn out civil war and residual violence, is facing the effects of full-fledged climate change, and experiences corporate and imperial extraction of land. Whatever the cause may be for Pasacuach, previous work with AMA led them to reach out for support during the transition. Knowledgeable in the complex processes behind building infrastructure, AMA’s accompaniment has allowed the community to build a school and work towards sanitation.

In both examples, entire communities have witnessed female leadership in action, through both the AMA staff and the leaders that rise up through the women’s circles. This is an intentional leveraging of soft power, transforming collective understanding of what women are capable of through example. The heart of AMA’s work is empowering women, which requires shaping both communal and internalized ideas.

Highlighting indigenous connection and influence is an easy way to situate your organization as compelling to a progressive demographic of funders, but for AMA, emphasizing this component of their work without authentic teaching by indigenous leaders would be another form of extraction and exploitation. Audelino Sac Coyoy, a member of the Maya K'iche', is a spiritual leader who sits on an advisory team for AMA.

A self-identified critic of non-profit work, specifically any organization associated with the West, Audelino has found AMA to be different. “I grew up here in the urban area of Quetzaltenango, and we attended the official education system,” he explains. “That [system] made us give up our cultural and ancestral practices, even to despise and disparage them. But in our home, our ancestors continued to strengthen us.”

Audelino’s own journey in Western-influenced education led him to disregard his inherited culture for a time, struggling to navigate an identity split in two, sharing, “We had to live two types of personalities. One was our cultural identity, which we practiced at home and in our community, and the other was the official identity imposed on us by the state, which we practiced at school and in front of society in general.” His role in the community is understood as “Counter of Days,” a role relatively comparable to a priest within Christianity, and he understands this calling as equipping people to dignify all aspects of their identity.

“Dignifying people begins with making them believe that they are valuable as individuals,” Audelino shares. He sees this ingrained in AMA’s work. It begins with the women’s circles, where women are encouraged to understand themselves as important and valuable despite whatever society has condemned them to. There’s a gender component at play, but also a cultural degradation of their ways of life and tradition. “[Dignity] is contrary to what we were taught by our education system, the government, and the Church,” Audelino shares about the collective deference to Western norms instead of inherited tradition.

Audelino is involved with the cultural exchange and service groups AMA hosts, understanding the second part of his calling as translating his culture for outsiders. He wants to share the universal values of his way of life with others, and teach them about how to understand and appreciate Maya culture, and indigenous ways of thinking more broadly. On AMA’s alignment with his own framework, he shares, “This is why I support the work… that people feel proud of their culture, of speaking their language, of practicing their philosophy or religion, of wearing their traditional clothing, which has deep philosophical and spiritual symbolism for them.” He sees the AMA staff doing this work on the ground, managing resources in a way that empowers local communities and limits overhead costs as much as possible. “And AMA and HSP have accompanied these processes in the field with the people, not from the office,” he emphasizes.

The traditional textiles provide a particularly strong example of how the dual empowerment of women and indigenous teaching are interwoven—literally, in this case. The Pixan Program was launched to give women the opportunity to learn skills in weaving traditional textiles, whether for the first time or to advance their knowledge. The AMA-run store in Quetzaltenango and its partner store AlterNatives in Richmond sell the products—seen by some as handicrafts, but more aptly appreciated as works of art.

Catarina, a former participant who now runs the store, introduces us to Isabel. Inside Isabel’s home, her wooden loom creates a sculptural background for the threads she’s expertly, and with great exertion of effort, weaving into a garment. This one is going to be for herself, a more expensive blouse than she’d be able to afford if she couldn’t make it. She explains, with Catarina translating from Isabel’s native tongue into Spanish, that her husband works gigs and their income is inconsistent. He’s able to buy her the thread she works with, and in addition to creating things for the family, she’s able to sell some of what she makes in AMA’s store to generate additional income. In this manner, these skills serve Isabel and other women on multiple levels: offsetting an expense, some income generation, and retaining a traditional knowledge.

Isabel describes the weaving as a therapeutic practice, one she can turn to when she’s experiencing tension or trouble in the family. “I pour my emotions into the textile,” she shares, “and I find relief in what I’m feeling and in my heart.” Catarina emphasizes the technical and artistic skill necessary to execute at such a high level: “It requires a level of concentration that makes them forget what's happening on the outside,” Catarina explains, drawing on her conversations with women and her own experience with the craft. Even as it provides some relief from daily challenges, it also anchors them in sacred tradition and story. “The designs have different meanings, and they represent a lot about the cosmos,” she explains. “They represent everything in nature—the sun, the moon, the elements. And they tell a story.” She goes on to explain that regionally there are different patterns and designs, and the textiles provide a sort of cultural language to echo the histories of different communities. For Catarina, it’s the individual’s touch that gives each piece its value, indigenous stories given new life by the hand of the artist.

The people-centered orientation of AMA’s work is best displayed in the stories of their staff. Almost all of the women who work at the organization engaged with it first as beneficiaries and have experienced its transformative power first-hand. Lesly came into the work at the invitation of her cousin, Guadalupe.

Lesly leads a number of the active women’s circles, accompanies communities like Twi’Ninwitz and Pasacuach in advocating for their needs, and has dreamed up new projects related to land and food. Yet when she describes her early years at AMA, she uses language like “reserved” and “unsure of herself,” completely unrecognizable from the Lesly you would find at work today. Guadalupe knew her cousin sold traditional handbags and offered to sell some in the AMA store. The invitation to sell felt like recognition that, at least in some small way, she had something to offer—and that was an entry point.

Like many families in Guatemala, Lesly’s family history is marked by the trauma of the civil war and ensuing violence. That deep wound of suffering in combat is often transmitted today in the form of domestic violence, women and children taking the brunt of the blow. Lesly bravely shares her own story as a way of connecting with the women she serves and offering them hope. She lost her father during the civil war, and was left to uncles who would ultimately abuse her.

“I always found pain, resentment, and a lot of feelings inside me,” she explains of her trauma during all the years it went unaddressed. “But since I came to AMA, I was able to forgive myself and overcome. Through the therapy we provide and the support we give to women, I was able to forgive myself. And through the presence of being able to support other women, you do feel that you can have your mind and spirit and be physically well.” I wanted to understand why, as a victim of violence, she needed forgiveness. She explained, “I had lived in that past, I lived in that moment [of suffering]. I was always in pain, always remembering, reliving it, feeling it... I didn't have a life.” When you watch Lesly command a room today, entire communities looking to her for leadership, it’s easy to see: Lesly has a life now, and it is rich and full.

There is a moment in AMA’s store where Antonieta and Guadalupe pose together for a photo, each leaning into the other’s embrace with a trust that is many years-long. They’re standing in front of beautifully woven tapestries, facilitated by Lesly’s circles and all managed and sold by Catarina. It’s this image that’s on my mind—women who’ve accomplished so much in service of others—when Lesly beams: “I always believed that I couldn't... I was always taught that I was good for nothing. And now look where I am.” In the vast disparity of culture and experience AMA seeks to reconcile together, the new world is already being woven.