e-Commerce Development for Latin American Artisans

As we hit the midpoint of the year, we can report on several important accomplishments.

We want to follow up with the tea about our website. Thank you all for giving us grace on how long it is taking to get the websites up and going. We would love for you to look at how we have streamlined the site to make it more user friendly and faster to navigate.

We have added new products and artisans, which will be highlighted in the next update of our website.

Meanwhile, I wanted to share stories about two of our partners.

Pedro learned to make barro negro, or black clay, pottery from his grandfather and father. It is made differently from the pottery we are most familiar with that uses a wheel. They take a special clay that is found in their region around Oaxaca, Mexico, and form it into molds to shape the piece. Once the clay dries a bit, they take it from the mold and then before it fully dries, they hand carve intricate designs onto it. The pieces become black when they are polished with pieces of quartz and placed in an oved and fully dried. Pedro had never sold a piece outside of the family shop until we arrived. Now he has learned how to properly pack his goods to prevent breakage, plan a schedule of what he will make to ensure the pieces are ready as needed, and to use a bank account for money transfers. These skills will be passed on to his children as time allows and we expect much more.

Lorena left the big city of San Jose to design print media in the smaller cities of northern Costa Rica. Although she was successful with her business, the pandemic stopped it all. During the downtime she decided to pursue her love of herbal products and began to make natural soaps, lotions, and spices from plants that she could find locally. She also took online courses and night classes to learn what she could not acquire from her mentors. Now she has a promising business and SoulGives is helping her with complying with governmental regulations regarding labelling, contents, and testing for sales outside of her country.

As we say, give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. But stay alongside and ensure he has and can use the equipment he really needs, he will feed himself, his family, and more for generations.

Financially, we have not yet generated sufficient funding to contract with consultants to establish our social media output. With your help, we look forward to the time when the people that are interested in sustainable hand-crafted products can find us.

Links:

• The SoulGives e-commerce website

2022 was an up-and-down year for our e-commerce project. There were several important accomplishments, but also disappointments.

The soulgives.org website was ported to a new platform that allowed us the ability to have as many products and variations as we would ever need. The new platform has more options for displaying products as well as attractive ways of telling the stories of our artisans and growers. We are in the process of developing new content and plan to have it available next quarter.

We added 9 new vendors bringing our total up to 16. There are three from Costa Rica, five from Mexico and one from Uganda. Already, women and families in these communities are learning how to become more efficient and business-savy. Their skills are amazing, and we hope you will check them out. Since they are paid nearly full price for their goods, we must resort to donations to fund web development, business needs, and community support.

On the downside, we had a social media reset. This caused us to loose traction we had in key areas as well as the following we worked hard to develop. We hope with your help we will quickly recover from this and initiate new marketing campaigns so the people that support artisan work, natural products, and stopping the inequitable wages of the people doing the work will find us and make a purchase or donation.

Our website is more than just a commerce site. In the past year we have added support to other nonprofit partners, including My360project.org, Transformacr.org, and HandsOfHope Uganda (hoha.org.ug). By coming alongside one another, we all grow.

Without your support we cannot share their stories to people who want to contribute to real change and your contributions help to maximize the return to these artisans and growers.

As the web presence develops, so can the livelihoods of these families who desperately want to leave poverty and are willing to lift themselves and their communities toward a sustainable future.