Women Empowerment

We want to share with you the progress we achieved in our project “Give 8 women a work opportunity” during the last four months.

We developed and carried out a series of eight workshops with eight mothers who participated per group. They were coordinated by one of our directors, and she was assisted by some members of our staff. There were a total of 8 meetings of 2.5 hours each.

Experience has shown us that it is important to keep this format in terms of number of participants because participants were able to better work individually and collectively.

We worked with these women discussing about subjects such as family, personal issues, work, about self-perception, knowledge of personal skills and attitudes, also about expectations and fears and we approach problems related to employment, world such as: willingness to work in teams, adoption of proactive attitudes, task responsibility, planning, division of labor, leadership, work-oriented results, commitment etc.

During these meetings we have reached different results expected.

First of all, the participants talked about their expectations of the whole workshop. We shared time to know each other, promote confidence and defined expectations.

The following 2 meetings our objectives were related to “Self – Knowledge” Every women was able to describe herself to identify some negative ideas and be able to transform them, into something positive.

Also they were able to identify those fears that function as obstacles and strengths so they could used to modify their current life situation.

During our fourth meeting, these women identified different stages in life, learning process and new objectives in life. They recognized different life experiences that "made us be who we are". 

We helped them to discover how their past experiences enable each one to develop capabilities and strengths in order to cope with their life circumstances.

For the next three meetings, the objective was to begin to build certain parameters that will enable the participants to assemble their own project.

To achieve it, these women had to define realistic objectives (measurable, specific, and relevant for this time in their lives). They divided them into short term, medium, long-term.  They developed their own Action Plan, based in different questions as: What? When? Where? How?  They had to think about resources that they would need, and if they had those resources. They thought about their internal aspects (strengths-weaknesses) and external (opportunity- threat) ones.

The last meeting was for closure.

In addition to these 8 meetings, we have conducted other workshops, such as: Cooking Class (team building), home economics, gender violence, as well. The participants also attended 8 meetings, once the project was over, that were helpful to track the progress of their action plans.

We are very happy with the Project we are running. 

As we have already mentioned in our previous report , Micaela and Emanuel are working at Unilever.

This is their first opportunity in the working world, and a really   life changing experience.   Besides their new jobs, they  started studying  at  a very well reknown  University of Argentina (Universidad de Belgrano). Micaela is studying Chemical Engineering and Emanuel Industrial Engineering.

At  Unilever Micaela started on March 9th. She works from Monday to Friday from 2 pm to 6 pm. During  the mornings she attend university classes

Unilever appointed a mentor to help Micaela with the technical aspects of her new job.  Fundación Oportunidad has been tutoring her in order to support the onboarding proceess and the adaptation to the values and company culture. 

Our work includes working sessions with Micaela and with her family as well. 

Nowadays, Micaela feels cheerful and excited about what is going on with her present life.

She is studying for the exams. Physics is the subject that she is worried about but she feels confident and she knows she will overcome this situation.