Indigenous Women's Leadership Program

This past December we finished an online servant leadership training.  We worked with six women from different regions in Mexico learning together new ways to work and make our work places and communities better.  One of our partiipants wrote a brief summary of her experience. 

My name is Guille and I work in a non for profit in the highlands of Chiapas. I am a local coordinator in a municiplaity in charge of 9 collaborators. In August I began the journey of learning about Servant Leadership online with Centro de Comopartimiento.

It has been very enriching and I have learned a lot. .As the leader of a group of people, I have to see their processes in different ways in order to work better as a team.  I  also need to strengthen my spirit, and the spirit of the collaborators. I have learned that authority is not something negative but is the art to be able to influence people to do what one wants voluntarily for the common good. That is why I am learning to reinforce my qualities as a leader, actively listen to my peers and be able to guide them to make better decisions. Our teams need commitment to personal growth, professional development to build community leaving individualism and competition aside.

Learning to heal myself has cost me work and for a long time fear kept me from starting the process, but it is necessary to heal to help others. I was able to recognize that one must learn to go through the process of breaking down in order to heal and be delivered to something better. One may think that pain has to be something personal, hidden, something that should not be said, but I believe that it is a way of healing and growing personally and can even serve as an inspiration for other people.

One thing I have learned is to control my emotions and to have more patience with the people around me, I know it is very easy to say, but it is very complicated because moments have come that even with learning  I still so I fall into that hole despite the danger and consequences that it will bring. My personality is one that is  very hardworking, with initiative, yet I like to control things, that everything is done perfectly. I have been able to identify that it is not good to be so extremist that there are also times for play and fun.

Thanks to your ongoing support we can continue to help women like Guille learn a different leaderhip style to use in her work in the indegenous communities of Chiapas.   We are grateful to our partners who continue to walk with us in our work to support women and their communities.  

We are deeply grateful to Ofelia Flor Diaz Alavez for the seven years she worked with us at Centro de Compartimiento.  She worked at the house mother for our scholarship program.  Her job was to  accompany and live with our students, being a mentor and guide for them.   During that time she also participated in our Women's Group.  She completed our Servant Leadership course, took courses on the Enneagram, Generational Trauma, and Gender Equity and Reconciliation, she also participated in the women's reading circles.  

Our commitment to personal growth is to all in our community, staff, students and our women's circles.  It is not unusual that a job asks you to go to professional development courses, but the work we do here is not your typical professional development, yet Ofelia walked with us so that she could learn better to support our scolarship students on thier path.  It was deep and sometimes diffucilt personal work. 

After seven years with CDC Ofelia decided to return to her home town of Jaltepec de Candayoc in the Lower Mixe region of Oaxaca to work on her own projects to help her family.  Ofelia was integral in the opening of a cafe that we have here at the Center.  The goal of the cafe is to provide a welcoming space for  community members to come and eat a meal, play games and spend time together.  Ofelia worked with us on the menu, interior design of the space and advertising for the cafe.  She even came up with there recipe for a Chai style tea that we sell in the cafe, which is unique to our cafe.  

She has now taken these skill home to help her family.  She is from a rural town and much of the family income is from coffee farming, the profit from the crop comes in only after harvest in January and February of each year.  As with all agriculture one never knows who good the crop will be what the selling price will be.  To help her family with a year round income she has opened a small cafe, selling take out frappes and fruit smoothies.   She is providing a unique product using local coffee and fruits.  With her brother on his motor cycle for delivery they have done well enough to start fixing up a space at their home for in-person dining. 

She and her brother, along with a cousin are also finding ways to bring internet to the town of about 2000 residents.  There is no cell phone service but new satalite technology has helped them to bring internet to the town.  

We are happy for this new stage in her life, we honor the path and her generous presence. We wish her every blessing in her future plans and projects.

With support from generous donations that you give through the GlobalGiving platform we can continue to help the women in our region to become self suficient leaders in their communities.  Thank you for your continuing support of our program.