Indigenous Women's Leadership Program

We here at Centro de Compartimiento, A.C. use the Servant Leader model of leadership as proposed by Robert Greenleaf in the early 1970s. As a base course to our program recipients we offer a twelve-week course to help our women understand the ideas of leadership and personal growth needed to become good leaders. For us, leadership is not as much about how you move your people as how well you know your people and help them to move towards growth. To do this one must first understand oneself. Part of our basic course is a brief introduction to the Enneagram theory of personality and growth. We have had women go through our basic program and many wanted to know more. Through the support given to the program through donors like you, we were able to provide a five-session enneagram course with an international presenter and then five weeks of follow-up for the participants to work on a deeper understanding of the Enneagram and their enneatype.

Enneagram proposes nine basic personality types and movement to a higher level of integration and functioning. The main objective is to explore, know and find how to be the best version of yourself. This year we had the opportunity to have a virtual workshop with Dr. Adelaida Harrison who is a professional enneagram consultant, coach, and teacher. The workshop was called "Change of Belief and Enneagram".   During the course, the participants worked on a diagnosis of their life and the areas where they considered that there was an opportunity to improve. Then the women examined the beliefs that are preventing them from achieving their goals.

One participant stated, "It helped a lot to understand that I can get to know myself, to use that knowledge to reach my objectives and projects." The focus then shifted to using this knowledge to have healthier relationships with the people around us. "Facing and getting rid of the beliefs that we have learned without realizing it. Seeing how those beliefs keep us from the best version of ourselves."

After the five-sessions lead by Dr. Harrison Centro de Compartimiento offered a learning circle to work together on specific changes. The course had 25 participants and through generous donations from donors like yourselves, we offered a low to no cost for participants depending on financial need.

This fall we will continue to offer courses online for men and women who want to improve their self-knowledge and leadership skills, to become the leaders their communities need. We will also be offering a course on mental health to support our participants in working through the trauma and grief of this pandemic. Here in southern Mexico, the wave of summer cases was worse than at any other point in the pandemic and more people died in August than any other single month. We are holding our community together through love and support, but we are all limping along together.

Thank you for your generous support, we hope you can continue to walk with us as we change the ideas of leadership here in our region and equip women with the skills they need to become leaders in thier communities.