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.