Indigenous Women's Leadership Program

We are pleased to announce that we have hired a new coordinator for our Women’s Leadership activities and our Children’s activities. Gabriela Sanchez has her master’s degree in education and comes to us after working for a women’s advocacy program in Madalena Tlacoltepec, Oaxaca. Gabriela is also a graduate of Centro de Compartimiento’s residential college program. She lived with us for three years while she got her undergraduate degree in psychology in Juchitán. We are so pleased that she has joined our program. We have known her for 13 years and watched her grow and succeed.

Gabriela, an indigenous Zoque, is from the community of San Miguel in the Chimalapas Mountains. After commuting long distances for high school, she came to CDC in our residential scholarship program to study at a local university. She completed her degree and graduated from our program. She says she struggled for many years. After the intimacy of a close community at CDC she felt lost and alone. Her jobs took her to small villages like her hometown, but she noticed that her coworkers were not interested in forming communities of support for themselves and the people with whom they were working. Most of the professional jobs she could find were in community programs, but with only short-term contracts that the government programs use to avoid paying benefits to their employees.

She returned to our community us over the years when she was in difficult situations, illness in her family, violence in her home village, she stated that she could never find the community that she had at CDC. She took our Servant Leadership program, and implemented practices in her life, but still found it difficult, returning to keep as close as she could to her base community at CDC.

When we had to fill a new position in CDC for a coordinator for our women’s program, we knew we wanted Gabriel to fill the roll. Although we could not give her a full-time job, we made our space available to her for her to start her private therapy practice as well. So, in addition to coordinating our women program she can give individual and family therapy to local residence. Within her contract she can give five sessions of therapy to our program participants and then, if they wish, they can continue with her as a private pay client on a sliding fee scale.

We are so pleased to have Gabriela back in our community, we know she understands and values our programs and ways of working. With the support of donors like you CDC con continue to support the women in our community to develop and become leaders like Gabriela.