A key part of Interweave’s mission is to strengthen the community. Without healthy communities, home and business success is restrained. Interweave advances community action through materials, training and action that emphasize active participation and ownership by all. Full participation generates social capital – trust, relationships, donated time and peer support – for united problem-solving and local sustainability after Interweave leaves.
Interweave helps participants create new or strengthen existing community mutual support organizations including self-reliance associations, village banks and other solidarity groups. These groups generate their own plans and projects to confront such problems as crime, garbage, AIDS, and family violence, In partnership with ProLiteracy, Interweave developed Neighbors Working Together a guide for community action based on ProLiteracy’s decades of social empowerment experience.
Incorporated in 2007, Interweave is a young organization, but its social action programs build on principles and practices tested and refined over decades. A ten-year project in Tinaja, Mexico continues to exemplify the long-term viablility of Interweave’s approach.
In 1982 Tinaja was a collection of twelve destitute desert ranchos – tiny villages in central Mexico. 5,000 impoverished residents subsisted without clean water, schools, electricity, roads, healthcare, jobs or hope. Housing consisted of drafty one-room shacks that couldn’t protect against cold,wind dusty, scorpions, rats and disease. Women walked a half mile to haul heavy buckets of dirty water shared by goats and pigs. Gastro-intestinal infections sapped the health and lives of families.
Outside helpers didn’t come in with hand-outs. Instead they helped local leaders organize residents in councils to identify needs and alternatives. The focus was learning, dialogue, participation and self-directed action in the context of local culture and concerns. Outside help came in the form of materials, training and mentoring through an in-country NGO. Villages gained skills, information and confidence to create their own solutions – to build and run schools, clinics, infrastructure and businesses. This limited outside help continued for about nine years, For two decades since then, Tinaja’s self-sustaining councils have generated progress without outside help.
The list of locally funded and sustained achievements emerging from Tinaja is breathtaking. Local health workers and midwives, paved roads, solar-powered electricity, schools, clean water wells, bus service, phone service, 2,000+ newly constructed homes, medical and dental clinics, sewers, community parks, aqua-culture fish ponds, village art and dance festivals, community sports teams and mariachi bands, village banks, libraries and a host of cooperative and individual businesses.
The focus of help was not physical commodities and construction but on the capacity and potential of people to learn, organize, envision and create their own solutions. The sustainable transformation of Tinaja continues with the next generation. Today Inteweave builds on the best of such empowerment strategies to help local communities become economically and socially self reliant as they shape their own futures.