Highland Support Project

The award would facilitate scaling up our "development through community engagement model" by increasing our power in negotiations with potential collaborators.  Our innovative model of addressing community infrastructure needs multiplies the impact of resources and contributes to project sustainability.   These innovations result from a human-centered design process with Indigenous communities of the Americas that has engaged representative members from the ground up.  We have developed "appropriate" technology for sanitation, irrigation, water collection, and indoor cooking accompanied by an organizing process that increases resiliency and behavioral health in communities with high levels of historical trauma.  Frequently, we are asked to give away our innovations and organizing to intermediary organizations.   We have identified one crucial step where increased financial support would help us develop partnerships, increasing our operations' scale permitting sustainability.   The creation of topographical studies enables engineers to adapt plans to a specific community and produce budgets for implementation.  In the "value chain" of water and sanitation, this is the space of "profit."  While we have partnerships for creating budgets and conducting topographical studies,  we can only bring new projects online with the slim margins of transactional engagements that do not cover the next project's planning and budgeting.

The United Nations Development Program defines poverty as the inability to access opportunity.  I know from personal experience that there are many obstacles that Indigenous children growing throughout the Americas face.  I know what helped my family survive the violence of a civil war was an education in resilience.  We organized with our neighbors, and my father started a cooperative through which my sisters and I obtained an education.  My passion comes from knowing hunger and fear.  When family members disappear, and there is an escape route planned if the army arrives, it changes your sense of priorities in life.  As I grew up, I learned that charity and "development" conform to the market conditions of supply and demand.  The needs of people like myself are the supply, and funders are the demand.  Intermediary organizations with access to funders design and implement the programs.  This set of relations produces a preference for the service model over the organizing model because funders frequently do not appreciate the importance of agency and resiliency.  My vision is to innovate the model of developing water and sanitation solutions through an organizing process that increases rather than limits the development of agency in young girls. 

Epidemiological research demonstrates that the two leading causes of mortality in our partner communities in Guatemala are upper respiratory infections and waterborne contaminants. For children under five, respiratory illness is the leading cause of death (WHO). These are both linked to the practice of cooking on open pit fires in tiny, unventilated homes.

Stoves built by HSP service-learning partners channel the thick smoke from cooking fires out of the unventilated brick dwellings via a new chimney installed with each stove. The size of the stove is large enough that its stovetop can fit many items at once, making it ideal to be able to provide for large rural families and warm their space. In addition, the stoves are significantly more fuel-efficient, thus decreasing the amount of money women must spend on cooking fuel. Because the stoves consume much less wood than the open pit fires previously used, they decrease the amount of deforestation regionally. Additionally, for every stove built by volunteers, 10 trees are planted in the neighboring forests.

Although stoves are our the roots and foundation of our work, they are by no means the final stop. We are working with Indigenous women's circles to create lasting and sustainable change that empowers them to be their own best advocate. Colonial histories have led to entrenched patterns of poverty and dependency in Highland communities of the Americas. We support communities to break these vicious cycles, to achieve agency, independence and prosperity– however this may be defined by these communities.Highland Support Project was created in 1993 as a response to political violence that was creating an indigenous leadership vacuum in the Highlands of Guatemala. The subsequent dramatic loss of leaders and organizational experience was perpetuating a dependent status for Maya communities. This weakening of individual and community agency was compounded by cultural stresses as great as any since conquest.

Since 1993, our mission and vision have evolved through a growing understanding of the interconnectedness of people, problems and solutions. Listening to our indigenous partners we have come to understand the wisdom that life is sustained through relationships, human and natural. Grassroots experience pushed us from defining the problem as a resource shortage issue to one of local inertia caused by historical, institutional and policy constraints. Therefore, to achieve our stated goal of transforming the world from a place of ill-being to one of well-being we work to create socially just and sustainable economies with accountable and inclusive systems of governance.