The Americas
Allpa provides market access to over 250 women and family workshops throughout Peru and provides them with craft skills training, coaching, and access to low interest loans. Allpa's goal is to turn artisans into entrepreneurs through support, training, and technical assistance.
At Aptec, women from all walks of life come together to practice the traditional art of hand knitting, a skill that has been largely lost due to machine manufacturing. Aptec focuses on providing equal opportunity employment, fair payment, respectful treatment, and transparent supply chains to their artisans.
As well as providing fair employment to their artisans, Artesanias de Chile is also involved in the outreach, training and education of their partners and communities. In teaching traditional Chilean crafts, they share their skills and heritage to a community of otherwise disadvantaged artisans.
For more than 30 years, Artesania Sorata has helped to empower indigenous Bolivian women by providing them with artisan job opportunities. Over 100 women create handmade knit pieces, while practicing traditional and environmentally responsible methods of production.
Casa Gigantes has been connecting artisan communities throughout Guatemala with a market for their hand crafted goods for 25 years. The social enterprise believes that artisanal crafts bring warmth and humanity to an increasingly technological and impersonal world, while providing artisans with a dignified way of making a living.
Cojolya is an association dedicated to the conservation of the Maya tradition of backstrap loom weaving as well as the customs and traditions that surround it. The association's goal is to have these practices viewed not as a historical relic, but as an economically viable source of employment for woman weavers.
The artisans of Juan Platero create stylish accessories with Mayan flair. The small workshop, located in the outskirts of Antigua, Guatemala, provides home-based income generation projects for women plagued by the unstable job market of the coffee farming industry.
In rural Guatemala, women too often find themselves stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty. Kiej de los Bosques aims to end this cycle of poverty, and in its place establish a “cycle of prosperity.” The organization envisions a world in which communities from around the globe can unite by sharing their stories through their work.
La Red was founded in 2006 to assist Mexican women displaced from factory jobs in the USA. A majority of La Red artisans live in rural, impoverished communities where they lack access to employment, education, health care and other basic services. La Red supports these women artisans by providing skills training and product design and marketing.
Alivicha Peru Alivicha Peru provides artisan jobs to women in Peru’s rural areas while providing the Alivicha community of hand-knitters access to training in reproductive, political, and economic rights. The organization gives Peruvian women an opportunity to leave the domestic sphere and “build a relationship with the world,” so that they can realize their full potential and exercise their rights as women.
Mayan Hands aims to empower and improve the quality of life for Mayan women artisans and their families while contributing to the preservation of traditional knowledge, art and culture in Guatemala. Mayan Hands creates opportunities for women to continue the 3000-year-old tradition of back-strap loom weaving.
Naguska is a family-run organization that employs women knitters from the Peruvian highlands. Naguska prides itself on providing consistent work to hundreds of artisans while offering them the opportunity to supplement their family income from farming by creating hand-knit accessories from locally sourced materials, such as cotton and alpaca wool.
Pixan is a community-based nonprofit organization that empowers the most isolated and marginalized women from the Highlands of Guatemala. Using the traditional back strap loom, pedal loom, and natural dyes made from bark and flowers, women artisan produce beautiful, contemporary designs.
Based in Peru, Royal Knit creates hand knit accessories from alpaca and other natural fibers. Established as a small workshop, its early objective was to provide training programs to teach weaving and sewing skills to single mothers and women victims of domestic abuse..
In 2006, three sisters founded Sumaq Qara in the hopes of bringing economic opportunity back to the women of Ayacucho, Peru. Internally displaced from guerrilla warfare or domestic violence, these women are generally unable to earn a living selling their products without Sumaq Qara’s resources and connections to the global market.