By Riccardo

During my seven months with CASA Chapulin, I worked closely with EDUCA AC, Servicios para una Educacion Alternativa, in their Community Economies Program. Besides supporting EDUCA’s staff in different activities like the Feria Tianguis, a statewide fair trade fair in Puerto Escondido and the Escuela Campesina, popular education about human rights in indigenous communities, I also conducted research on the local economy of Rancho Nuevo, a Chatino community in the Sierra Sur.

Rancho Nuevo is made up of 30 families. It belongs to the municipality of San Juan Lachao, 5 hours away from the state capital. Most, if not all the families, survive on coffee production, and on the goods they cultivate in their own fields. The research took place in the community of Rancho Nuevo during the course of 4 months, during which we organized several workshops and a survey regarding the incomes and expenditures of each family in education, health, agriculture, and general household. The research helped EDUCA evaluate several of its recently established production projects in the community including apiculture and avocado cultivation as well as the impact of the creation of a community general store.

Working with EDUCA has provided several very useful insights in the development discourse and how it is handled by local organizations, what their priorities are and how work on the ground takes place.

EDUCA was founded by a group of young people working in the Catholic Diocesan Youth Ministry (Pastoral Juveníl) in 1994. Their work was profoundly inspired by Liberation Theology. Their work with poor, rural and indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca had taught them about the realities of this region: chronic poverty and marginalization generating an almost complete loss of hope.

EDUCA consequently came about as a civic association with a political mission to strengthen poor indigenous communities of Oaxaca through building civic awareness and increasing social and political participation in both local and state levels, employing popular education techniques as a tool to generate change and growth.

EDUCA carries out its work independent of churches, the government, and from any political party. Nevertheless, they maintain relationships of respect these sectors and collaborate on common initiatives. This approach allows EDUCA to remain autonomous.

Its mission aims at promoting holistic community development, social organization and civic initiatives in public policy to improve the quality of life and strengthen democracy in the poor and indigenous communities of Oaxaca. EDUCA, as a civil and independent not-for-profit organization strengthens citizenship, social involvement, and local government. It lobbies government entities to influence public policies which lead to a more democratic state.

EDUCA works mainly in three connected areas: Building Active Citizenship, Indigenous Municipalities and Peoples, and the Community Economics.

The Building Citizenship program promotes active citizenship oriented towards fulfilling basic human rights and works to guarantee democracy and political stability in Oaxacan municipal districts. It also organizes and participates in public forums of interchange and communication that provide the foundation for the construction of this type of citizenship. The program promotes the agenda of the common citizen to develop and encourage active citizenship and traditional, local government systems that create steady governable conditions as well as healthy political interaction in the indigenous communities of Oaxaca.

The Indigenous Municipalities and Peoples program promotes indigenous autonomy through four underlying principles of political practice: autonomy, local government, communal participation, and traditional indigenous institutions. The Program strengthens local governments through training, improving administration and through the development of legislation. Indigenous Municipalities and Peoples strongly promotes transparency of decision-making and financial management.

The program stimulates community participation and learning in the area of technical-political knowledge leading to more transparent government activity and a broad integrated perspective to inform decision-making.

The program aims to strengthen traditional values, indigenous organizational practices (system of communal duties, assembly, tequio: communal work tasks, council of elders, etc). EDUCA writes up and disseminates documentation of these practices especially to the younger generation with the hope that this will contribute to an improved political functioning of Oaxaca’s municipalities.

Indigenous Municipalities and Peoples also aims to bring about the following changes:
• Indigenous Governments capable of generating resources, capacity to initiate and carry out projects to build infrastructure for their communities and constituencies.

•Indigenous local governments which respond to the needs of indigenous women

• Increase the involvement of local citizens in local decision making.

• Strengthen traditional local government functioning around the central value of respect and service to its electoral constituency.

• Strengthen local governments especially in the areas of creativity, imagination, political capability, and administrative ability; local governments which in addition to being competent administrations are also capable negotiators with attitudes of respect, listening and tolerance.

• Strengthen traditional indigenous forms of self-government including community assemblies, council of elders, and ad-hoc committees which sustain a healthy diversity of local government.

The Community Economics program promotes community development through community-based production and service businesses. It strengthens the leaders of these community based organizations so that they can be more effective agents to improve the quality of life in their villages. This program guides three central projects: community savings and loans associations, community general stores and production cooperatives.
Many people and private institutions maintain that indigenous peoples and communities lack basic skills and capacities, and for that reason one most “aid them” and/or teach them. EDUCA’s Program presumes the contrary: indigenous peoples already possess sufficient skills and capacity to improve their own lives and their work builds upon the “know-how” which rural indigenous peoples already possess.

The goals include:

•Provide consistent support and evaluation to 18 community-based organizations.

•Carry out three Regional workshops (Coast, Southern Sierra, Central Valleys) selecting a specific technical or organizational theme for each workshop.

•Offer three trainings for leaders of community based organizations.

•Organize 5 trainings along technical themes with the services of outside experts competent in these areas (eg: bee-keeping, organic farming, marketing goods, pricing strategies, etc)

•Work continuously to maintain the links and communications of REGUESA, the grassroots network which links these 18 community-based organizations.

•Offer two service-learning experiences for students of the Mexican Technological University

The Community Economics program also provides support to three Cooperatives, two on the Oaxacan coast and one in the central valleys region.

The women’s cooperative “TREIG” (Ecological Roof Tiling), in Etla, just west of Oaxaca City produces roof tiling in their own small production facility. More than simply a production cooperative, TREIG also offers training workshops in the area including courses on health and human rights. They formed as an organization 10 years ago and have been working with roofing tiles for the last four. They participate with RECGUESA – Network of Community Economies Organizations “GUESA”.
“The Green Organic Cooperative”.

Men from the community of Tataltepec de Valdés formed “The Green Cooperative” five years ago. Presently they cultivate black beans and chili using only organic fertilizer. They market their products to the local community and also to some stores in Acapulco. They have sought out and employed advanced technical consulting for their process of cultivation and marketing. The Green Cooperative is also a member GUESA, and responds to basic family and community needs through the creation of jobs and increasing family income.

Another member of GUESA, the cooperative of the “Dignified Women Seamstresses” was also formed in Talatepec de Valdés in 2000 with the objective of creating jobs with good working conditions that would generate income for their households and offer a service of quality dressmaking to the community for a low cost. They sought out and completed training in the areas of tailoring as well as in administrative and organizational processes. In addition, they are the Cultural Commissioners, a formal local government role for the municipality of Taltaltepec de Valdés, Oaxaca. Their 5 years of functioning has strengthened their commitment to each other and developed their personal and technical capacity in service to their families and to their community.

As I said before, EDUCA is committed to the approach and the techniques of Popular Education. This method helps them to assist the communities to assume more active roles in their organizations, their communities and in their local governments. The following popular education tools are used by EDUCA’s staff: word creation, dynamics/games, drawings, workshops, skits, collage, and group journaling.

The cooperatives have recorded a number of successes such as: production of quality ecological, organic and low cots products, sources of family income, job creation, local products meeting local demands, and building and strengthening the local economy.

However, despite these successes there are some challenges which cannot be undermined: finding/creating viable local markets for their products; maintaining the well-being of the cooperative as the final goal, and resisting tendencies of some to attempt to “take over” the cooperative. And finally establishing viable and just prices.

The concrete and pragmatic results achieved by the Community Economics Program can be resumed in three main points. Firstly, the program has strengthened individual growth in both women and men; secondly it has aligned and coordinated concurrent development projects in communities so that these efforts complement each other and so that the goals of these projects fall within the community's capacity to realize them; and finally it has networked and connected the organizations and their leaders throughout the regions where EDUCA works in order to create new models of community development.