Our goal is that the women obtain a basic knowledge of business and administration in order to achieve sustainable, self-managing, cooperative businesses. Micro-credit loans provide groups with the capital to initiate small business ventures.
As part of our goal to provide small business skills education to our groups of women, OB conducts small business and promotion workshops to our participating women’s cooperatives. Level 1 and 2 provides rudimentary information on price calculations, accounting, exhibiting, and buying processes. Our most recent trainings, levels 3 & 4, include in-depth workshops on all the elements of costing out a product (including the difference between retail and wholesale), Fair Trade principles and quality standards, market competition, creating labels with logos, learning to utilize value-added, understanding market trends, color combinations and tendencies, and creating a catalog. OB originally developed these themes from a series of workshops hosted by Sharing the Dream to help artisans promote their products.
Level 4 workshops allow the women to put all those skills into practice with the development of our Women’s Center & Fair Trade store, where we offer targeted education sessions on product setup, customer interactions (in-store and in-community), and sales and inventory. As part of OB’s institutional strengthening efforts, we are in the process of developing OB into a member-owned and operated formal Association, which in addition to participating on the General Assembly of the organization, the women will also cooperatively manage the Fair Trade Store. Since we’ve initiated day tours to the communities to provide the women with more access to potential clients, we also teach the women how to promote their group to visitors (i.e., presentation of the history, community, products, traditional clothing, etc.). back to top
Production Processes
Our first workshops series on Production Processes was created in collaboration with Fiona Laurie who fulfilled her Fulbright fellowship with OB. General themes for the series were tested at our 2008 annual Leadership Assembly, where we demonstrated using a tree-model, the production process from producer to buyer beginning at its roots. Information gathered from the assembly allowed us to create a more in-depth series of workshops in three parts: 1) Introduction to Production Processes (which included definitions of popular markets and exclusive stores, the role of organizations, and the importance of product quality); 2) Exporting, Costing, and Fair Trade; and 3) Product Finishings, Exhibitions, and Self-Promotion. These workshops are similar to a Marketing 101 course for Maya women artisans. By the end of the project, Fiona produced a training manual that is available for viewing in our Resource Library. back to top
Micro-credit loan program
Our micro-credit program officially began in 2008 as a means for the women participating in our sewing program to buy sewing machines. Since then a handful of groups have taken out loans for different small business ventures, including development of new products and designs. Our women’s cooperative from Los Morales, Las Estrellas, has taken out four loans in total since the program began and has paid back every loan on time and in full. Our loans are group solidarity loans where payment responsibility lies on the entire group instead of one individual woman. Our program includes an educational component where loan recipients must receive a series of workshops in financial responsibility before obtaining the loan. The loans are currently only available to OB’s member groups. back to top
