Circa 2009, La India.
11/03/22
08/03/22
27/11/20
How Puente Verde started
Back in 2020 when the pandemic started I was in Medellín. I had just returned from Belgium where me and my family lived for almost a year, trying to figure out if it could be a place where we could live given there’s more security and a good education. Unfortunately the plan didn’t work, we missed home terribly, we had lived in Medellín for almost ten years and it was our home now, my kids were 7 and 12 years old at that time.
We came back just in time before we entered what turned out to be the longest quarantine in the world, Colombia's obligatory quarantine lasted five months, the kids did virtual classes even after the quarantine ended.
I was trying to figure out how to help, there was hunger everywhere in Colombia due to the restrictive measures, many people in the cities who lived day to day and made their money out of informal economies where starving, people in remote regions were starving as well since they had become dependent on the market to get their basic diet. I encountered an initiative that wanted to independently raise money by selling some beautiful scarfs designed by Catalina Estrada, a famous illustrator from my city, to send seeds and tools to women in the Amazon so they could grow their own food. One would think the Amazon has abundant sources of food but the opposite is true, the indigenous communities that lived there back in 2020 had become dependent on the market to get their food and because of the pandemic they could no longer go to the towns to do grocery shopping so they were experiencing hunger. I thought "that’s an interesting way to tackle food security, to give people the necessary tools so they can grow their own food". It was hard to send the tools and seeds to the communities given that all land and river transportation between different regions of the country was prohibited but the person who was organizing all this found ways through the contacts she had in the Amazon.
I decided to contact Carolina Villegas, that’s her name, she lived in Boston USA and she told me how she started giving school supplies to the kids when she first visited the Amazon, and ever since then she fell in love with the region and visited regularly, she’s a photographer. She connected me to a couple of organizations that focus their work on food security amongst indigenous communities and I contacted them as well. One of them, Fanny, was in the process of writing a grant for the Open Society so she could develop a long term plan of sustainable development with communities in the Amazon, she asked me to help her with her grant writing process since I had an academic background and she was trying to justify her project, to give it a framework but didn’t really know where to start. We talked about it and I sent her a couple of resources. This made me realize that there are so many people on the ground, trying to do things to make this world better, there are also many foundations and lots of grants but there’s a disconnect between the doers and the financial resources. I decided right there and then that I wanted to be a connector.
My vision at that time was to help local organizations get the grants, the founding and the necessary knowledge and skills so they could become better at accomplishing their projects. For two reasons: one, they are really in tune with what people really need, oftentimes they are part of those communities so it would empower bottom up initiatives and two, because grant writing and founding requires incredibly good writing skills, a level of education most people working on the ground don’t have.
It’s been 20 years since this idea first started and I haven’t stopped ever since. At that time I joined terra.do a Climate Change course and now a global movement as we all know. The course focused very much on action, on doing things to mitigate global warming and the two things connected perfectly. I wanted to start by supporting indigenous organizations working on issues pertaining to food security and indigenous knowledge and this is directly connected to conservation. Indigenous communities have a lot to contribute because they are the ones that inhabit the very territories we need to conserve. By helping those communities recover their knowledge of how to grow their own food and have a healthy local diet so many issues can be tackled, obesity for example, food security, sustainable development, conservation. It’s a win win for the communities and the environment.
So that’s where I started. My organization is called Puente Verde, it focuses on supporting local indigenous organizations throughout South America whose livelihoods are in harmony with the environment they inhabit, whose very presence on those territories grants conservation. I have volunteers from all over the world who help community leaders get the grants and funding they need, the organization has become in itself a database where people who want to do something in the region, volunteer or work can find very easily what organizations are there, what they focus on and what do they need support on. It has become a beautiful network of people who love nature and that are working together to preserve it through indigenous practices.
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