The Nicaragua Pueblo Project
Our Mission:
to assist Nicaraguans, especially women and youth, to acquire hard skills in natural building while developing life skills to augment opportunities for safe housing, employment and contribution to a healthy environment.
Our Guiding Principle:
Integrating respect of culture while encouraging positive advancement of skills through hands on education.
Our Goals:
- Creating opportunities for women and young people to learn skills that will build confidence, communication skills, leadership and team building skills, and the hard skills of natural building construction.
- Creating safe, healthy, environmentally sound and sensible /functional, and affordable homes in regions where unemployment and poverty levels are extremely high and opportunities for women are nearly non-existent.
- Developing women’s community skills for their own personal growth and advancement.
- Training a team of young people /women to gain experience and get directly involved in building projects in their communities.
- Building homes that are affordable, seismically sound, aesthetically contemporary and beautiful, functionally adaptable, and user friendly in these times of changing climate.
- Creating a service/ volunteer program that allows for international involvement in building homes and interacting in rich cultural exchange.
- Researching and creating a study of materials available in different regions to support consistent results in building with non standardized materials. This allows for the use of readily available, raw materials to be used to build safely and inexpensively, for the people and the planet.
Recent Projects in northern Nicaragua
Liz Johndrow of Earthen Endeavors has collaborated with Grupo Fenix, Las Mujeres Solares, La Montana Solar, and Las Mujeres Constructoras to bring natural building workshops and projects to the region over the last two years. These workshops have allowed local people to attend and learn many new skills and techniques with age old materials and concepts. They have invited people from other countries to attend and share in the local culture. And each workshop has given the various groups a community-oriented building for building a future of educational access for the people of the pueblo. Click here to see a photo gallery from each of these three projects from 2012 and 2013. Click here to read blogposts about the projects and Liz's growing work in Nicaragua.
How You Can Help!
We are investing in human potential and the work we do is supported by private donations. You could help make this project grow! Any amount is welcome, as this is a very poor region in need of support to move forward in creating resiliency in their communities. A donation of $500 could reach a whole rural community in receiving training and manuals in seismically sound adobe practices or train four women in youth to pass on the skills of earthen plastering and earthen floors. Please consider being part of this exciting and heartwarming work. We are happy to share our budget for the coming year with you upon request. Consider joining our advisory board and helping our program grow. Please feel free to contact us and thank you!
We are investing in human potential and the work we do is supported by private donations. You could help make this project grow! Any amount is welcome, as this is a very poor region in need of support to move forward in creating resiliency in their communities. A donation of $500 could reach a whole rural community in receiving training and manuals in seismically sound adobe practices or train four women in youth to pass on the skills of earthen plastering and earthen floors. Please consider being part of this exciting and heartwarming work. We are happy to share our budget for the coming year with you upon request. Consider joining our advisory board and helping our program grow. Please feel free to contact us and thank you!